By Ted Grussing
… a quiet morning around here … espresso, sharp cheddar on sourdough toast, checking email and news headlines and an eye on the sky hoping for some sun. Mid-afternoon it was up to the airport with hopes for sun on the plateau, but that didn’t work out so well as the cloud layer over the plateau where I wanted to shoot was overcast and only an envelope of about 2,000’ to fly in so I headed SW where there was some blue sky and did some shooting of Sycamore Canyon.
I took this shot from a couple of miles S of the Verde River looking pretty much to the NNE. The Verde River is at the bottom of the image and the flow is from left to right, curving upwards a bit and Sycamore Creek joins the Verde River near the apex of the curve. And just to the right of the confluence is the parking area where you can access trails into Sycamore Canyon … you can see the dirt road coming in from the right side of the image. Looking further up the canyon you have Black Mountain to the right of the canyon, being a flat top mountain it may not look like one, but it is. The canyon is about 21 miles long and 7 miles wide … and very beautiful. On the horizon from the left is Sitgreaves Mountain, then Kendrick Peak which has the top portion in the clouds and then the San Francisco Peaks, although you can’t really see them because the cloud ceiling is so low.
Although the size of this in megapixels is about the same, I used a higher compression ratio and the dimensions are about half again as big as usual … should give you close to a full screen image.
Time to wrap the day … looks like some sun tomorrow before another storm system rolls in tomorrow night, so maybe more air time … we’ll see how it looks over espresso in about six hours. Have a beautiful day … share your joy and keep breathing.
Cheers
Ted
To be somewhere alone with you and watch the myriad stars,
Far golden worlds beyond the noisy earth’s unkindly jars.
As quietly they sail night’s sea, above the world and you and me.
— Max Ehrmann
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The easiest way to reach Mr. Grussing is by email: ted@tedgrussing.com
In addition to sales of photographs already taken Ted does special shoots for patrons on request and also does air-to-air photography for those who want photographs of their airplanes in flight. All special photographic sessions are billed on an hourly basis.
Ted also does one-on-one workshops for those interested in learning the techniques he uses. By special arrangement Ted will do one-on-one aerial photography workshops which will include actual photo sessions in the air.
