Top 10 Favorite Travel and Landscape Photos from 2015

Bandon Sunset Reflection, Oregon Coast

Ansel Adams once stated that "Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop."  Perhaps Ansel would be more efficient and productive today with digital photography, or perhaps he simply had a really high bar for what he considered "significant".  

I often produce a few dozen photos per year that I'm pleased with and collect into albums on Flickr, so reducing them down further, to something like an annual "Top 10", doesn't always reach the top of my "to do" list. But as the "Photographing California" book that I finished and released in 2015 starts to go into retail auto-pilot, I can take a moment to reflect on my past year of photographic adventures as I look towards 2016. 

Great Light in Eroded Hills, Eastern Nevada

The photo above was captured early on in my 3500-mile "victory lap" road trip that I embarked on in September, as my book was about to ship to wholesalers and Amazon.com. I visited Mt. Shasta, Lassen Volcanic National Park, and Crater Lake National Park before turning west and heading for the coast. I arrived just in time for sunset. 

In March I took a quick trip across Nevada to scout for locations for possible Nevada photography workshops in 2016. I've been doing this for a few years now, but it takes a lot of experience to get to know a region, in detail, in a variety of season s and weather conditions. The photo to the right shows one of the sites that I really enjoyed for its geology and geometry.  Other sites in Nevada are good for wildflowers, dark, clear night skies, history (petroglyphs, mining areas and abandoned ranches), or cultural details. The state is huge though, and supporting resources such as gas, restaurants and lodging are spread out, so it'll pose some interesting challenges to cover efficiently and comfortably with a group. Access can also be complicated by weather and washouts on the often unpaved roads, so vehicles with appropriate all terrain tires and adequate ground clearance can also be a consideration.

A year wouldn't be complete for me without astrophotography, so in late April I headed out to the Mojave Desert in search of some photos of the Milky Way rising. In the case of the image below, I captured a sequence of 54 photos around 2 am to show the movement of the stars.

Milky Way Rising Behind Joshua Trees, Mojave Desert

In June I still had the Milky Way on my mind, as I dropped by Mono Lake to capture a 360-degree panorama featuring the lake's tufa calcium carbonate rock formations under the arch of the Milky Way.

Mono Lake Milky Way Arch Panorama

By July we had a nice summer monsoon season of sporadic storms, not enough to end our drought in the Eastern Sierra, but storms are certainly a plus for landscape photography! In this case a shaft of golden hour sunlight struck a column of rain, producing a warm-tinted sunset rainbow.

Shaft of Water and Light, Topaz Lake

Although there are so many stunning photography locations to cover in California I only included a handful of backpacking destinations in my book, I personally love backpacking, so I took the opportunity to visit the Golden Trout Wilderness in July. Little did I know that the remains of Hurricane Dolores would come ashore that night, creating "super historic" record July rainfall across much of Southern California. Fortunately there was a break in the rain on the following day, so I could head to the trailhead to dry out my gear before selecting my next adventure.

Muir Lake Morning Reflection, Golden Trout Wilderness

In August the big event for me is usually the Perseid meteor shower. Sometimes I like to maximize sky in my meteor shower photos, but in this case I decided to include an interesting Joshua tree. So back to the Mojave Desert I went.

Perseid Meteor Shower and Milky Way over Joshua Tree, Mojave Desert

Another location that I visited during my whirlwind September road trip was Morraine Lake in Alberta's Banff National Park. I was fortunate to arrive right after the first snowfall of the year, and it was still snowing lightly as the last light of the day faded, so there weren't many people out in the cold to wander into this shot along the shoreline. I also picked up the more typical elevated view from a nearby knoll, showing the glacial blue color of the lake, on the following morning.

Morraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

I captured a number of nice Bodie and Eastern Sierra fall colors images this year, but one of my favorites was this late, snowy fall colors shot from Conway Summit in early November. Many of the compositions I was capturing on this morning were a little too evenly lit, but for a moment a thin spot in the cloud cover had the lower portion of this line of trees brightly lit while the trees and hill in the ravine in the background fell into darker shadow. This highlighted the lower line of trees and gave the whole scene a more 3D feel to it.

Snowy Fall Aspen, Early November in Mono County

Later in November I headed to Death Valley to pursue some new locations for an upcoming detailed guide to the park that I'm writing, but one of my favorite images ended up being from the Mesquite Flat Dunes near Stovepipe Wells. I had other photos with arguably better light, but the photographers add scale and a nice point of interest. I've photographed these dunes a lot, but the combination of low angle sun and broken light passing through breaks in the clouds created some unique opportunities.

Exploring the Dunes in Death Valley, Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes

New 2015 Results from Past Years

Valley View Calm Evening Reflection, Aug 2007

As I was working on the book I occasionally came across good photos from past years... when either I lacked the tools to complete a nice result, or I simply overlooked an image due to time constraints or simple oversight. Fortunately I can rediscover and rescue these old files on future visits to the folders that they're in. The one to the right was from Yosemite, way back in August 2007. It was captured on a Canon Digital Rebel XTi! A little adjustment in Lightroom 5, and voila! It's as good as new. I used it as the title page for my guidebook.

One of my more stunning finds was from an incredible sunset in Bodie during one of my workshops on June 29, 2013. Bodie was just outside of the area I was covering with my book, so post-processing photos from there hadn't been a priority. My loss then, and gain now! It was an unusually purple-tinted sunset, as confirmed across many photographers and cameras from various manufacturers.A few shots in the middle of the sunset's transformation had a wide variety of colors, ranging from orange-yellow to magenta-pink and blue to indigo shades, in addition to the base purple that dominated many adjacent shots.

Sunset Over Bodie Main Street, June 2013

There was another surprising overlooked shot that I found in an old Yosemite folder from 2008. Covering Half Dome at sunset from Glacier Point, the Yosemite chapter had already gone through layout before I found it in February, but it's a nice addition to my Yosemite portfolio for future uses!

Runner-up Images for 2015

I named my Top 10 for people who prefer the predictability and order of a preset and finite number, but I'll show a few of the other contenders for people who prefer not to be arbitrarily constrained.

This sunset shot is from the Cambridge Hills south of Yerington in Mason Valley, Nevada. I was looking for some old cars that were supposed to be in the area, but they were apparently either moved or stolen. The road had to serve as the subject and leading line, heading to that last bit of orange sunlight on a shaft of rain int he distance.



This dune shot was captured at 200mm to isolate the dune ridge and blowing sand from the dark background. I was hoping to see a desert tortoise or two in the area, but the burrows I found had cobwebs in their entrances.



At the bases of Death Valley's mountain ranges, on the edges of their alluvial fans of gravel and debris, you sometimes find small springs. In a landscape that only receives an average of 1.93" of rain per year, these are precious sources of water for nearby wildlife.  They are delicate places as well, with soft mud that will easily become severely trampled if hordes of visitors show up and love them to death.



I spend a lot of time in Bodie, and occasionally I'm there for the evening break-up of afternoon thunderstorms. In this case I saw a rainbow forming over town, and I knew that if I shifted my camera position a couple of hundred yards, I could place the rainbow over the Standard Mill. These opportunities can change quickly, so I hopped into my car, and drove east to move the rainbow.



This rainbow and reflection shot was one of my favorite mobile phone images in 2015, and one of my first photos taken on an LG G4 smartphone that I was provided with as part of the #G4Preview program.



This sun shot captured through geyser basin fog in Yellowstone is another of my favorite mobile images, this one captured on my 2 year old iPhone 5S.  It won an +Instagram / iPhone assignment being conducted by Outdoor Photographer Magazine.



I have many more images that I considered for my favorite photos and moments of 2015, and I've collected over 50 of them in a 2015 Favorites album on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreysullivan/albums/72157651316649769

Favorite Photos from Prior Years

Here are some of my collections from prior years.  It has been a great decade of adventure, I can't wait to see what I can find to show you in the next 10!

2014 Favorites album on Flickr

 

2013 Favorites album on Flickr 



2012 Favorites album on Flickr 



2011 Favorites album on Flickr
2011 Top 10 blog post



2010 Favorites album on Flickr 2010 Top 10 blog post



2009 Favorites album on Flickr
2009 Top 10 blog post



2008 Favorites album on Flickr 2008 Top 10 blog post



2007 Favorites album on Flickr 2007 Top 10 blog post



2006 Favorites album on Flickr 2006 Top 10 blog post

A Day in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

Lewis Falls,  Yellowstone National Park. 

Departing Yellowstone National Park to the south, you pass Lewis Falls on the Lewis River just below Lewis Lake.  There are a number of scenic stops that you can make along Jackson Lake, but campgrounds there were closed or full, so we headed towards the large Gros Ventre Campground down near the Jackson Hole Airport and the tiny town of Moose, Wyoming.  Fortunately Gros Ventre had room, and the cottonwoods were stunning in their yellow fall colors.

Smartphones are a great resource while you travel, whether looking up lodging and restaurants, using a map program to navigate, or Google Earth to look for unpaved roads to explore.  It's best for a smartphone's battery life not to keep it plugged in all the time, and to let it get pretty well discharged before charging it back up again.  There's no telling where your devices might be in the charge-discharge cycle when you stop, but when I'm not driving, I can top off my devices in a campground using a 10,000 MAh battery.  You don't expect to lose your vehicle as a power source, but on this trip I did, so it was good that I had an alternate power source to ensure that we'd have enough power to call for a tow truck!  

The LG G4 phone I was using for some photos on the trip has 32GB memory but, only 16GB after apps and OS, so it was at 1% remaining space when I took this.  The SanDisk memory stick charging here is also a Wireless Memory Stick that works over wifi, so I had it automatically back up all photos from the LG G4 as I took them.  I'd periodically delete a few photos from before the trip, since I was pretty sure that I had them at home, and they were backed up to the Wireless Stick anyway.  When I hit a hotel room every few days, I could plug the wireless stick in to my laptop like a standard USB memory.  (It could do that wirelessly in a campground as well, but I use laptops with 17" HD screens, which have short enough battery life to be more convenient to use when connected to power.)

Devices attended to, we could settle in for dinner and a glass of wine.  It was a clear day, so there was no need to rush out for sunset.  We had picked up a 2014 Larch Hills Marechal Foch Reserve, from the North Okanagan wine region in British Columbia, Canada.  I had never tasted a Marechal Foch before.  Now I have.  It had a very different flavor profile than more common red wines like cabernet or syrah.  It was more like Argentinian malbec meets "young wine" (think Beaujolais), with perhaps a trace of residual sugar.

The next morning we headed over to nearby Mormon Row and the popular Moulton Barn.  I forgot that we had passed some long, deep, muddy puddles in the road on our way to the campground the evening before, so when I came upon the first one, rather than stop and go around it seemed wiser to click on the 4WD and just power through, sheets of water and mud spraying out to the sides.

There were only a couple of people at the barn when we arrived, but it quickly got more crowded.  There wasn't anything exciting going on in the sky, so the scene of photographers was about as interesting a subject as anything.

The area just to the north of this is known as Antelope Flats, and true to its name, a buck antelope had a few girlfriends alongside the road.  It being close to mating season, at times he would spontaneously jump around and prance and dance, either to impress them or simply as an outlet for his excess energy.  If they noticed, they pretended to ignore him.

We went back for breakfast, packed up the campsite, and spent the day enjoying the changing light in Grand Teton National Park, as well as checking out the fall colors along nearby Forest Service and 4WD roads.  I wanted to drive by Jackson Hole Ski Resort and picture it with a coating of snow.  Maybe I'll return for some skiing in a few months.

Jackson Lake was nice and calm when we drove by, so there were some nice reflections of Mount Moran.  Oxbow Bend was calm as well, with the added bonus of bright yellow aspen reflecting in the still water of the oxbow.  I've encountered moose here on several occasions, and moose, elk and grizzly bears at Willow Flats just to the west, but this time people at the Oxbow Bend turnout were looking across the water for a moose they had seen over there.

Other animals were pretty much in their usual places.  Horses were feeding in a large field north of the historic Cunningham Cabin, and across the Jackson Hole Highway bison were feeding in their usual place on the Wolff Ranch.  Bison were also near the northern end of the Mormon Row barns.  In the evening, several bull elk near Teton Park Road south of Jenny Lake were bugling to warn potential challengers not to try to take their harem of cows.

There were a few sporadic clouds in the air during the day, so for sunset we found a nice spot on Jackson Lake to watch them turn color.  A slight breeze during the most intense color gave way to calmer air as sunset transitioned towards blue hour, so that phase yielded the best reflections (photo below).  We had a very nice dinner at nearby Signal Mountain Lodge.

We returned to Jackson Lake for sunrise the next day, which I describe in my next post:

End of the Road for My SUV!
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2015/10/22/end-of-the-road-for-my-suv/

 

Sunset at Jackson Lake, Grand Teton National Park

End of the Road for My SUV!

First light on the colorful aspen at Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (Canon 5D Mark III)

The day started like any other fall day on the road: the pink over blue Belt of Venus light leading to a  sunrise, golden hour light and calm morning reflections, fall colors, then driving to the next location on the itinerary.  Usually I don't finish the drive in a tow truck, with my SUV on the back!

Let's talk about the good news first.  Sunrise on Jackson Lake was uneventful, with no clouds, but gorgeous nonetheless.  The Belt of Venus color can be fantastic if you know how to coax its color out of the sky and into your camera, and the pastel pink and blue tones on this morning didn't disappoint.

Fortunately the lake was calm, so the colorful light show in the sky was doubled in the water.  As the sun approached on the eastern horizon, the Tetons were bathed in golden light.  So far it was shaping up to be a good day.

Not far away was Oxbow Bend (above), where colorful aspen trees were lighting up in the first rays of the sun.  There was another spot to the east which had a nice stand of colorful aspen in front of Mt. Moran as well.

Schwabacher Landing (LG G4)

A few miles south on the way to Jackson was Schwabacher Landing, which can get really crowded at sunrise, but it wasn't all that crowded by the time I arrived.  The sun was behind me, but with a little bit of waiting and some coordination with people walking by, I was able to get some shots without people or shadows in them.  The Tetons here make a long, narrow subject, perfect for the 16 x 9 aspect ratio of my LG G4 smartphone, but it was out of memory.  It has 32GB of memory, 16GB of that left for photos.  The LG G4 has a microSD slot for memory expansion, but I was using one microSD in my GoPro, and had misplaced my spare.

Fortunately, prior to the trip I had been asked to try out the 32GB SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick.  It looks like a USB flash drive that you'd plug into computers, but it connects to your smartphone via wi-fi.  Earlier in the trip I had started a complete gallery backup from the LG G4, and not only did that transfer over 4200 existing photos, it also transferred new photos as I took them.  So all I had to do on the smartphone was delete old photos, since they were already backed up.  I also filled my 64GB iPhone 5S with photos on this trip, and I was able to back up files from that as well, then delete them on the phone.

SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick with iPhone 6S+

Smartphone memory issue solved, it was on to Jackson for breakfast, grocery shopping, then I could move on to the next area to shoot.  In this case, the location change was from Grand Teton National Park and Jackson, Wyoming to Salt Lake City.  I should return home from there to prepare for a workshop in 2 weeks, but "shoulds" are for wimps.  Having invested so much time and so many miles to get that far, I could extend the trip underway to swing through Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and continue on to Colorado to catch fall colors in Aspen, at the Maroon Bells, in Telluride and Ouray before returning home.  I'd still have a week to get ready to go back out.  Or I could wait until next year, but something could come up and it could end up being the year after that.  Heck, I may not live that long.  Life and time are precious; there's no time like the present.

But as the saying goes, life is what happens when we're busy making other plans.

Somewhere between Jackson, Wyoming and Salt Lake City, a few miles south of the small town of Cokeville, in the middle of extensive hay fields, and outside of Verizon's service area, the Explorer made a noise.  An unhappy noise.  A warning noise.  A message in the dashboard was trying to tell me something, but driving into the bright glare of the afternoon sun, I couldn't read the fading light of its aging display.  Then it was gone.  Everything was apparently fine.  Without a warning indicator, the infamous "check engine" message, I couldn't use the engine code reader to give me some clues.

The peace didn't last long.  The light came on again, I was able to read it this time, and "Low Oil Pressure" meant that I needed to pull over ASAP.  The road was elevated with essentially no shoulder.  Just as I spotted a driveway coming up across the road, the engine cut off, so I had to wrestle the now-powerless steering and brakes to cross oncoming traffic and bring the vehicle to a stop.  The stall could have been an engine safety shutdown, but I would need to have it towed to somewhere where a mechanic could assess the failure.  Fortunately Lori Hibbett had flown in to Seattle to join me earlier in the trip, and her AT&T phone had one bar of service, so we could call for a tow.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, so Salt Lake City 150 miles to the south would be the best option for finding a mechanic working on a Saturday.  Thank goodness for premium roadside assistance plans covering tows up to 200 miles!  Not being able to look up shops or do a lot of calling to identify a shop open Saturdays, we had the SUV towed to the Courtyard Marriott at the airport so we'd be able to catch a shuttle to the airport and rent a car to get around.  When we arrived, I called every mobile mechanic in town, so see if one would come out late on a Friday or early Saturday.  No one called me back Friday, even the places which supposedly worked 24 x 7, but Saturday morning I did get a single call back, and the mechanic was there less than an hour later.  At first he was optimistic that the oil pressure sensor may have failed, since it had clearly been worked on, but he eventually tried to turn the engine with a large wrench, and it was seized.  The oil was topped off and there was no coolant mixed in from a broken gasket, so the mode of failure most likely had to do with the oil pump itself, possibly the timing chain which drives it.

Although I had kept the vehicle in immaculate shape to get me in and out of remote places, and I had recently put another $1000 into it to hopefully get another 100,000 miles out of it, the book value was only $2000 and a rebuilt engine would cost more, so it was a total loss.

One shuttle to the airport and one rental minivan later, we were leaving at noon for the 8-hour drive home.  Of course the minivan had weather stripping on both sides of the windshield that whistled loudly over 50 MPH, at what sounded like the exact frequency of my SUV's warning beep!  A couple of stops and a few feet of gaffer's tape, and the whistling minivan was silenced.

The following day I was able to locate a place that would buy my vehicle using its pink slip in Reno, but pick it up in Salt Lake City a couple of days later.  Done, except for the fact that I lost the vehicle and its $2000 value, plus expenses associated with the breakdown.  I guess that I need to come up with my next project, and include a new vehicle in the budget for it.

After the trip, I bought an Apple iPhone 6S+ using the Apple Upgrade Plan, and the SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick worked like a charm with that as well.  Although the USB connection is mainly to keep the Wireless Stick charged, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that when I plugged it into my laptop, it worked like a USB drive as well, and I was able to copy photos from all three smartphones directly to the laptop.

Although we think of hard drives as being a weak link in our photography toolkit (right behind vehicles), smartphones also fail, often by being dropped in water, so I'm glad to have to have an easy backup solution for the photos on mine.  If you think that you might want to pick up a SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick for storage expansion, backup, or wireless transfer of files among your wi-fi capable devices, SanDisk has given me a coupon code to offer you 30% off: https://goo.gl/1HRPrF

It handles a lot more than smartphones and photos, you can stream music or HD movies to up to 3 devices at once.  Learn about the product here: https://goo.gl/Gp0mBm or watch a product video: https://goo.gl/SfTNNc 


This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of SanDisk . The opinions and text are all mine.

Sunset at Midway Geyser Basin

Alien World, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

The Grand Prismatic Spring is one of my favorite shooting location in Yellowstone, and sunset is an excellent time to be there. The horizon is even lower to the West than to the East, so you're more likely to get some nice color at sunset.

Old Faithful Geyser Basin

Morning Glory Pool, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I wanted to reach the Morning Glory Pool around mid-day, so I arrived at old Faithful mid-morning. Old Faithful was scheduled to erupt at 10:54, so I stayed for that.

As I was waiting, the Beehive Geyser erupted nearby as well with a 200' stream of water.








Old Faithful.

Dawn at the Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone

Yellowstone Moonset, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

WIth people staying home due to high gas prices and to watch the Olmpics, I was able to phone in a reservation for the Madison Campground on the afternoon of my arrival. My goal was to be near the geyser basins near Old Faithful.

I decided to spend my first sunrise at Midway Geyser Basin, but along eh way I couldn't help but stop to catch the full moon setting over the fog created by the steam from the geyser basins.

Midway Geyser Basin is tucked between two small hills, so my stop on the way there was productive while the sun climbed high enough to reach the basin. It will be weeks before I get through all of my Yellowstone photos, but a lot of the better ones will come from Midway Geyser Basin.