Death Valley, March 2009

We spent a weekend at Death Valley recently, and of course I took a lot of pictures. The weather was quite mild, which made it nice. Unfortunately our first day there it was on the hazy side because of strong winds. I collected all of my Death Valley galleries into one place, with the photos sorted into gallery by location. You can access my favorite photos from Death Valley via this link or just relax and enjoy the slideshow below:



On the first day, we started in the morning by going out to Dante's Peak. I wasn't too happy with any of the photos I took so I didn't bother to upload them. There was too much dust and haze in the valley. It was also a bit cloudy. We came back in and drove through 20 Mule Team Road which was interesting and fun. It was still cloudy so results were mixed. We then stopped at Zabriskie Point and in between the clouds when the sun broke through there was some nice views. After that, we went down to Badwater, the lowest point in the Western hemisphere, and that was pretty neat even with the clouds. We came back up from Badwater and stopped at Devil's Golf Course, Golden Canyon and Artist's Palette, all of which were just lovely.

The next day we headed north. We had lunch at Salt Creek. Then we went up to Scotty's Castle. I didn't like any of the shots I took so didn't bother posting. Then we went to Ubehebe Crater. We had never explored the north portion of the park before so I wasn't even aware there was a crater in the park. I went down to the bottom and came back up while my family waited in the car. Luckily the weather was very mild, I can imagine it would get pretty hot in there a little later in the year. Then we headed back south and stopped at the Sand Dunes. The next day, on our way back to LA, we stopped at the Sand Dunes again in the morning, and then went to the Charcoal Kilns up in the mountains. We came out through the Wildrose Road which actually wasn't as bad as the park map would have you believe. We made it through with no problem at all in a passenger car. Once we were out of the park headed south through the Panamint Valley, through Trona and Ridgecrest and eventually Mojave and so forth back to LA.

Here is a map view of the locations... Click on the markers to bring up links to the galleries...


View Larger Map

Slide show of favorite pictures from China

I was looking at my Smugmug site a few days ago and was pleased to see that they have made it possible to do bulk editing of captions and keywords for photos selected on keywords. So for example now it is possible to view all of the photos associated with a specified set of keywords via a standard keyword url, for example http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/keyword/china-favorite to bring up all the photos at my site with china and favorite as keywords, and then use Tools/Caption Keyword to go to a screen that allows for bulk editing. This is handy because right now, at least as far as I know, keyword-based feeds in Smugmug can only accommodate one keyword, so it isn't possible to do a slideshow of favorite China photos by specifying a keyword feed URL that includes China and favorite. I used the new bulk editing under Tools in the keyword photo view to add a new keyword chinafavorite to all the photos with China and favorite as keywords, and now I can use that as the basis of a keyword feed. I suppose I could have done this manually before, but it would have taken a while. Here is the slideshow of my resulting favorites:




Now that bulk addition of keywords is so simple, I'll probably start posting slideshows of some of my favorite themes, like walkways and corridors, subway stations, and so forth.