Beaver Creek, Colorado

Jarom and I and Jarom's friend Nick decided to give the Beaver Creek ski resort a try today. It is pretty upscale; even a little more than Vail, but much smaller in terms of acreage. It is about 15 minutes west of Vail, and we were hoping for something new, and also hoping to escape the weekend crowds. There were some really fun runs, and the weather couldn't have been prettier. All told I skied over 20,000 vertical feet and Jarom snowboarded over 24,000 today. Wish more family would/could join us!

Jarom tackling a big jump in the terrain park. Notice the perfectly groomed snow.

Jarom's Big Jump at Beaver Creek, CO from randy guthrie on Vimeo.

Experiment: Night Photos of Snow

Starting Saturday evening we had about 18 hours of steady snow that left us with about 6 inches in the yard and some respectible low temperatures (like 3 degrees). I wanted to take some snow pictures and decided to do some experimenting with my 50mm lens and new tripod. All of these pictures were taken in natural light at about 11pm with very long exposures and an ISO speed of 100. You can tell it is night by how brightly any artificial lumination source glows. In the third photo taken from the loft, you can see the lights from the high school off in the distance. One cool thing is with the long exposures (about 6 seconds) you don't see the falling snow. All of the color is "natural" (no photoshop). Since most of the outside lighting is sodium vapor with a single wavelength, you end up with a mostly black and white sepia-tone affect.

Science Feature: Lunar Eclipse

On Monday, Dec 22nd Christmas we had a total eclipse of the moon. It started around 11pm and didn't finish until after 3am. I was having a restless night so I got up and put on my 200mm telephoto lens and captured a couple shots. Not having a great tripod made this hard (thank-you Staci for helping Mom get me a good one; I love it!) but having an image-stabilizing lens helped a lot. I'm really thinking as a grandpa I need to get a decent telescope that will take my camera body so we can do a better job when these things happen. For those of you who didn't stay up to see it, or were busy doing other things (like James and Allie finishing their Christmas video), you can see what you did or didn't miss. The last photo is the constellation known as the Pleiades, that appears in the winter sky near Orion. It is a tiny little "dipper" that you have to have good vision or good glasses and a dark sky to see.