RIDE LONG AND SMILE

Yesterday I went up to explore mining country on the fat bike. I had plans of riding several miles up into the mountains south of St. Elmo, CO and exploring and spending the night.  Well, plans change in the mountains.  It started off beautiful and sunny.  Then a quick rain moved in so I sought shelter in this old building while I ate my lunch: It was pretty neat inside and kept me dry. I really wanted to climb this ladder. That rain storm moved on and so did I. Above about 10,750 ft there is still snow.  In fact, there is a lot of snow.  The road quickly turned bad and after a while of short manageable hike-a-bikes, the hike-a-bikes became longer and deeper.  No fun. There was water flowing everywhere from all of the melting snow.  I felt like I was in a snowy rainforest.  I could have spent a while dialing in a great shot of this pretty little waterfall, but again ...

Last night I got out after work to experiment with light on a sweet (borrowed) titanium Budnitz.  That bike is quite an urban ripper.  I set out to see if I could get some shots that would possibly be used in some way for upcoming marketing stuff for work. When I arrived at my first location the light was almost perfect, but fading fast - too fast as it turned out.  This was the scene of where I would spend a bunch of time playing around with light: As you can see the sky had already started to turn by the time I got the flash set up and positioned.  Oh well, still an interesting shot: After a few other methods of lighting I decided to start practicing "painting with light".  All three of these similar photos were taken with a 30 second exposure, plenty of time for some light painting.  So, I grabbed a bright light, triggered the shutter, and began painting the light where I wanted it and trying to minimize shadows by shining the light at...