Winter Dawn - White Mountains.

I meant to make this blog posting almost two weeks ago, but the night after taking the above photo, I came down with the flu and spent the next ten days getting back to where I can work again.  Whew - I'm glad that's over!

In any event, on March 18th, my friend Ty Wivell and I were led by local climbing guide Paul Cormier on a sunrise hike up to this spot in the col between Mount Washington and Mount Clay.  We had originally planned on hiking the day before, but 80 mph winds on the summits nixed that idea.  Instead we met on the 18th at 3:30 a.m. at the base of the Cog Railway, and soon began the hike up in the dark, though the moonlight was so bright we didn't even need headlamps until the moon set around 5:00. We arrived at the above spot a little after 6:00 and found calm winds and beautiful pre-dawn light.  We couldn't have planned it any better.


Paul and Ty below the summit of Mount Clay.  Mounts Adams and Madison are in the distance.

We spent the next 2-plus hours shooting and hiking up to the summit of Mount Clay which has a spectacular view of the Great Gulf and the northern Presidentials, which is why I picked this spot for our little morning photo shoot.


The three of us head towards the summit of Mount Clay.

There were a couple of new pieces of equipment along for the ride on this shoot.  This was my first shoot with my new Canon 1DsMarkIII camera.  It performed quite well.  I appreciated it's smaller, lighter batteries, which held up nicely in the cold, and I was more enamored with its live view feature than I expected (though once the sun was up and bright it was hard to use the LCD for much.)  During post-processing, besides liking the big 21-plus megapixel files, I was happily surprised at the ability to recapture shadow detail without adding additional noise.  A much bigger improvement over the 1DsMarkII than I expected.

The other piece of new gear is called an intervalometer, which is basically a fancy cable release that lets you set up the camera to shoot as many exposures as you want at regular intervals.  For the above shot of the three of us hiking, I secured the camera to my tripod and set it to take 30 images, 3 seconds apart.  I pushed the button, and off we went while the camera captured the scene.  Very cool.


Ty photographing Paul on Mount Clay.


Mount Adams.

All in all, it was a pretty great morning!

Until next time...
-Jerry

 

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