Playa Grande. Big Beach. Not the most imaginative name, but its a name I won’t forget. That’s because this is the beach you dream about on a winter’s day as you are stowed away in a cubicle in some northern city. Sugary golden sand, ever-changing surf and palm trees that burst open like fireworks. It’s as though it were designed for a Corona commercial. Continue reading
Hailey, Varenna and I just returned last weekend from a six-day vacation in Cabarete, a beach town on the north shore of the Dominican Republic. We traveled with Hailey’s mom, Diana, who instigated the trip last April. The logic was like many vacations hatched for this time of the year: some place warm, with sand and surf. No other requirements.
(Click on image for a larger view).
The highlight of my trip to the Trappers Lake and the Flat Tops area was hanging out with my dad in a rustic, 400-square-foot cabin in the woods. I cooked up spaghetti with red wine sauce one night, and we polished off a bottle of Plungerhead — which plunged my head pretty badly the next morning, but man, it is such a good wine.
Sure, the lake was beautiful. Sure, the respite from the city was needed. But there’s nothing that compares to good conversation with a good friend over good food and good wine. It made the trip.
While we chatted, I set up my Canon 5D Mark II on a tripod outside the cabin and captured two 20-minute exposures of the night sky with a Canon 24mm f/1.4. This is a situation where the quality of this gear really comes through. Both the camera and the lens are remarkably clear when it comes to shooting the night sky.
It took nearly an hour to discover what was happening.
We had hiked up to this meadow just outside Zermatt, on the trail that eventually leads to Zmutt and the North Face of the Matterhorn. It was getting hot, and Varenna was inspecting the gravel on the trail, handing her best specimens to Mom, and then pushing her stroller like the big girl she was proclaiming to be (“bick guhr! bick gurh!). We were all content, and not planning to go too far. After all, this appeared to be it: the iconic view of the Matterhorn, the one that conjures visions of alpenhorns and men yodeling “Ri-co-la” into the crisp glacial air.
But as we turned to head back to town, the moon was suddenly quite noticeable and on a very interesting course.
Here’s my dilemma: I have too many good photos from the Berner Oberland for one post.
This has little to do with me and my photography skills. It has everything to do with the extreme beauty of the area. Never before have I been anywhere as dramatic and scenic as this alpine region smack in the middle of Switzerland. We spent almost an entire week here, and it still wasn’t enough. Every day was different, and we kept moving, but even then, I can’t pretend that I am a fountain of definitive photography knowledge on the area.
But what I did learn, I’m putting here, so hopefully there are a few kernels of insight.
In full disclosure, I ran out of time (and money) in the valley to shoot the following areas: Interlaken, Brienzsee, Thunersee, Jungfraujoch, Shilthorn/Piz Gloria, Schynige Platte, Gimmelwald, Grindelwald, First/Bachalpsee and — tops on my Unfinished Business List — Hinteres Lauterbrunnental.
That’s a ton. In fact, if you are reading this because you are researching a vacation in the area, it may sound like I didn’t see any of the big sights. Not true. There’s just simply that much to see and shoot in the Berner Oberland.
This post covers the following subjects:
Part 2 will cover:
I’ve included a Google Map of these places — and where I took these images — at the bottom of this post.
(Click on images for a larger view)
Go ahead. Ogle all you want.
Words often fail me. They fail me the most when it comes to mountains. Grandeur. Majesty. Magnificence. Please: those words are chumps when you are beneath the Jungfrau (above two images), a hulking mountain that towers over the Lauterbrunnen Valley like a glacier clad bully. It’s name (roughly translated as Young Girl in German) is hardly worth dissecting. It makes little sense. This peak is a beast.
Lucerne is said to be one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. I still have a lot of Europe to cover, but its hard to imagine a cleaner, more idyllic, more photogenic city than Lucerne. The place seems designed for postcards, coffeetable books and small 1-inch-by-1-inch decorative chocolate wrappers.
To get my best shots in Lucerne, I made my way to these places:
(Click on images for a larger view)
I recently spent two weeks touring around Switzerland with my wife and our one-year-old daughter. It was a magnificent trip — one of those get-it-out-of-my-system-now kinds of trips while Varenna is young and portable. Ha! That’s at least what we thought when we booked the trip in January. She’s a bit more … mobile, shall we say.
But we had a very good time, and ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised with the images I returned home with. In the moment, we both were a bit distracted trying to keep our daughter entertained, engaged, and safe. We worked hard every hour of the trip, just not on photography. Or so it seemed.
You should never start a blog post with an apology for not posting recently. It’s just bad form, and truthfully, who reads this blog regularly anyway? Even if you did, you’d notice that I haven’t posted anything — anything — since January.
But I feel the long absence is worth noting, if for no other reason than the major personal changes I’ve undergone since my last post.
I’ve started my own company.
Not a hobby company. Not a dabble-in-it-and-see-if-it-fits company.
A livelihood. A bona fide “wow, this is what I ought to be doing in life” company.
My business is called Headwaters Content, and its one of Denver’s first content strategy firms. What brought this about is a long and probably boring story (I think it’s interesting. You probably don’t). But needless to say, maintaining a photo blog has been a free-time activity, and since February, setting Headwaters up has been rather consuming, both from a labor-intensive and mentally fatiguing perspective.
I had heard that Kauai’s food was the type of thing to inspire obsession. Actually, I hadn’t heard that. I saw it manifested in my brother, who goes to the Garden Isle almost every year, and who — as a result — now hosts an annual luau with more than 30 menu items from there.
Well, here I am, two months after the trip, and I still have the international/sometimes kooky/always delicious flavors of Kauai on my taste buds. Here’s the best of what we had:
