Today Nikon announced two new 36+MP full frame DSLRs, the D800 and D800E, and Canon announced a long-awaited update to their EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L zoom. I’ve posted a bit more information in a new entry on the Deals page.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
I just received a note from B&H saying that the Canon EOS 5D Mark II body is available right now for $1999.95. The 5D2 (as I prefer to call it – less typing!) is Canon’s 21 MP full frame DSLR that also can produce excellent HD video. This is the camera that I use for my own photography.
UPDATE: This price includes a “bundle” of other useful items, too:
SanDisk 16GB Extreme Pro CompactFlash Card
Lowepro Adventura 170 Shoulder Bag
Red Giant B&H Video Production Software Bundle
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Morning sunlight shine through the window frames of the ruins of the abandoned schoolhouse in the ghost town of Rhyolite Nevada, near Death Valley National Park.
The ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada is located just east of the boundary of Death Valley National Park, along the edge of the Amargosa Valley, and not far from Beatty, Nevada, which itself is close to the Nevada Test Site. Put all of that together and you have the potential for a bit of a spooky place!
Rhyolite was a short-lived mining town in the early 1900s, when it apparently was home to thousands of people who streamed to this forsaken landscape to find silver. The town was eventually abandoned – although some mining still takes place in the area – but a good number of the larger buildings are still there, in various states of decay. An old train station that looks pretty fancy is fenced off to keep us out, but you can walk (respectfully and carefully!) among many other old structures including the old school house that is the subject of this photograph.
I’ve been out here a number of times and dawn is my favorite time to photograph here. The light makes it to many of the old ruins very shortly after actual sunrise, and there is a moment of often beautiful light at this time. From Rhyolite the hills inside Death Valley National Park are visible to the west and above the nearer hills you can see Telescope Peak, the highest point in the park at over 11,000′ elevation.
The school (like a few of the other ruins) looks like it must have been a very large and robust structure. Even though the roof and the second floor are gone, almost all of the exterior walls still stand and don’t show any immediate signs of incipient collapse. On this morning I made a series of photographs from just inside one of the “doorways” of the school with a wide-angle lens. I selected and shared a few of them back in 2009, but I recently went back to my original raw files and decided to try this one in black and white.
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A double-reflection of late light from an adjacent building appears in the upper story of this window-covered industrial building near the High Line Park in New York City.
This is another of my photographs from New York City’s High Line Park, made during my late August visit to the city earlier this year. For those who may not know, the High Line is a relatively new (and still under construction) urban park in Chelsea that is “elevated,” being built on the bed of the old elevated railway that passed through here. The park is tremendously popular, especially on summer evenings.
Aside from being a pleasant place to walk, the High Line affords some interesting views that are usually not quite this accessible. There are not to many places where you can walk through a busy urban environment such as Manhattan for a mile or so, out in the open, a couple of stories above street level, with largely unobstructed views of subjects near and far, and above and below. Here the park passes between some taller buildings that are closely spaced, creating an interesting lighting situation. (Oddly, it is a kind of lighting that I often look for when shooting landscape or nature subjects.) The sun is behind the building in the photograph, so the building is largely lit by light from the open sky plus light reflected from the building behind my camera position. You can see that other building in the windows here, the upper floors in direct sun light and the lower in shadow.
(Basic EXIF data may be available by “mousing over” large images in posts when this page is viewed on the web. Leave a comment if you want to know more.)
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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