Wednesday Apr 15, 2009 at 23:35

Off to Arches National Park with a D700

Alice and I are heading off back to southern Utah for a long weekend tomorrow evening. As usual, we’re staying the first night in Glenwood Springs (around 180 miles from Boulder) to break the journey (won’t be leaving until late afternoon), then on to Moab for the weekend.

The plan is to visit Arches National Park – we’ve both been there before, but not long enough to really do it full justice.

For extra excitement, it’ll be the first real photographic outing for my new Nikon D700 (which arrived just last week). It, coupled with the Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 I picked up from B&H on Feb 1st, just before the yen-dollar exchange rate-induced price hikes, should hopefully prove a real step up from the D200 + 12-24 f/4 combination I’ve been shooting with to date (although I’ve been very pleased with what that setup has delivered, such as the Three Gossips above from February 2008).

The internal schizoid debate in which I indulged for several months as to whether I should go 14-24 or 17-35 is probably worth a separate post, but I’ll postpone until I have really tried out the 17-35 in the field (it hasn’t had much of an outing to date).

The other promising aspect of this trip is the timing: a late winter storm blowing through tomorrow, clearing through Friday and Saturday and with clear weather forecast all day Sunday – should give us a high chance of some interesting light and cloud formations.

All that, plus, April-May is – I read – the time for flowers in the desert. The National Park Service has some fantastic documents on the Arches National Park site detailing the bloom dates by species.

If you’re inspired by Tom Till’s Mule Ear Flowers and Courthouse Towers (and yes, I am) – then this information might prove invaluable.

Posted in Locations Equipment

Stephen · Wednesday, April 15, 2009, 23:35 · Permalink

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