Mountain Photography for Lazy People
Last update: November, 2008

Almost all the pictures on this website were taken by yours truly. Those which weren't are credited.

Living in the mountains makes mountain photography easy. There are many places and instances where great mountain shots can be had with little exertion. Unlike serious professional photographers like John Fielder, who treks the backcountry of Colorado complete with a llama team to carry his equipment, I prefer to stay close to roads and trailheads. My point is that you don't need a llama team in Colorado to get great shots. You don't have to hike for miles for spectacular scenery.

So what does it take? Simple:

1. Be at the right place at the right time. Go out at weird times of the day, like at dawn, or during stormy weather. Avoid the middle of the day, when light is "flat".
2. Use a decent zoom lens. Simple, non-zoom snapshot cameras have very wide angle lenses...you can't get "in" close enough. And stay away from cameras with only a "digital zoom"...it's almost worthless. You need an "optical zoom".
3. Always take your camera with you. How can you get the picture if you don't have the camera?
4. Read some good books about photography. Forget the magazines. Mostly what they want to do is sell you new equipment. They're full of pictures complete with exposure and equipment data. Who cares?. Your equipment, as long as it takes decent quality pictures, doesn't matter. You only have to know how to use it. Don't be an equipment junkie. Just go out and PRACTICE. It's not like there are big film expenses. Take pictures that please YOU.
5. The Weather Underground has a section on their website where people can submit weather-related pictures. Check it out. There are great examples of digital photography there, and there are horrible examples. They don't turn down any reasonable submission. Study it. Correspond with some of the people there. Definitely worth the trouble. You have to be a "member" to do this stuff, I think, but the membership is only $10 per year, and that also eliminates ads from their site...worth the ten bucks in itself.

Understand your software. One of my favorite early shots (i.e. one taken just after we moved to Colorado) is the shot of the first snowfall in Mayflower Gulch. There were nine inches of powder snow on the ground, and I decided I'd just drive up to Mayflower Gulch to see what it looked like as the storm cleared. It was fantastic. And there I was in loafers! Nevertheless, I walked up the road a bit, trying to stay in the single set of tire tracks, to get the shot. Stupid me, though...I photographed it at 640 x 480...a resolution okay for websites, but too small for a decent 8 x 10 print. And being relatively new to digital photography, I didn't realize that the software I used compressed the image every time I saved it, which means that I lost detail / resolution every time I saved the image. The original image, alas, is lost. NEVER save a modified image over the top of an original!

My original camera was (well, IS...I still have it but rarely use it anymore) an Olympus D320L. It is basically a snapshot camera, but at $700 when it first came out in 1998, it was all we could afford. My frustration with it is that, like most snapshot cameras, it has a fixed-focus wide-angle lens. The result is that any picture I take with it makes things look farther away...not a good thing for quality landscape or wildlife shots. What I really needed was a decent zoom lens.

In late 2000, I bought my next digital, an Olympus C2100UZ. The UZ stands for "Ultra Zoom", and indeed, it has a 10x optical zoom lens, and allows through-the-lens viewing of the image. I really like this camera, since it can do almost everything a standard 35mm can do, and has some additional features as well. I find I still use it for occasional website work. The camera is only a 2.1 megapixel, but for website work that's okay. I've even gotten a decent 15 x 20 enlargement of an image taken with this camera. But by today's big-megapixel standard, it's obsolete.

I must add that subsequently Olympus offered the C700UZ (since replaced by numerous successors). This was a terrific little camera for those who didn't need semi-professional features, but still wanted a long zoom lens. It was so small it would fit in a large pocket, and was affordably priced. I bought one for the small property management company I worked for. The company now owns and still uses two.

During the "moose episode" down in Silverthorne, when there were two moose in the creek which ran right through the Outlet Mall (moose sightings are very rare here...moose are normally quite shy), both Cora and I wished that we had a small but very capable camera to keep in her car for circumstances like this. Cora noticed that the discontinued Olympus C720 was being advertised for $100 off. This is a relative of the 700UZ, but with "only" an 8x optical zoom, but still a great deal and very capable camera, based on my experience with the 700. So we bought it, and Cora took it with her whenever she goes out. If you don't have your camera with you, you can't get the picture! Subsequently, Cora's sister bought a 765UZ...smaller, more powerful, and 10x optical zoom.

I have purchased some of my digital cameras from Norman Camera, via the Internet (and telephone). I have found them to be very reliable. When we ordered our first camera we were living in Alexandria, Ohio, and were going to use the camera for photographing a new residence in Colorado. We waited and waited, and eventually traced the camera to Alexandria, Virginia! Yikes! We called Norman Camera and explained the problem (which wasn't THEIRS). They took care of recovering the Virginia camera, and immediately shipped a new camera to us, which we got, barely in time, for our house-hunting trip to Colorado.

In June of 2004, I took the plunge and purchased a Nikon D70 with two lenses, from Wolf Camera down in Denver. The D70 is a digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR). If you had and liked a 35mm camera, you'd love this one. There are some things it doesn't do for you, like image stabilization (unless you have the very expensive VR lenses). But image quality is superb, and I love this camera. It's a 6.1 megapixel camera; I've gotten 24 by 36 inch enlargements from its images.

Cora purchased a Pentax Optio SV, 5 megapixel, 5x optical zoom, which has served her very well for winter ski shots. It's very small, and actually has an optical viewfinder...something all too rare on compact digital cameras, in my opinion. This camera replaced the Olympus 700UZ, which we gave away to a friend.

One of the Achilles' heels of the DSLR is that when you change lenses, you expose the sensor to the atmosphere, complete with all the dust it carries. Some of this dust can deposit itself on the sensor, giving you dust spots on your images. With a decent image editor (Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photopaint, etc.) these spots are usually very easy to remove, but it's still a pain because every picture you take has these spots. It got bad enough with the D70 that I tried to use a Q-tip to clean off the sensor. HUGE mistake! The sensor has a very fragile coating on it, which I managed to scratch. It meant a trip to Denver to get the camera into a shop, which, in turn, meant that the camera had to be sent to Nikon to have the sensor replaced. In the meantime, I had already committed to photographing the wedding of the daughter of some friends. So I was without a camera to do the wedding. Bottom line: in August of '08 we bought a second DSLR, a Nikon D80. We got it from buydig.com, and we were very happy with their service.

The D80 is only slightly smaller than the 70, and produces a ten megapixel image. Controls are virtually the same as the D70's, so there was no learning curve. I used the D80 to do the wedding. (The D70 took forever to be repaired, but at long last I have it back.) The addition of the second DSLR meant that now I can keep a telephoto zoom on one camera, and a wide-angle-to-standard lens on the other, and avoid the frequent lens changing which lead to the dust-on-the-sensor problem. I find that for almost every application, either the 17mm to 70mm, or 70mm to 300mm lens will do the job. I have a couple of other lenses now, but seldom use them.

The digital camera scene right now is still very competitive, and the single biggest point of contention is how many megapixels the camera's sensor contains. If you're going to take pictures and extract huge enlargements, then the more the better. But if all you really want is maybe an occasional 8 x 10 enlargement and mostly just snapshots, you don't need much more than a 4 or 5 megapixel camera. Larger megapixels mean a much bigger computer file. Some of the images coming out of the Nikon can exceed 6 megabytes. But most cameras made today can be "throttled down" to take smaller pictures when a very large image is not desired. So the megapixel race is on and will probably continue for awhile yet. The other thing that most camera manufacturers don't mention is the actual physical size of the sensor. Ten megapixels on a huge sensor will produce magnificent images. Ten megapixels on a very small sensor will not do as well.

Earlier this year I bought a "Flip" point-and-shoot video camera, just to see if I really wanted to mess with moving pictures. So far, so good. We got a GREAT deal on the Ulead Video Studio Plus (only $30 after a couple of rebates). After using the Ulead editor with the Flip camera, I was very impressed with the editor's capabilities, and somewhat frustrated with the Flip camera, mostly because of its limitations. So in May of 2008 I bought a JVC HD video camera, which I really like. The camera saves files in a proprietary format, which I'd normally try to avoid, but the Ulead editor understands the format, so everything's cool. I think video is the "killer app" which is driving the need for next-generation computer hardware...very large hard drives and multi-core processors are almost a necessity. For example, a 30 second HD video clip requires about 50 megabytes of storage space. Obviously, the Internet isn't ready for HD...too slow for really large files, but the Ulead software can take a 15 minute "featurette" requiring nearly 500 megabytes and boil it down to a 15 megabyte .wmv, definitely suitable for the web. When assembling a movie, the final step is "rendering", which takes all the clips in the movie and produces the final version in whatever format you specify. The render is very time consuming...each minute of movie requires about 7 minutes to render, so you can see that you don't want to make a minor change and re-render at every opportunity! I went with the HD cam because I liked the 16:9 format, and I wanted something I could grow into. So the adventure continues.

(November, 2008, about printers): Hopefully you're not one of the poor suckers who buys an inkjet printer to print virtually any and all pictures you take with your brand new digital camera. We have scrapbooks FULL of old pictures that we hardly, if ever, look at. Imagine the cost of printing all those images with today's inkjet printers! Our experience with inkjet printers ended when we finally decided that, since we rarely printed ANY pictures, our inkjet printer was destined for recycling. The dry climate here meant that the nozzle(s) in the ink cartridges always dried out, and required constant maintenance and replacement of costly and mostly full ink cartridges.

So about 18 months ago we bought a HP color laser printer, and dumped the inkjet and all those expensive ink cartridges. So far, it has been flawless, and since it was a "network" printer (for $400?? helluva deal!!), we have it configured so that either Cora or I can print to this thing on demand from our own computers. If we really need prints we can print them with the new printer, or for absolute "photo quality" prints, we can get them cheaply at City Market. I've even ordered really LARGE prints (24" x 36") online and have been pleased with both the quality and price. So if you're in the market for a printer, BEWARE of the cheap inkjet printers. The manufacturers definitely make up their losses on the printers through sales of ridiculously expensive ink cartridges! The laser printer is, at least in our experience, a cheaper solution in the long run. We have yet to replace ANY of the toner cartridges in the printer. (But remember, we don't print all our pictures, either!)

The Olympus C700UZ and C2100UZ

The state of my art -- March '08. This thing has gotten totally out of control!