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On the night of December 27, 2013, Chris Georgia, Garrett Evans, and I hiked up Artist’s Bluff in Franconia Notch State Park, New Hampshire. What a view! Straight ahead is Echo Lake, to the right are the ski slopes of Cannon Mountain (they were grooming the trails), and to the left is Interstate 93 snaking its way through Franconia Notch. Overhead, Orion, the Milky Way, Jupiter, and the Beehive Cluster can be seen peeking through the fast moving clouds.
More behind the scenes photos can be explored on my website: http://galleries.aaronpriestphoto.com/Night/2013-Artists-Bluff/
Technical details: shot with a Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod with leveling base, Panoneed robotic head, Promote Control, Nikon D700, & Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14mm, f/2.8, ISO 2500, and 5 exposures of 1.7 EV steps from 0.3 to 30 seconds. The sphere is stitched from 13 positions of 5 exposures plus an extra bracket of me standing by the rock for a total of 70 images. RAW conversion, noise reduction, and sharpening to 16-bit TIFFs was done with Lightroom, exposure fusion with Photomatix Pro, stitched with PTGui Pro, and blended with a combination of PTGui, Enblend, and Photoshop layers by hand (particularly the moving clouds).
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The United States is one of the most diverse countries on earth, jam packed full of amazing sights from St. Patrick's cathedral in New York to Mount Hollywood California.The Northeast region is where it all started. Thirteen British colonies fought the American Revolution from here and won their independence in the first successful colonial rebellion in history. Take a look at these rolling hills carpeted with foliage along the Hudson river here, north of New York City.The American south is known for its polite people and slow pace of life. Probably they move slowly because it's so hot. Southerners tend not to trust people from "up north" because they talk too fast. Here's a cemetery in Georgia where you can find graves of soldiers from the Civil War.The West Coast is sort of like another country that exists to make the east coast jealous. California is full of nothing but grizzly old miners digging for gold, a few gangster rappers, and then actors. That is to say, the West Coast functions as the imagination of the US, like a weird little brother who teases everybody then gets famous for making freaky art.The central part of the country is flat farmland all the way over to the Rocky Mountains. Up in the northwest corner you can find creative people in places like Portland and Seattle, along with awesome snowboarding and good beer. Text by Steve Smith.