That Golden Glow

I’ve spent many an hour waiting for the sun to either rise or set.  Looking toward it or away from it, the light skimming almost tangent to the earth can be amazing.

I caught these morning photos a couple of weekends ago when I was down in Arches National Park.  When camping, I’m usually up at the first sign of daylight, before the sun has a chance to break over the horizon.  I had the campfire burning, second cup of coffee in hand, when I took these pictures right from the Devil’s Garden Campground.

See more Golden Glow shots at:

Arches and Alta

I got these shots this morning before the first session of the day.

And here’s the modern-day technology shots of Arches from last weekend.

Turn-of-the-millennium Technology.

I found my very first digital camera recently, and not only does it still work, but my roommate has a computer old enough that it has a card reader that fits the camera’s memory card.

The Kodak DC50 came out in 1996, I’m not sure what year I bought mine, but it wasn’t long after.  I looked for data to compare it with my newest (2yr old) camera, and there wasn’t much to compare.  Technology has changed so much since it came out that the terminology is completely different.  I did find two things that could be directly compared:

1. The best picture for the DC50 is 756x504 pixels, on my Nikon D3100 camera I get 4608x3072 pixels.
2. The DC50 can shoot at a maximum rate of 1 picture every 5 seconds, the Nikon takes 3 per second.

The DC50 boasts 24-bit color, the Nikon doesn’t even mention how many bit color it has.   The Nikon boasts a 14.2 megapixel sensor, the DC50 doesn’t even mention megapixels.  [ I think that’s because it’s sensor size is the 756x504 the pictures comes out.  If I’m right, that means it has a 381,024 pixel sensor compared to the 14,200,000 Nikon sensor. ]

So, here is some pictures of my trip to Arches National Park this weekend, through the eyes of a camera from the last millennium.

I’ll get the Nikon pictures on here in the next couple of days.  I have a lot more of those to go through, the DC50’s memory card only held 80 pictures.

Arches National Park

I used to go down to Arches National Park all the time when I was in high school and in my 20’s.  You could pull into their campground before noon and almost always find a spot.  On the occasions the campground was full, there was the beautiful Potash Road, along the Colorado River just down the road, where you could always find a spot.

I don’t go as often anymore.  Moab has become a huge tourist destination, and getting a spot in the Arches campground means booking it 6 months in advance.  Exactly six months, because that’s when reservations open online and by 12:05 that morning at least half the spots are booked.

And the last time we camped down the Potash Road, we felt like we were in a bad horror movie when two groups of teenagers (one on each side of the river) were shooting rifles in the air well after dark set in.

So, I don’t go down there as often.  Once or twice a year my brother and nephew-in-law will book 2 or 3 sites and portions of my extended family go.  Last time I partook was the summer of 2010.

These pictures are from the year before, all in the same general area inside the Arches campground, all on the same evening.  I took them with my Nikon D40x, on a tripod, in manual mode.  The beauty of digital photography is that I could just take a bunch at different settings and sort out the good ones when I got home.