In perhaps my fastest photo turnaround time ever, I've put up photos from this weekend's trip to King's Canyon National Park.

The trip itself was excellent. We spent two nights (Friday and Saturday) at the Middle Paradise Valley camp site. The site was quite posh, having a pit toilet and a bear box. A pit toilet may not sound wonderful, but it beats the crap out of digging your own hole each time (no pun intended).

We even managed to get most of the bad luck out of the way in the packing and on the journey there. Due to a small snafu with failing to stop at the last gas station and having to backtrack, we arrived at the staging campground (Sentinal, in Ceder Grove) at 2am Thursday night! But we made up for it by sleeping in on Saturday morning.

The trip had a lot of wildlife. The most exciting wildlife were the completely fearless deer that ran rampant around the campsite. According to the ranger, they were after the salt in our urine. Yum!

I'm really glad I brought my EF-S 10-22. It got a lot of use. I'd considered buying the EF 100-400L for this trip, but decided it was way too expensive and too heavy. Buy ironically, we ran into a crazy old dude who had also schlepped a Canon 20D up a mountain and did have a 100-400L. He let me play it with it. Such a nice lens. I'm so tempted.

I took a lot of panoramas this trip, and my old workflow just wasn't up to it. This time, I assembled and layed-out the panoramas in Autopano Pro, then exported them to Hugin and Enblend for the final warping and blending. This worked fairly well and I'm quite happy with the results.

Also, REI did have an almost exact replacement for my fleece jacket. The only problem with the new one is lack of pit zippers.

posted: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:45 | permanent link to this entry