iceblog

January 17, 2010

Puppy Play Time

My housemate, Angie, got a puppy (11 months) a month or so ago, and I got a new lens earlier this week. I decided to test both of them out.

[Playing with the new lens.]

[Meet Che.]

Sonora and Che are ideal playmates. It's possible, though, that Che has slightly more energy than Sonora.

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January 3, 2010

Moon over Marshall Mesa

A few of us had a hankering to get outside into the moonlight last night, so we did. Judah, Angie, Adam, and I, and Sonora and Che (Angie's pup) headed down to Marshall Mesa, just south of Boulder, to hike around.

Cold and beautiful! And a lot darker than it looks here! Complete with moonshadows, though.

[Adam, Angie, and Judah with Sonora and Che playing in the midst. Sonora shown as a trail of glow-collar streaks.]

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December 20, 2009

Mmm, Tulips

[Cut tulips in the afternoon light.]

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December 14, 2009

Snow and Wind

Snow and wind makes for leaf-covered snow. The world was positively lovely a few mornings ago and I had to run back to my house to grab my camera for a little photo shoot before I went to work.

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October 4, 2009

Fall Colors

I was fortunate enough to be invited along for a fall photo shoot this past week with my good friend Jen.

I'm shooting a friend's wedding this coming weekend and figured I could use all the practice I can get.

Jen's a pretty fantastic photographer, and is building up a landscape photography business: http://jenyuphotography.com/

She also writes and shoots a beautiful food blog: http://userealbutter.com/

Until I met Jen, I didn't know food photography was a "thing." Not until I saw her pictures. One of the best things about Jen is getting to eat her labor, but that's another topic altogether...

So Tuesday morning we set out to shoot Colorado's fall colors. Jen is meticulous. She's a researcher. (I know her through work.) She looked around online to see what other nature photographers were saying about the trees and planned our route accordingly: We'd stay in Gunnison the first night and play it by ear from there depending on the latest reports. The weather was supposed to go south on Wednesday and some stands had already reached and passed their peak, some were blown out (stripped of their leaves by wind), the colors were supposedly nothing compared to last year, and then really you never know.

Well, we got pretty lucky.

The weather held, the trees were amazing (to me, a rookie), and the county roads beckoned.

I was a little disappointed in my catch, but what can you do. Looking back over my pics I've found a few I really like, and besides, just seeing the spectacle was pretty amazing. I mean, I've never seen the largest Aspen stand in the world before.

[Jen is lovin' it.]

[The wind picked up big time Wednesday afternoon. Don't know if you can tell, but here it's blowing dust and leaves across the road.]

[Aspen party!]

Too see more, check out my flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bethbartel/sets/72157622392431981/

I noticed the pics aren't as sharp as they should be on flickr, but what can you do.

Happy fall!

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September 12, 2009

Anenome

Nothing like a short hike just outside of town on a sunny, mellow Friday afternoon.

The Anenome trail's the best, because it's beautiful and for some great reason there are never very many people on it.

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September 11, 2009

I Love Seattle

Here are a few reasons why.

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August 30, 2009

Surprise!

My friend Tara's boyfriend, Will, organized one of the coolest surprise parties ever for Tara for her birthday on Friday.

So simple, so brilliant.

About ten of us met up in Boulder to carpool up to a trail about a half an hour out of Boulder and hiked the 15 or 20 minutes to the top of the peak.

And waited.

[Ken pretends to play scout in the perfect evening sunlight.]

[Shadows looking east to Boulder.]

[Ken and Elizabeth claim their seats.]

It was a pretty tough place to wait.

[Scaling a ridge.]

Will convinced Tara that he'd planned out a romantic birthday evening for just the two of them--the rest of us were going to party with her on Sunday at a barbecue at his house. So smart.

[Claire gets ready with her camera.]

But no, no romantic night for them.

[Tara and Will arrive at the top.]

Who needs romance when you have a group of your best friends on a mountain top with champagne?

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August 21, 2009

Using the "Laser"

We've started in with an instrument called a "terrestrial laser scanner" (TLS) at work--you set it up on a tripod and tell it to scan your surroundings, which are presumably something of scientific interest, and it sends out a laser and tells you how far it is from the scanner to everything around you. (A more common use for these is scanning refineries and such to get a 3-D model of the pipes, but whatever.) You end up with a 'point cloud'--a recording of a bunch of points hit by the laser--which shows up in 3-D. It's very cool.

I was invited to go help out with / check out the equipment for a day with fellow employees David and Brennan at Bijou Creek, a study area about an hour from Boulder, east of Denver where the plains stretch on through Kansas. At Bijou Creek, the plains are interrupted by gullies, and the focus of the study is gully erosion. In this particular case, a gully at Bijou Creek has been scanned multiple times to see how the gully is being eroded. By comparing this year's scan to last year's, we can see how fast (0.5 m over the last year, as it turns out) and where the gully is eroding.

I was just a tag-along, since the guy in charge of this stuff at work knows that I'm interested in learning more about it. Plus, he needed someone to help lug all this heavy equipment around.

Bijou Creek turned out to be much cooler than I expected.

Besides being a gully, it's a nature preserve, and of particular geologic interest.

This little outcrop is the K-T boundary.

I know. Pretty amazing. Take a closer look.

Yep, not kidding. The K-T boundary.

Okay, what the heck is the K-T boundary?

The K-T boundary is the transition between the Cretaceous (C was already taken) and the Tertiary periods, about 65.5 million years ago. Why do we care? Major extinction event, maybe due to a meteor impact. Cool.

Just upslope from the boundary is another outcrop of interest.

[Brennan leads the way.]

As Brennan pointed out, just a few thousand years after this major extinction event, the area was teeming with life.

With tree life, anyway.

Break open any of the soft rock, and the place is plastered with leaf imprints. It's pretty much an outcrop of leaves with a little silt inbetween.

[Modern-day life finds a ray of sun in which to grow--yes, I modified this image a bit.]

But we were there to scan the gully.

We set out reference markers, surveyed them (Brennan did), set up the scanner, pushed a few buttons (well, Dave did), and stayed out of the scanner's way. Moved the whole operation and did it again.

[Dave with the instrument. The head of the gully ('head scarp') is that brown spot in the background--a little dirt drop-off. That's the part that's eroding backward as the rains come down.]