I retired from NASA in May of 2010. I took a position at Johns Hopkins University that
was definitely part time. I decided to focus some effort at improving my photography
skills. I had always enjoyed taking photographs on my travels but was never too serieous
about looking for opportunities. I looked on the web for possible workshops to attend
and found one in Colorado run by Rocky Mountain Reflections. I chose Colorado so that
we could combine the trip with a visit to Shirley's brother Bob and his wife Janet. It
turned out to be a great choice as Andy Cook, who ran the workshop, was a great teacher
and got us to good locations at the right time of day. The workshop was broken into two
3-day sessions. I only took the first one and was exhausted after 3 days of meeting
in the parking lot at 4:30 am and then after an early dinner staying up to dark to take
photos in the evening.
The first morning we arrived at Maroon Bells well before dawn. The parking lot was
already nearly full and when we got to the lake that was used to get reflections of the
mountains there were 30 or so photographers there with their tripods already set up to
take the iconic picture as the sun rose and illuminated the mountains. The next morning
we went to a ghost town to take pictures of the old buildings and the background of
colorful autumn trees. There was a fairly heavy frost and it was extremely cold. We
then moved from the hotel at Snowmass Village to one near Carbondale. The third morning
we went up a mountain road to get a panoramic view of the fall colors in the Colorado
mountains. We had to leave the cars at the bottom and pile into the 4-wheel drive vehicles,
one of which I had rented. The road up the mountain was narrow and steep with deep ruts.
When we got to the clearing their were a couple of bow hunters who had driven their truck
up the road pulling a large trailer. We fanned out across the steep ridge to take
panoramas of the valley and mountains. One of the workshop participants had a "kit" that
had about 50 pounds of camera gear. Andy gave us instructions on taking multiple frame
panoramas that would later be stitched together in photoshop. Since I was not very
familiar with the manual mode of my camera he simplified the instructions by advising
me to start by shooting at F22 so that I would not have to be so precise on deciding
where to focus.
On the last afternoon we stopped along one of the roads to photograph a stand of Aspen
trees that resulted in one of my favorite photos from the trip. During the 3 days I
car-pooled with a couple of interesting guys who were white-hat computer hackers. They
were hired by companies to test there computer systems. They used all kinds of ruses
to figure out how to get into the company's computer system. One I remember is that
they sent out an email entitled "Executive Salaries: Private". A number of employees
opened it out of curiosity and thereby introduced malware into the system that allowed
them to get passwords. One of my car-poolers indicated that his purpose was to get that
one shot, "the shot", and that would determine if he had a successful trip. I didn't
really understand that at the time but have come to appreciate it more as I have become
a better photographer. Overall the trip was a great success for me as I have continued
to improve my photography and attended 6 more workshops run by Andy Cook.
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