7.25.2011

tamalpais night riding | s24o

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climbed tam via old railroad grade, the beginning of a carfree ride thanks to trails and sunset road closures across all roads in the park.

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the fog was gorgeous

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looking back from whence we came.

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a favorite

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dinner at west point

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we pushed on for the summit, and climbed to the saddle between east and west peaks by trail

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west peak radar dome, 2574 ft.

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surreal views

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surreal II

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summer triangle

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ridgecrest road|rode without lights

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moving down bolinas ridge at night. stopped after much enjoyment around 4am and made camp.

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3 hours later, woke up to a wolf spider sleeping next to me and broke camp

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why i use fenders

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bolinas ridge

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high performance footwear, looking good alex

Shortly hereafter my 3rd freewheel of the past year imploded, sealing the deal for my migration to cassettes. IRD is junk--this time the smallest chainring (which is the threaded lockring) snapped in two under load. This let all my cogs spill sideways and fail to engage the splines. i fixed it by finding a combo with a perfect chainline and carefully rethreaded the lockcog (no sideways strain to pop that cog off), but this combined with two! chain breaks (only 500ish miles on this chain, too) forced me to use the granny gear up front. I rode home with a 24x26 and the amazing towing work of alex. Literally--sam p. taylor to larkspur ferry. He pulled me. We meet up with a great group of women (on a ladies' ride to sam p taylor), hit up a swimming hole, and then found the ferry.

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alex recreates the disappointment at the ferry building

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kelly

4 comments:

liz song mandell said...

definitely surreal. how long are those exposures on the cosmos shots?

erik said...

you can find the metadata if you click through to flickr--typically at or shorter than 8 seconds with high iso. i actually found i can't go quite as long even before trailing now that i have a higher res camera--it's all about apparent shift at the pixel level of the sensor. anyway, i do 20-30 seconds with my 8mm fisheye (depending on the area of sky i'm imaging). i like having a reasonably-not-noisy 3200 iso setting (vs my older limit of 800). makes things a bit better. prime lenses are the way to go with this, as well, for speed and chromatic aberration (even this L gives a purple fringe towards the corner). You'll want to crop from a full-frame for that same reason, too. Lots to say about astrophotography--it's a real wormhole, but there are some good resources out there. One of the hardest objects to capture cleanly, imho. When you get crisp focus, having a bit of gaffers tape to through on the ring will keep you locked for an entire shooting session.

erik said...

i actually find my ricoh grdIII to be equally useful, with its 1.9 and wide incredibly crisp lens. light weight helps with tripod drift, as well.

here's a deep space shot i took with a telescope about a year ago. this uses a rotating mount to track with the stars.

http://bikenoir.blogspot.com/2010/02/orion-nebula.html

Apertome said...

You have some truly stunningly beautiful shots here. I love fog -- and so often I hear things like "I was going to take some pictures, but there was too much fog." In my view some of the best photos involve fog. Being above it here is particularly great, and the night lends it even more atmosphere. Extremely well done!