Back in Boulder

I am currently in Boulder, Colorado finishing up my backlog of edits and preparing for the next part of the journey.  Tomorrow I will head to the Great Sand Dunes, where I'll hopefully be able to capture some great Milky Way and Star Trails photos.

After spending a few days exploring the area, my favorite place in Boulder, so far, is the Chautauqua area.  This is the iconic mountain area that most people think of when they hear Boulder.

At 5:30am I started out on a little hike and was blown away by the scenery.  The land east of Boulder is incredibly flat, meaning the slightest elevation gain will allow you to see for miles and miles.  Thankfully I had my Tamron 150-600mm and was able to capture some neat photos.  

As I was hiking I came to a particularly nice overlook and was able to see Denver on the horizon!!

Since I hadn't done any Star Trails photos yet, I decided to give it a shot here in town.  I went to the NCAR trailhead, which provides a stunning 180 degree view of the surrounding flat-lands.  It was dusk and the sun had dipped below the mountains.  As I was scouting out a spot to shoot from, I thought I saw a mountain lion nearby.  I decided to get a bit closer to verify.  Turns out it was a bobcat, a very illusive animal that few people get to see.

After seeing the bobcat, I figured I'd better find a new location to shoot from.  I realized that I had yet to shoot a Star Trails photo facing West, so I headed back to the Chautauqua trailhead, to incorporate the iconic mountain range.

While I was shooting there, I met a fellow adventurer, Krauss.  He is a fantastic artist who not only does video work, but photography as well.  Check out his work!  

Thankfully I invested in a powerful editing laptop, as Star Trail photos require an insane amount of tech.  I was using all 16 GBs of RAM as well as 90% utilization of my SSD just to edit the Star Trails photos.  Then again, I did have 418 layers open in Photoshop.  All told, it took over 2 hours to process one Star Trails photo.