It was a gorgeous day, cooler with a slight overcast making it a good day for photos.  Every trip there reminds me how brutal the conditions were, and how much the soldiers on each side had to take.  Standing shoulder to shoulder at very close range with black powder rifles had to be terrifying.  Seeing what vicious damage the soft lead bullets did to flesh and bone, not to mention the shot and shell, always makes you question, “Could I have stood there, with my comrades?”  The battlefield is incredibly well marked.  After the war, the States and individual units came back to walk that hallowed ground.  My two favorite memorials are actually from the Southern line, in the woods where the troops formed up, before marching across open ground to be destroyed in Pickett’s charge.  

Forward

 The North Carolina memorial captures their men going forward and you can almost feel the bullets flowing past them like a lead rain. 

North Carolina memorial

The Virginia memorial captures the wide range of men who left their occupations as farmers, mechanics, teachers and landowners to fight for the wrong cause. 

We stayed in a nice hotel, with all the modern amenities.  The buses you see are your transportation within the park.  You should book early because it gets very busy.  There are several good restaurants within walking distance.

The roads inside the park are dirt and very narrow.  If you’re a nervous rider, you’ll want to close your eyes in several places.  The picture below is from my window, and that river is about 1000 feet down the cliff.  At the time, our bus was waiting for another bus to pass in the other direction, so we had to wait.  Our guide was great.  One rider asked if they had ever “lost a bus on these roads?”  MJ answered immediately: “No, we always find them at the bottom.”   

The drive takes you as close as 35 miles from Mt. McKinley (Denali, to the Inuits and Alaskans).  Clouds usually obscure the view of the summit, and our luck was no better.  I’ve seen clear views of Denali many times when we lived in Anchorage, but not this time. 

Most folks go to see the wildlife, and we saw plenty: grizzly bears; caribou; moose; and even a wolf.  Since this is a preserve, the animals are completely wild and unassisted by the rangers, except that hunters are not allowed.  You can see from the photos that I had to crop in to get a semi-reasonable image.  I had my 70-200mm zoom, but I really wish I had rented a longer lens.  I guess I need to go spend some time with Moose Peterson before I go back up there.  

We started the morning in Georgetown, arriving early as usual, and snapping a few shots as we waited for the rest of the group to meet at the rally point.  There were about 35 walkers in our group. We even had Kathy, our buddy from the Reinventing a Boomer blog, join us while she was visiting her son; he came along, too.

We took a group photo and began our walk along the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal.  President John Quincy Adams ceremoniously began digging on 4 July 1828, and it was finally completed in 1850.  In Georgetown, you can take a short ride on the canal boat, still. 

We walked up M Street, with cameras snapping away in countless directions, making the tourists and locals wonder what was up.  You can see the group’s photostream here.  There are almost 200 photos there now, and photographers can add more until this weekend. 

After cooling off in a local establishment with some lovely stout, I went home for a cold shower, so I could be ready for the Warrenton evening walk.  The town of Warrenton is the county seat of Fauquier County and a town full of history from its 1810 incorporation.  We had a smaller group of about 20 folks, but had just as much fun.  For this walk, Mark and I limited ourselves to only one lens, the 105mm.  Besides constraining our views, it also meant we didn’t carry any heavy bags.  There was still plenty of heat and humidity to drain my reserves, but I managed to get a few more shots.  The walk ended at the ice cream stand (it was packed with overheated folks).  You can look at the Warrenton photostream here.

It was a long hot day, but I’d do it again next year.  Mark and I have participated in all three of the Worldwide Photowalks, and my only complaint is that Scott Kelby needs to move the date to a month that isn’t so hot.  Or, maybe, I need to join a walk in Alaska next year.  Anyone up for a roadtrip?

Taking panoramic pictures requires a bit of planning.  The software needs 15-20% overlap between images in order to stitch them together.  Ideally, you will have a tripod for your camera and can get your horizon line nice and straight.  You can pick a starting point, and just shoot, keeping track of the overlap in your viewfinder.  It is important that your images all have the same depth of field so you want to set your camera to aperture priority.  Typically since you are trying to get as much of the image in focus you want to set the aperture up at least all the way to 11, but f22 will keep the picture sharp from horizon to horizon.  Since I tend to shoot a lot of pictures I want to remember which pictures should be included in each pano.  So the first image I shoot has my hand in it, I then remove the hand and start shooting.

When I have finished, guess what?  Yep, shoot the hand again to end the sequence.  It’s digital, it’s free and it really helps when you get back 2 weeks later. That simple tip from the great Scott Kelby (photoshopinsider.com) has saved me a ton of time.  If you want even finer detail, rotate your camera and shoot in portrait mode, the image slices will be smaller, but the vertical detail will be much greater.

One of the great organizing features in Lightroom, sits in the Library module.  Once you’ve imported all your pictures, tossed all the bad ones,  tagged all your metadata and are ready to roll, you can look over your grid view and, wait, what are those picture of your hand????  Oh yes, the mark the beginning and the end of a group of photos you intend to turn into something else.  Highlight them all and press Control-G and wham, you have now created a stack.  Or you can do the same thing by going to the Photo Menu, and select Stacking.  All your pictures are collapsed into just 1 thumbnail.  Stacks are great for other things as well, when you have shot a whole sequence of similar shots, you don’t need to clog up your entire screen.  Just stack em up.  You can move the one you like best to the top of the stack.  You can expand the stack and collapse it at will just by selecting the little vertical bar on the top slide. 

Now here is where the magic really takes over.  Expand the stack, select all the pictures between your hand shots and go to Photo>Edit In>Merge to Panorama in Photoshop.  This also works from Adobe Bridge.  It will open all the files, hit Use and go get a cup of coffee.  Photoshop will automatically align the images based upon your overlaps, it will create layer masks to pick the best parts, and will adjust the color and tone across all the images.  If you shot it on a tripod you might have a little clean up to do with the crop tool.  If you shot it handheld, you will likely have some gaps which might need to be filled.  Be warned, this creates some big, huge, ginormous .psb files.  Once you have cropped it to what you like, I then do the left side of the keyboard dance in Control Alt Shift-E which creates a new merged layer on top of all the individual images below.  I then delete all of those images and just hit Save.  The merged image is automatically returned to Lightroom and is there in your catalog.  So to finish up, I add it as the top image in the stack.   Here is the finished image from the stack above.

This is really good for capturing all the details in places like the Parthenon and the Great Library in Ephesus.

Thanks folks, gotta finish up editing my panoramas, because sometime you forget a chunk. 

Now, they draw the tourists into a maze of shops and restaurants. I shot them from a shop window in Little Venice and, “enh,” boring. I tried shooting them from the boat going to Delos, and that was almost as dull, and the background was way too busy.I knew two things: I needed to be closer; and it needed to be around sunset to get the detail and quality of light I really was looking for. We had rented a car for a day and had spent time on the other side of the island at a “free” beach club.  Sand is free, 2 drink minimum, and, oh, the umbrella and cushions also cost.  Still that was beautiful.   So my intrepid photogs and I piled in the back of the tiny car and worked our way down through the impossibly narrow winding unmarked streets and alleys of Choros.  After my hands released from the death grip on the wheel, we joined the throngs of tourists.

Since the light was still not what I was looking for, I went in to focus on the details of the shadows and the angles caused by the wood and the wires. I also tried to find the impact of the light on the brightly painted hubs of the windmills.

Finally, I could see the light was changing. I went in back of the mills to help block out the light and start to capture the evening glow.

We kept watching and waiting and finally got what I was looking for.

The Sunset Shot

Once I shot a dozen of these, we packed up and crawled our way back in the direction of our hotel for yet another incredible dinner.  Next, it’s on to Panoramas and how to shoot for them.