Steens Mountain Weekend

[MarkBC]

I'm minutes away from heading out to Steens Mountain for a couple of days of camping.
Though I've been in the vicinity of the Steens 3+ times already this year -- the east side, Alvord Desert, I haven't actually been up on the Mountain loop road for several years. Maybe I avoid it because it's the obvious tourist destination in an area that's otherwise hard to love -- except by desert rats like me.
Summit is 9733', and because it's a fault block mountain that means that there's a lot more of it that's high (well, high for the altitudinally-challenged state of Oregon

) than the pointy volcanoes of the Cascades that Oregon is most known for.
Weather forecast calls for the coldest nights/days since spring, so I swapped out my summer bag for winter bag. Snow is forecast as a possibility, too -- that would be a sure way to send the tourists running! I wouldn't mind that...

 

[SunMan]

I'm minutes away from heading out to Steens Mountain for a couple of days of camping.
Though I've been in the vicinity of the Steens 3+ times already this year -- the east side, Alvord Desert, I haven't actually been up on the Mountain loop road for several years. Maybe I avoid it because it's the obvious tourist destination in an area that's otherwise hard to love -- except by desert rats like me.
Summit is 9733', and because it's a fault block mountain that means that there's a lot more of it that's high (well, high for the altitudinally-challenged state of Oregon

) than the pointy volcanoes of the Cascades that Oregon is most known for.
Weather forecast calls for the coldest nights/days since spring, so I swapped out my summer bag for winter bag. Snow is forecast as a possibility, too -- that would be a sure way to send the tourists running! I wouldn't mind that...

Sounds like a great weekend, I'll be painting (oh joy)...you know we'll be expecting some pics

 

[DirtyDog]

Gonna be a cold one out there this weekend Mark. Looking forward to some pics!

 

[MarkBC]

I'm parked in the summit parking lot on Steens Mt, and here's the view to the west right now:

It's snowing (the grey spots in the image are snow on my lens) -- horizontally -- as the wind crests over the 9700' summit ridge from the west and down to the Alvord Desert a mile below me. There are still a number of tourists up here.
Weather was much better yesterday PM, and I got some OK photos, but it was hazy with smoke from all the wildfires in Oregon, so that was limiting. I'll upload anything worthwhile later...think I'm coming home tonight.

 

[MarkBC]

OK, I'm home now. I think I got a few worth-sharing photos out of this trip, despite bad smoky haze and close weather, but I'm too tired to sort/edit tonight.
But here's one from this morning, from the Loop Road, before the weather closed in -- the top of Little Blitzen Gorge (looking west):

 

[Tomas Tierra]

Awesome Pic!!

 

[MarkBC]

I've added a few photos of my Steens Mountain 24-hour "weekend" in the Steens Mountain gallery.
It was too smoky from all the wildfires...but it was still damn scenic! Here's one of them, below (looking north along the Steens crest from the East Rim Overlook).
They're all HDR (high dynamic range) photos, meaning they're composites of 3 different exposures...but other than that they're not significantly tweaked. HDR seemed to bring out definition despite the smoke.

 

[Ted]

Hi Mark,

The scenery up there is impressive, thanks for posting. In that last photo, the rocks in the soil right in front of you seem to be layed out in a pattern. Is that a foundation for some long gone structure?

 

[Dughlas Stiubhart]

Hi Mark,

The scenery up there is impressive, thanks for posting. In that last photo, the rocks in the soil right in front of you seem to be layed out in a pattern. Is that a foundation for some long gone structure?


Ted, my good friend, the foundation pattern is clearly from a prehistoric alien visitation. I'm sure Mark will back me up on this . . .

Stew

 

[ski3pin]

Hey science buffs, if you are curious just now special of a place Steens Mountain is, get a copy of the PBS Nova program "Magnetic Storm." It is available on netflix.

 

[MarkBC]

Hey science buffs, if you are curious just now special of a place Steens Mountain is, get a copy of the PBS Nova program "Magnetic Storm." It is available on netflix.


Does "Magnetic Storm" refer to the magnetic residue left by the alien visitors??
Or not...

Here's an excerpt from a transcript of the Nova program where it refers to Steens Mt.:

NARRATOR: No one has ever experienced a magnetic reversal. If this is really the beginning of a flip, what exactly will happen next? One man who may know, is geologist Rob Coe. For 25 years, he's been coming to Steens Mountain in Oregon, a vast heap of hundreds of ancient lava flows.


ROB COE: (University of California, Santa Cruz): Sixteen million years ago there was a huge series of eruptions here. You can pick out literally hundreds of lava flows over on that wall. Each line delineates a different lava flow. It's over 3,000 feet of overlying flows.


NARRATOR: What makes Steens special, is that 16 million years ago, when this lava was erupted, the magnetic field was in the middle of a flip. Taking samples from dozens of flows all the way up the mountain, Rob and his colleagues have pieced together a detailed record of this magnetic reversal, although it's so surprising that not everyone accepts it.


I don't know if I like the Steens being referred to as "a vast heap"... doesn't sound respectful.

 

[ski3pin]

the interesting part:

NARRATOR: The field started out pointing south, but as it weakened the direction of the field began to change erratically. After 300 years, it had swung a full 180 degrees to point north, and the field strength started to recover.

ROB COE: But it couldn't hold that polarity, and it fell back to...reversed and the intensity crashed again.

NARRATOR: Once more the Earth's magnetic shield practically disappeared, this time for 3,000 years. What was left was changing so fast that Rob found a flow that captured these wild gyrations even as the lava cooled.

ROB COE: And what we found was even harder to believe. The quickly chilled margins in the bottom and the top had one direction, like that of the underlying flow, and the middle portion had a direction that was sixty degrees farther away. It was just as though, while the flow cooled, the field had moved sixty degrees, which if you calculate it out, that comes to about six degrees of movement per day. If we were observing this with a compass, you would be able almost to see the motion with your eye. It was truly astonishing and extraordinary.

NARRATOR: The lava layers of Steens Mountain suggest we could be in for magnetic chaos, with magnetic north changing from day to day. More seriously, for perhaps thousands of years, the Earth's magnetic shield will be weakened, something that will affect every person on the planet.

 

[MarkBC]

I've added a couple more photos from last weekend to the Gallery, taken from the Steens East Rim Overlook.
Here's one of them, which shows the layers of lava found to have alternating/transitioning magnetic orientation, as mentioned in that Nova program.

 

[Dughlas Stiubhart]

They're all HDR (high dynamic range) photos, meaning they're composites of 3 different exposures...but other than that they're not significantly tweaked. HDR seemed to bring out definition despite the smoke.



Hey, Mark, HDR is a Nikon thing, eh? Do you need to use a tripod or does the camera take three quick exposures at once. I do like the depth of field and the color in those shots.

 

[MarkBC]

Hey, Mark, HDR is a Nikon thing, eh? Do you need to use a tripod or does the camera take three quick exposures at once. I do like the depth of field and the color in those shots.


Stew, here's my long-winded answer -

HDR is just a digital-image/computer thing, not a Nikon thing. Any way that you get photos into a computer from any camera (or scanned slide, even) works the same.
Combining multiple exposures -- usually 3 (or more) images: 1-or-2-stops over and 1-or-2-stops under combined with "correct" exposure -- is done with software in a computer. I'm using stand-alone software called Photomatix Pro to do this imaging-combining, but it's an available function in the latest version(s) of Photoshop, too, and I'm sure there are others. Basically, the software somehow takes the elements of each photo that contain the most information (i.e., not blown-out highlights or black-dark shadows) and combines them into one image that spans more dynamic range (light to dark) than sensors or film can capture....and compressed into a dynamic range that can be displayed on a screen or printed.

Using a tripod is better, to prevent shifting of your aim as you shoot multiple images. But all of these that I took last weekend on Steens Mt were hand-held, with my camera (Nikon D300s) in high-speed continuous (6 frames/s) mode while "autobracketing" (automatically shoot 3 different exposures in succession: "correct", 1-stop under, 1-stop over). The lens I used is a Nikon "VR" (vibration-reduction) type, so I could get away with hand-holding the camera even when shooting at fairly slow shutter speeds (1/30 s). (slow shutter speeds because of small aperture to get deep depth of field)
And Photomatix has the ability to compensate for camera shifting between images, aligning the images automatically by matching up similar pixel patterns...something like that -- pretty amazing, really.

With all this technological help, makes you wonder what my role is...?

Oh that's right, I composed the shot!

 

[Dughlas Stiubhart]

Stew, here's my long-winded answer -

HDR is just a digital-image/computer thing, not a Nikon thing. Any way that you get photos into a computer from any camera (or scanned slide, even) works the same.
Combining multiple exposures -- usually 3 (or more) images: 1-or-2-stops over and 1-or-2-stops under combined with "correct" exposure -- is done with software. I'm using stand-alone software called Photomatix Pro to do this imaging-combining, but it's an available function in the latest version(s) of Photoshop, too, and I'm sure there are others. Basically, the software somehow takes the elements of each photo that contain the most information (i.e., not blown-out highlights or black-dark shadows) and combines them into one image that spans more dynamic range (light to dark) than sensors or film can capture....and compressed into a dynamic range that can be displayed on a screen or printed.

Using a tripod is better, to prevent shifting of your aim as you shoot multiple images. But all of these that I took last weekend on Steens Mt were hand-held, with my camera (Nikon D300s) in high-speed continuous (6 frames/s) mode while "autobracketing" (automatically shoot 3 different exposures in succession: "correct", 1-stop under, 1-stop over). The lens I used is a Nikon "VR" (vibration-reduction) type, so I could get away with hand-holding the camera even when shooting at fairly slow shutter speeds (1/30 s).
And Photomatix has the ability to compensate for camera shifting between images, aligning the images automatically by matching up similar pixel patterns...something like that -- pretty amazing, really.

With all this technological help, makes you wonder what my role is...?

Oh that's right, I composed the shot!

Thanks, Mark, I get it. Now to find some freeware . . .

 

[craig333]

Geez, and I was having trouble figuring out how to use my "point and shoot" camera.

 

[MarkBC]

Geez, and I was having trouble figuring out how to use my "point and shoot" camera.


As smoky as the air was last weekend in Oregon I needed all the technology/processing to get something worth looking at!

 

[Dughlas Stiubhart]

Here's another, but non-photo related, technical question for you, Mark: How do you make the short cuts to the hyperlinks shown in the quote below? Do you actually type in some code?

Stew


HDR is just a digital-image/computer thing, not a Nikon thing.

I'm using stand-alone software called Pro to do this imaging-combining.

 

[MarkBC]

Here's another, but non-photo related, technical question for you, Mark: How do you make the short cuts to the hyperlinks shown in the quote below? Do you actually type in some code?

Stew


Stew -
Here's another long-winded answer...but I can't help myself explaining thoroughly

.

In my browser I go to the page I want to link to (like that HDR entry on Wikipedia) and copy the URL from the address line -- whatever it's called -- in the browser. Then I start a reply or post in WTW. In the text of my reply I select the text that I want to use as the basis for the link -- like I selected "HDR". One of the tool/options icons in the reply window -- between the smiley face icon and the Insert Image icon -- is an icon for "Insert Link". I open that and in the space for "URL" I paste the previously-copied URL I started with (from Wikipedia, for example). The Link Text should show the text I selected already (e.g., "HDR"). Then I click "Insert Link" at the bottom of the Insert Link window, and that produces the link.
- Mark