Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

Just curious if anyone knows if this is in the park? (Not Cerro Gordo but where he is riding.)
https://youtu.be/zFygGNxmnpA?t=931

 

That's Cerro Gordo. Just outside the park.

They didn't let me fly my drone there when I visited last year, so I'm a bit envious of their footage! I visited before the hotel burned down last year. Looks like the footage in this video is post-fire.

Sorry, I re-read your question and am an idiot. I don't know where he's riding.

Still watching the video...

Edit: I have no idea, but hopefully it's not in the park... what with the off-trail riding and drone footage!

My guess would be somewhere south of Lone Pine. There are a few shots that show the pacific intertie. But not the same shots as the dirt bike riding. Also he is either really good at trick drone shots, or he crashed his drone into his truck on the highway. I might guess the latter given the lack of professionalism exhibited elsewhere, e.g., harassing wildlife with it.

 

Headed to Death Valley March 4-7, can't wait since we couldn't make our trip in November!

 

Thanks, I was asking because looking through the comments some people appear to express interest in visiting that area as well in order to have a similar experience in what looks like sensitive areas.

 

Not Death Valley, but I finally got a real camera and thought you guys would like some pictures I took in the desert last weekend! (Near the Salton Sea.)

 

@mk5 most excellent!

 

Excellent. Looks like you have a pretty good lens to go with it

 

I like those very much. Thank you!

 

Very nice. I feel like you may have mentioned it somewhere, but what'd camera did you get?

 

Those are some great shots!

 

Didn't mention it yet, as it seems a bit pre-mature to review the setup with only two days of use under my belt. (Although I did manage to snap nearly 2000 photos, not including the timelapses!)

But I wound up going with the A7C:



Thanks to your, Ken's, and others' very helpful feedback, I had narrowed it down to a Sony or Cannon mirrorless. I'll admit I was already leaning towards the Sony, as I had borrowed someone else's alpha 5500 for some recent trips with good results. I had even borrowed an A9 for a recent attempt to photograph a meteor shower and planetary alignment at Kelso Dunes the other month... but I forgot a damn SD card so I didn't get to take any pictures! At least I got to see a sharp-looking first-gen camped out in the desert though.

What finally made me pull the trigger on the Sony was actually the lens situation. Specifically, Sony's FE24240, a 24-240mm 3.5-6.3 zoom with autofocus and electromechanical stabilization that apparently people love to hate. For me, that was a good thing, because I was able to get one used for nearly 40% off retail. Buying that instead of the kit lens only cost an additional $320, and gives me in my opinion a pretty epic zoom lens for getting started with this camera. And I couldn't find a similar deal on Cannon lenses.


24mm


240mm hand-held at dusk... wow!

The one drawback to this zoom lens is that the zoom is manual, so it's not going to work as well for panning in video. But even shaky hand-held zooms clean up pretty nicely with post stabilizing:


Jeez, already got dust on the sensor!

Plus, thanks to the recent holiday and birthday season, I was also able snag a used 12mm manual fisheye lens (Rokinon) at a similar discount, less than $300 shipped. I forget to focus it 90% of the time, but the ones that turn out, turn out great!


This one is cropped!


Having fun without lens correction

Finally, I had my old collection of hexanon glass, manual primes ranging from 24 to 200 mm, which will probably hardly ever get used, but the 57mm 1.4 definitely makes the cut. At least for cat photos!


He thinks we should have bought cat food, not a stupid camera!

There's one major disappointment with the A7C though: It turns out that Sony nixed their PlayMemories App Store from the latest generation of cameras! Somehow I totally overlooked this. I had been playing with apps on the a5500, and was excited to learn that someone had reverse engineered the API. I was super excited about the prospect of playing around with writing my own software to run on the new camera. Sadly, that won't happen. WTF, Sony?!?

At least those ass-clowns managed to include an intervalometer on the A7C, otherwise I would be returning it. (That was done via app on the a5 series) But that still leaves this camera lacking some pretty basic software features for 2021: no panorama stitching, no star trails, and very limited bracketing options.

Overall though I'm infatuated with the new frontier of photography awaiting me on future adventures, and I don't have the itch to immediately bankrupt myself buying more lenses (at least so far).

So what to spend more money on? I'm thinking a handful of battery LED lights for night photography. I was impressed at what I could do just using my cellphone screen as a remote light:



Edit July 2021: Still pretty pleased with the camera, but have come to know of a few more shortcomings:

1. The colors I get from RAW in Adobe suck compared to Cannon or probably any other brand, and I still don't have a time-efficient way to correct this. If I want good colors I have to either accept the camera's JPEG, or manually tune each raw file, which takes forever! That especially sucks because I'm usually exposing at -2 or -3 to avoid blowing out the clouds, so the JPEGs are always useless.

2. The 24-240mm lens doesn't focus as well as I had hoped. Maybe that's why people seem to hate it, and why I got mine used for nearly half off?

A. Manual focusing is essentially impossible because the UI completely sucks, and there's no mechanical linkage. I don't know what the hell is wrong with today's product engineers, but it seems that whenever a mechanical focus linkage is replaced with a rotary encoder and a motor, some fucking moron decides to add a non-linear acceleration profile instead of a direct 1:1 control loop between knob position and focus position. That means that it's impossible to intuitively set the focus, since returning the ring to the "optimal" position won't bring you back to optimal focus. Every. Fucking. Time. It's the same way on a $300k microscope I use at work. Top that off with a focus zoom mode that times out after 12 nanoseconds, before you can even begin to assess the actual focus, and you get a lens you'll want to throw off a cliff whenever you try to focus it manually. Whoever designed it this way should be shot, there's no reason it can't be easy to use except that some fuckhead botched it on the software side.

B. Autofocusing is on the slow side compared to other modern lenses, and even Sony's "industry leading" autofocus just can't keep up with many situations involving people or wildlife.

C. On the upper zoom range, the minimum focus distance is pretty terrible, like up to 6 feet terrible. I don't know the actual number, but it's a lousy lens for close-ups on tiny subjects such as plants, lizards, and bugs--unless you remember to back off the zoom and hope you can still get a crisp cropped image out of the exposure. I am slowly learning to pay more attention to the focus indicators to avoid botched closeups.

D. Perhaps worst of all, it can't quite reach infinity focus at full zoom. If you forget to back off just a bit from 240mm, you'll get a slightly blurry shot of distant objects. I consistently forget to do this, so most of my distant wildlife shots turn out just slightly blurry, and that annoys the hell out of me.
​

Despite all this complaining, I am still loving the new camera and am consistently amazed at the new dimensions of photography I've been able to explore in the past few months. Plus, it works wonderfully with manual lenses.

To sum it up, I guess you get what you pay for. I got one of the cheapest full-frame cameras and superzoom lenses on the market. It beats the fuck out of cellphone photography, but there's still plenty to complain about.

Oh, and I did get a set of LED lights to use at night, and it is awesome!

 

FINALLY Made it to DV. Camped up on Cottonwood canyon road and explored around a bit. Found some old mine ruins towards the north end of the park. My main memory has to be the washboard...

Beautiful though!

 

@MonsieurHodge

glad you made it to DV and that you enjoyed the washboard. Han*shan, a Tang philosopher once said " Go ask the people with all those Overland Tacomas":

"whats the use of all that money and noise?"

 

Glad you made it out there. Looking forward to our trip next week!

 

In all honesty though, what actually causes the crazy washboarding? Is it the harmonic of cars driving over it, the wind erosion, lack of rain? It was insanely bad in some places. How do you drive on that stuff? Sometimes it made sense to rip 25 - 30mph, but I didn't want to pop a tire since I can't air down since I don't have a compressor yet, but sometimes it was so unbearable I had to crawl along at 10 mph just to tolerate it.

 

Mostly, it's the continued travel along the road. If you watch the road after it's been graded, you can see it comes back pretty quick. Braking action, bumps, and acceleration all affect the condition of the road. Weather also has an effect-for example, water travels along the road surface eroding parts of it. Puddles form and drivers avoid them or plow thru-that further erodes the surface.

 

Makes sense in terms of accelerating and braking. Can't you eliminate washboarding by crowning the road a bit so water drains? I guess it's just hard to maintain roads like that in such a harsh environment.

 

Wash boarding can't be eliminated, it's just a result of physics and nature.

 

No. Because the road surface is malleable and because even tho water plays a part, it's not the root cause of the washboarding.

 

Ugh, physics are so boring...