When you vote, you will get entered into a drawing to win a $100 B&H Photo gift card.

You can just go to:
https://www.unifiedcolor.com/user/register?destination=utc_voting/vote/591
and fill out the form and click “create new account” and you will be done.

If you are only interested in voting for me – thank you!. The rest of this blog entry doesn’t matter to you and is just a bunch of historical text… the link above will vote for me immediately after you register so you don’t have to do anything else.

Background

A while ago I discovered the HDR Expose and 32 Float – both products from Unified Color that make it easy to get a natural look when you process HDR photos. As a promotion for their software, they ran a photo contest. There were three phases to the contest and each phase produced 15 winners (1 first prize winner and 4 honorable mention winners in 3 categories). Now all three phases are over and they are running a contest to pick the grand prize winner – based on public voting.

What’s in it for you?

Why should you care? Well, for starters – everyone who votes gets entered into another drawing to get win one of five $100 gift card from B&H Photo. (Which is very useful, they sell lots of stuff). Also, if you vote for my image and I end up winning, I’ll get to go on a really cool National Geographic photo expedition and take tons of photos that I’ll post on my blog or flickr account for you to look at and say “cool.” Plus… what’s the social revolution of the web all about if it’s not about coercing friends into voting on stuff for you in random contests?

On that page of thumbnails, I have four images in the running. Their thumbnails look like this:

Short version on how to vote: Click on the above image, and then find the thumbnail of the conference center image. Click on it, say 'neat' when you see it larger, and then click the 'Vote for this photo:' button. When you register for an account (in order to vote) you also get entered into the gift card drawing.

How to vote

Here’s the process on how to vote:

The voting page on Unified Color's site

When you click on thumbnail, the large “vote for this image” button appears and lets you click on it to vote for an image. You will have to register for an account there in order to vote – but it is pretty easy to do and once you vote you will also be entered into their drawing for a $100 gift card.

If you are SUPER LAZY

You can go to the Unified Color Voting Page and then paste the following into your address bar and hit enter:
javascript:$("div.utc-voting-image-preview").load("/utc_voting/image/preview/591");window.scroll(0,1000);
And then click the “Vote for this photo” button.

or you could try clicking here

What that does is the same thing that you do when you click on the thumbnail – but it saves you the two seconds it takes to find the thumbnail of my image. I would encourage you to still look at the other entries… and you still have to click the “vote” button.
It’s possible to link directly to the voting page for my image but that might violate the spirit of the competition too much so I would suggest taking the extra steps to avoid them thinking I’m trying to hack the planet or something.

Click to play the timelapse video of cleaning leaves. The 1080p version is much better quality than the others

I’ve been using the TC-80N3 clone I got for my birthday to take some timelapse shots of various things.

I’m going to take a shot a throwing together some of the timelapse scenes I have shot into a longer sequence about the change from fall to winter weather.

Here’s one clip that I think is Time Lapse of cleaning up fall leaves on YouTube .

This is one you really should view full screen and zoom in on different sections. Click on the “fullscreen” icon to the far right of the tool bar in the flash viewer to go fullscreen, click on the “+” button to zoom in. (you can also use your scroll wheel or keyboard to zoom in and out – the control and shift keys control the zoom)

About Scout Lookout

From Scout Lookout you have an amazing view of Zion Canyon and the Virgin River running through it.

The hike to Scout lookout is 1.9 miles with 1,000 feet of elevation gain. The hike has a few scenic stopping points, and a big chunk of the elevation gain takes places in the “Walters Wiggles” portion of the trail – a series of 21 switchbacks that were cut into the rock in 1926.

About this panorama

This is the highest resolution one that I have yet put up on the web. It’s stitched at around 300 megapixels, and if you are using the flash viewer for it you can zoom in quite far. As you pan around, you will see people starting the hike up to Angels Landing and grabbing onto a cable. The Angels Landing trail is closed for a little while (expected to re-open late October, 2010) while the cables and chains are being replaced with new ones, but even with new chains it will still be a tough hike with sheer drops. So in other words, don’t bring your kids up it.

Things to look for

I didn’t notice it at the time, but if you pan up and zoom in, you can see a bird in the sky. (it’s pretty small even when you zoom all the way in so it’s hard to tell exactly what kind of bird it is – looks like a bird of prey of some sort). If you zoom down and follow the river around the Big Bend you can pan up and see the parking lot for the Weeping Rock trail. As you pan around a bit more you can see the Great White Throne. If you happen to have someone who knows the names of the different features in Zion better than I do – you can hear them point them out to you while you pan around too.

If you look by the toilets you’ll notice the black metal drums that are accumulating waiting to be taken away via helicopter. The hike down from this point lasts only about an hour, so the bathrooms are great for anyone who can’t hold it for an hour… and for everyone else they stink up the area on hot days and motivate you to go explore other areas of the park.

That big pile of bags contain my canyoneering gear and hold my camera stuff while I’m doing a canyon. If I’m doing a wet canyon, I’ll have dry bags for everything – and if I’m doing a wet and cold canyon I’ll have all that stuff plus a drysuit and very sore shoulders.

I thought about blurring out the part where some dork named “Lee” scratched his name into the rock, but I left it in there so we can all look at it and say “What kind of a loser scratches their name into a rock?”. Seriously – don’t ever do that. If you ever see someone do that, get them to stop.

The links!

Flash version

If clicking on the image at the top of the article doesn’t work, or you don’t feel like scrolling back up there, you can view the full 360 panorama of the view from Scout Lookout in Zion National Park

iPad / iPod Version

You can use a special HTML5/CSS 3D viewer of the iPad-friendly panorama of the view from Scout Lookout in Zion National Park

Android Version

If you are on android, you can use the normal full flash link (as long as you have installed the Flash player on your Android phone) – and if you are side-by-side with an iPhone user you can rub in the fact that yours will zoom in farther since it will dynamically load images as it zooms whereas the HTML5/CSS3D viewer cannot.

On Friday, I went with a group to Zion National Park and descended Behunin Canyon. I’ve done this canyon a number of times before, but it’s been a while since the last time I have done it. The view right before the last rappel is quite stunning, and it is one of my favorite spots in the park. While standing on a ledge next to a 200-foot drop, I carefully shot this series of images to stitch together for a Panorama of Lady Mountain, Deertrap Mountain, and Mountain of the Sun from the end of Behunin Canyon.

At this spot, you will not encounter any large crowds – there is a limit of 20 people allowed to do the canyon on any given day (up to 14 people can reserve a permit ahead of time, and up to 6 can get a “walk on” permit as early as the day before the trip). There is a maximum group size of 6 people allowed in this canyon. On the day we did it, there was one other group of three people that we met up with, and based on the permit records only eight people went through the canyon that day.

To get to the point that this shot was taken requires a backcountry permit, around 6 to 8 hours of hiking, a lot of downclimbing, wading through water and eight rappels (this is right before the 9th – and final – rappel).

If you are interested in doing some of the technical canyons in Zion, I would highly recommend getting a copy of Tom Jone’s book Zion: Canyoneering. You can get much of the content online from Tom’s Utah Canyoneering website but a paper copy of the book is convenient and for many of the canyons contains updated or more in-depth information. Plus, Tom Jones is a good guy and maybe if enough of us buy his book he can finally afford that second headlight for his car

What you can see

The pink looking navajo sandstone mountain towering over you as the panorama loads is “Lady Mountain”. Apparently to some early pioneers it resembled a lady, hence the name. Note: The Lady Mountain hiking/climbing route is a technical hiking trail (involves two 5.6 climbing sections) – is only described on Tom’s website, but might make it in the next edition of his book. haven’t done it yet, but it’s on my list

As you look down canyon, if you zoom in you will be able to see the roof of the Zion Lodge. The original lodge was built in 1924 by a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad – but burned down in 1966. The lodge was rebuilt quickly, but it wasn’t until 1990 that it was remodeled to feel rustic again. I’m not a Zion Mountain-name buff, so these names might be wrong – but looking to the left, the white-capped mountain topped with ponderosa pines is Deertrap Mountain, and then looking to the right you see The Mountain of the Sun, and behind it are the Twin Brothers.

The trail you see in the trees following the base of Lady Mountain is the Emerald Pools trail leading to the Middle Emerald Pools. If you zoom in far enough you can see a few people on the trail making their way up to the pools. On our way out of the canyon, we passed by the Middle and Lower emerald pools. I probably should have taken pictures of them – but we were all pretty hungry and anxious to make our way out of there.

I took several more panoramas that day, and as I get time I’ll process them and post them here in another post. I think this one is probably the most interesting of them – and this view was the main reason I wanted to do Behunin canyon again.

A narrow section of Angel Cove Canyon

Another panorama from Angel Cove canyon – here is a panorama of a narrow section of Angel Cove Canyon. The lighting was pretty cool when I was in this section.

The tripod was set up pretty low when I took these. I set it up because I saw some cool shots from that lower angle. It wasn’t until I stitched this that I realized that a 360×180 taken from such a low perspective gives kind of a leprechaun’s-eye-view of the surroundings. In this case, I think it works out pretty well.

We were planning to do the Squeeze in the San Rafael Swell, but the weather didn’t cooperate. By the time we reached the base of Moroni Slopes, the storm clouds were already forming and moving around the sky. I captured a 360×180 panorama while we were there.

Moroni Slopes panorama

I took a Goblin Valley panorama that I have also posted.

Every year on Black Friday “Santa” flies in and lands at the mall. Here he is on approach. (I posted a few more images of the helicopter on flikr, and will post more when I get a chance)

(After three clicks and you get to see the big picture).