Pinnacles National Monument

A couple of weeks ago, I revisited Pinnacles National Monument – a site that I briefly stopped at in June of 2008. This time, I took the entire day and hiked starting at the Old Pinnacles trail head to the entrance of the Balconies Caves, then back out and around via the Balconies Cliffs, past the Chaparral Ranger Station up to the High Peaks via the Juniper Canyon Trail to the Tunnel Trail. Then, passing through the tunnel carved into a rock formation, I hike on to the High Peaks trail which returned me to the Old Pinnacles trail. This loop was approximately 8.4 miles and took me about 4 hours with lots of stops to take photographs. By far, the best scenery / images were up to the High Peaks. The switchback trail climbs upward from the Chaparral Ranger Station with each turn providing great views of the rock formations and the terrain below. By going in January, the weather was enjoyable in the 50′s and 60′s — on my previous trip, temperatures were well into the 90′s in the morning.

Here’s a rough sequence of the route that I took with coordinates and mapping provided by my SPOT personal GPS locating device and Google Maps:

View my gallery of photos from Pinnacles National Monument

Pinnacles National Monument – Images by Jason O. Watson

Charleston, South Carolina

I recently traveled back to the east coast to visit my family and spent some time in Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. I had been to Charleston just over two years prior, and was pleased to have two very nice days to revisit many of the areas I had previously photographed under better light. I’ve added over 70 new images to my Charleston gallery and a bunch to my Georgia gallery as well.

More photographs from Charleston, SC

USA: South Carolina – Charleston – Images by Jason Watson

NHL Hockey: St. Louis Blues at San Jose Sharks

I’m starting to have a lot of fun with this whole hockey thing. Last week, I shot the St. Louis Blues vs. San Jose Sharks at HP Pavilion in San Jose, CA. I shot at the Sharks Head ice-level photographer hole locations for the first and third periods and up top for the second. Fortunately, great things happened on my end during the third period as the Sharks tied the game up 1-1 to send it to overtime (the Blues were shooting on my end the first and third). I got very lucky with this particular image — the NHL/Sharks photographer was sitting next to me and shooting with the arena’s strobes — I some how managed to catch some of his light in this frame. Enough to pop the color and create a bit of a shadow, subtle but it definitely helps this frame. Usually when this happens, all or part of the image is completely washed out — less than 5% of the time it actually helps. This was one of those lucky times. The Sharks went on to win 2-1 in overtime on a Dany Heatley breakaway goal — to the other end of the ice.

More images from the game…

20100106 – St. Louis Blues at San Jose Sharks (NHL Hockey) – Images by Jason Watson