I recently took a trip into the Humboldt county redwoods park. Avenue of the Giants! Absolutely incredible visuals. To think, some of these trees were alive while Christ was on earth and while the pyramids were being built. Wow! Naturally, I brought my photo gear for some ancient forest photography.
I made a huge mistake in the beginning ... I forgot my tripod! I couldn't believe it! I had to work with limited options. For landspace shots, you want a small aperture to maximize your depth of field. Anywhere from f8 to f16 would be great for super wide to standard telephoto lenses. Unfortunately, I could barely get above f4.5 (and that's with ISO800 and 1/60sec shutter speed!)
I've been slowly adding my Death Valley pictures to Flickr over the week. I had three days in the park (broken up over 5 days) and I was blown away by the beauty! It's an amazing place, you can see for miles across the valley floor and the mountain ranges are as unique as an alien world.
The first day was nice ... 70's ... nice cloud cover to accent photos. We stopped by Zabriskie Point and I filled the camera full of photo's. I took wide angle, standard, telephoto ... everything but macro shots. The clouds were amazing, perfect accents to the landscape. The lighting could have been better (it was around 3:30pm or so), but I'll take what I can get