Our one full day in Big Bend was a busy one! After a quick breakfast and camp breakdown, we headed over to the Hot Springs. The water was clear and warm, and we took advantage of the cool river to alternate between hot and cold. The healing waters of the Rio Grande felt so good!

Next up was a hop over the border at the Boquillas Crossing for lunch at Jose Falcon’s. My chile relleno and beer was great. It was very different from the kind we get in Austin.

Fuelled up on Mexican food, it was time to burn those calories on the trail. We’ve never hiked The Window Trail in the Chisos Basin, so that was our destination. It was such a cool trail when ends at a viewpoint which is the actual Window. Such a great view, and we chatted with a few other hikers who arrived at the same time. Very cool vibe with the cool air flowing into the canyon, and Mexican Jays joining us.

Our campsite for the evening was Robbers Roost, a backcountry site that you need a high-clearance vehicle to reach. Because it so remote, the sky is super-dark and it’s perfect for astrophotography. Unfortunately, the winds were very strong this weekend, so there was a lot of dust and haze in the air. That made shooting the Milky Way (which was just over the horizon) difficult. But the dust did make for nice sunset colors!

And guess what? The Lyrid meteor shower was just starting up, so we got treated to a nice show!

It’s nice that my friend and I like photography. Dark skies in Big Bend are a highlight of the trip for sure, and we stayed up until 3 am taking photos. So fun, and nice way to end an awesome day.

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Today my friend and I drove out to Guadalupe Mountains National Park to begin a long weekend of camping and hiking. It was the first time to the park for both of us so we were excited to explore the new park, and the ~8-hour journey seemed to go by quickly.

We reserved a campsite at the Pine Springs Campground online and when we arrived we immediately set up our tents and got the site in order with our camp kitchen, lanterns, and food. The sun goes down quickly these days! By the way, I highly recommend site #18. It’s set back a ways from the road and has some nice views of the mountains and is great for watching the sunrise.

For dinner we splurged with some Japanese Miyazaki steaks which were amazing on the grill, and cold beer and refreshing whiskey sodas made for some tasty beverages!

After cleaning up, we set up our tripods and camera gear to capture the amazing night skies. We got lucky with the weather as the skies were clear and our timing was nice because of the new moon and as a bonus, the Geminid Meteor Shower was just beginning. The coolest thing I saw was a line of light moving across the sky. While it was dark on the ground, a plane’s contrail up at 30,000 feet was lit up, but disappeared only a short distance behind it. The effect looked like a train moving across the sky, or even like a white dragon. One of the neatest things I have ever seen! I don’t have video of it, but in the photo below, just imagine that line moving slowly across the sky from left to right, with the line not changing size. Incredible!

Tomorrow we have a long hike to Guadalupe Peak, which is the highest peak in Texas… it’s going to be fun!

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This morning I woke up at 5 am and right outside my tent was the Milky Way. It was awesome! I got out my Fujifilm X-E4 with 18-55 mm lens, put it on the Ultrapod and took a few shots. There were only a few clouds in the sky so the shots looked pretty good, and I even captured a few shooting stars. In fact, with the 30-second exposure, almost every shot had at least one shooting star in it. It was so cool!

Soon, the sun made its way into the day, and after a sunrise photo and some coffee, it was time to hit the trail. We hiked Laguna Meadows Trail all the way down to the Chisos Basin, seeing one large bear along the way. It was digging a hole near the trail so we had to scoot past pretty quickly, bear-spray at the ready. Very exciting!

At the end of the hike, I splurged on a Topo Chico and mango ice cream bar before we hit the road. After a couple of hours we arrived at Fort Stockton and had lunch at Pepito’s, where I had a huge burger. It was a good way to satisfy my hiker hunger!

Here are a few more photos and the Strava track from the last day of our Big Bend trip. Enjoy!

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I woke up early from my highway rest stop accommodations, and while packing up, I decided to put the Fujifilm X-E4 on the tripod and point it up at the Milky Way. I am pretty happy with the result that the XF 18-55mm “kit” lens produced (with some editing in Adobe Lightroom).

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Tonight the International Space Station (ISS) was very bright as it passed over Texas, and I had my camera and tripod set up to capture it. I didn’t really know what kind of settings to use, so I just went with a typical exposure that I normally do. Unfortunately there were a lot of clouds obscuring the view, but I think the photo turned out okay.

I made a series of 10-second exposures, then stacked them in Photoshop to create the composite image above. You might notice that there appear to be double stars. This is because I hid a few layers in the Photoshop stack when the ISS was passing behind the clouds so the overall cloud coverage would be reduced, and this resulted in the star trails having a gap in them.

FYI, this website is a fantastic resource to see when satellites will be flying overhead. It uses Google Street View to show you exactly where to look from your viewpoint! Just make sure that your watch is synchronized to the atomic clock so you know when to look up.

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I tried my hand at capturing some of the meteors of this year’s Perseid Meteor Shower by setting up my X100T’s intervalometer and letting it shoot for a few hours, then checking the results for shooting stars. The five-hour span resulted in seven shooting stars, which I combined into the composite photo above. It’s pretty neat how almost all of them originate from the same point, isn’t it? I’m happy with the results, but next year I will keep the camera going all night which will require that I wake up twice in the middle of the night to reset the camera, unless I upgrade to the latest X100, which can shoot all night all by itself. (my current camera has a 999 exposure limit)

Since I had a lot of images, I created a time-lapse video. It’s not optimal for viewing shooting stars, but I think it’s fun to watch anyways.

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I finally saw Comet NEOWISE! Thanks to my friend Jeremy’s tips and advice, I was able to spot the comet just over the treeline and captured a couple of photos with my Fujifilm X100T camera. It’s the first comet I’ve ever seen so I was pretty stoked.

I make Mariko laugh when I came back from the photo session because I was carrying my tripod/camera, had my headlamp on my forehead, and around my neck was my compass and binoculars. I struck a pose and she said “Dasai!!” (uncool)

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I managed to take this photo before turning in for the evening (I sleep so early these days!). This 9:15 pm photo still shows a little glow from the sun, but the lack of a moon and the less-polluted skies allow for some decent star photos, even from suburbia. That bright star in the center is actually the planet Venus. Super bright as usual! This is a 13-second exposure using a Sony NEX-6 and Sigma 10-20 mm lens, at a 15 mm full-frame equivalent focal distance, ISO 3200, with a quick edit in Adobe Lightroom 5.7.

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The early-evening moonless sky was pretty clear so I decided to do a little astro-photography out on the back deck. I used the Sony NEX-6 paired with the Sigma 10-20 mm lens to take a few RAW snaps, and when I got to editing in Adobe Lightroom, I noticed that I managed to capture a shooting star. Lucky!!!

Photo details:
ISO: 3200
Shutter speed: 13 seconds
Aperture: f/4
Post-processing: Adobe Lightroom 5.7

I hope you had a nice day!

またね～

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こんばんは。How’s it going?

This evening the skies in my neighborhood were relatively clear so I set up my Fujifilm X100T in the backyard to do a little astrophotography time-lapse. I got started a bit late, and it was very cold, so I only let it run for about an hour. Still, I am pleased with how it turned out. Please take a look:

Speaking of cameras, the Fujifilm X100V was announced recently, and I am almost positive that I will be upgrading from my X100T. The new model will be a huge step up for me since I will be skipping a generation (X100F). As far as time-lapse capabilities go, the X100T’s longest shutter speed while using the electronic shutter was only 1 second, thus forcing me to use the mechanical shutter which causes a bit of flickering. The X100F fixed this by maximizing it to 30 seconds. Also, the maximum number of exposures using the interval timer has changed from 999 on the X100T to “infinity” on the X100F. This will be key for creating longer time-lapses without having to babysit the camera. Exciting!

The only thing I still wish for is the ability to lock down the aperture during the time-lapse. The way it works with the T is that the aperture re-adjusts every photo, so there is a slight difference in each exposure which causes flickering in the time-lapse. This forces me to shoot wide-open, which isn’t always the best… However, the X100V has a new lens design which makes shooting at f/2 much sharper. All-in-all, the X100V will be better for time-lapse photography, and I am looking forward to it!

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