jeff's blog

For those of you who don’t know, I spent almost two weeks in Colorado recently, and am just now getting around to putting pictures up. A group of five of us spent 9 wonderful days on the trail, treking through some of the most remote and beautiful parts of Colorado in the Weminuche Wilderness. For those interested in the details of our route, just ask and I can break it down step by step, but many parts of it will be clear from the comments on the full gallery of pictures.

For those interested, I took the D90 with a Tamron 17-50 2.8, and Seth graciously loaned me his Nikon 55-200 VR.  In addition I took my gorillapod and three batteries – the whole rig contributing about 4 pounds to my pack.  In retrospect, I would probably swap out the 17-50 for a lighter 18-55, even though the quality likely wouldn’t be as good – the weight would be hard to argue with, though. Additionally, I did suffer a near-catastrophic failure of my memory card, though with some good recovery software I was able to get a few of the images off. Not quite sure about the reason for the failure yet.

A full gallery, along with subtitles, is available here.

View from our campsite on the first night.

A Rocky Mountain Columbine

The first part of our trip was hiking up the Vallecito Creek, shown here.

Lots of lily-like flowers along the trail.

The Guardian, as seen from our third camp.

One of many mountain waterfalls.

Leviathan Lake, pretty much the most beautiful place ever, even in this HDR-ish shot.

A view of the lake in the morning, with the water still.

Needed a new Facebook profile picture.

We were joined by two goats – in this case Buddy.

Yes, had to do a long exposure even in the mountains.  Why else would I take 3 batteries?

Looking back to the west over the whole of the lake in the morning.

Jagged Mountain. Note that Buddy (and Mable) decided to follow us over the pass.

This is Floyd, our friendly neighborhood marmot.

Brent, fishing on the Animas.

I’ve had this video for a while, but I finally got a chance to put it together a few days ago.  More D90 with Nikon 200, but this time of some lizards and frogs instead of just butterflies.  I’ve also got a compilation of this video and the previous one that I’ll post in a couple of days.

One of the more interesting things about this editing process was learning just how fast my new computer is at rendering video – specifically that it will do it almost in real time.  This 2:45 video rendered in almost exactly 3 minutes.  On my laptop that probably would have taken 20-30.  Gotta love technology.

Just to keep everyone up to date, we’ve switched webhosts from a shared (slow) server to a colocated (fast) server where we have a bit more control over what goes on.  The long and the short of it involves Dreamhost complaining that transferring images to my sister so she could make wedding books violated their terms of service, which led to us getting our own dedicated box and telling Dreamhost we wouldn’t be paying them any more money. During the transfer last night I was getting about 42Mbps of throughput from the DH servers to our new one, so I think speed shouldn’t be an issue.

The result should be that service is faster, not that most people will notice that.  On the flip side, if any of you have always wanted to get your website hosted somewhere and didn’t know where, let me know.  We’ve got plenty of space and bandwidth.