Sam Lodise and I went to High Rocks State Park with Bill Schilling and his cohort and I was met with a cascade of fuck-ups.  I had somehow lost the top plate of my tripod, then I broke the battery cage for my panoramic base and finally nearly removed lost my testicles in my first fence-hopping experience in ages.  The paths about the rock face left little room for error and I was greeted in my attempts to move about with four falls in about 10 seconds.  I wanted the comic “about to fall” noise to play before the fourth flattening but no foley artists were present.  I skinned my elbow for the first time since I was 12 and had my first official photography war wound.

My most recent lens purchase was a 17-40mm f/4 which is a wide lens.  The edges have a bit of barrel distortion which leads to almost cheating when showing big things.

I was an idiot and shot all my 17mm pics with two stacked filters leading to vignetting so I’m robbed of about 15% of the grandeur.

I also test drove tonemapped HDR for the first time and sometimes the results are subtle:

The first is the original for the tone-mapped second.  In other cases the results were a bit more dramatic:

The rocks weren’t nearly as colorful as depicted above.