Arches National Park, September 24, 2007
12:03 P.M.; 1/350; f/6.7; 18mm; no flash;

Bronze Big Horn Sheep at Arches National Park Visitors Center

September 25, 2007 9:52 A.M.;
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 40 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Focal Length In 35mm Film: 60

September 27, 2007; This photo was from the last campground of our August - September trip.

I’ve stopped publishing Mike’s Photo Blog. Instead, my photo-blogging will be here on Exit78. I’ll be leaving the photo blog in place for now (perhaps I’ll resume it at some future time) so that any links from other sites pointing to it will not be broken. Photos previously posted on Mike’s Photo Blog may also appear here.

Generally, I will be selecting random photos for publication and will post new images a few times a week, interspersed with my other posts.

The photograph above was taken in August in South Dakota’s Custer State Park. The haze was from wild fires in states north and west of us and made for a very smoky day, though we saw worse days later in the trip.

Canoing On Lake Bailey (not us!)

We got to Petit Jean State Park, which is south of Morrilton, Arkansas, yesterday afternoon. It’s not a very long drive from where we live, so it didn’t take long to get here. We’ll be here one more night and head back home after lunch.

One of the things I wanted to do this weekend was to see if I could do a travel journal and process photos on a near daily basis. The last thing I did last night before going to bed was post a travel journal article to Haw Creek Out ‘n About. I had posted some images to flikr earlier. It looks like it’ll be a successful process. I’ll just need to keep on top of it on our longer trips.

I also posted some of the images to my photo blog for the weekly Photo Hunt. The topic is I love ____ (participants fill in the blank, so it’s kind of an open category week.) For more Photo Hunt submissions see the Technorati photo hunt tag page.

I’ve been a bit behind on my photo blog. My intent is to have picture for each day, not to necessarily post a new image each day. That’s kind of a picky point, but to meet the intent, if I get behind, I’ll be posting the missing images to catch up. A better way to do if I can’t post each day would be to post in advance. That way, I won’t be behind.

We’ll be going on a hike or two today and I’ll be taking more photos, some of which I hope to post this evening.

Day before yesterday, we went to Woolly Hollow State Park, which is north of Conway, Arkansas, for a hike.

We had never been there before and my intent was to use the visit as the focus for a new approach to presenting travel related images and information on-line. I didn’t have a firm concept of what I wanted it to be at that point. I just knew that I needed something different. What I had just wasn’t working.

My old approach was to have a web page for each place that we had visited, with a few photos on it, and another page set up as a photo gallery index with each photo having it’s own web page and site navigation. Every one of the pages had advertising on it, of course. Though I had built some templates to streamline the process, it was still quite a bit of work. For the Woolly Hollow material there would have been a content page, a photo gallery index page, and 24 photo pages.

With the new approach, there is only one page. Space for content, photo gallery, and advertising is provided, with links to the individual images on flikr and a link to the flikr slide show for the “set” of photos. Over the last couple of days, I edited the photos that I wanted to use for the Woolly Hollow page and uploaded them to flikr and developed a new web layout I’m calling “Places and Images.”

With this, I should be able to publish new material a lot sooner after I’ve shot the images for whatever location we’ve visited. Of course, I’ve lot a pretty good backlog of material from places we visited this year, but this new approach should also be very, very helpful for that.

My whole concept for this is to publish “photos from places we’ve visited combined with relevant information and links.”

Now to catch up on some other stuff that have been neglected over the last several days……

I’ve been trying out flikr, the photo sharing storage and site, the last couple of days to see if it would make it easier for me to manage my photos.

Right now, it looks like it will be very helpful and may actually cut out a couple of steps for me.

For whatever reasons, I was reluctant to use flikr in the past. Once it became a part of Yahoo, I was even more reluctant because of an earlier bad web hosting experience with Yahoo.

However, I’ll give flikr a try for a while.

If it works, I’ll be reconsidering how I do my photo-galleries. My photo blog will continue as is.

We’ve been back home for 4 weeks now and I still haven’t gotten around to dealing with all of the photos that I took and finishing my incomplete travel journal. I’ve taken a step back, looked at what I’ve got, and developed a plan — of sorts.

The first thing that I’ve done is lay out the route of our travels on a map.

The next part of this will be to tackle the trip in small bites. For instance, the first part will be the trip from home to Spring Lake Campground outside Halstead, Kansas, with the pictures that I took along the way and in Kansas.

For each part of the trip I’ll publish a travel article on my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog as well as build a photo gallery on Haw Creek Outdoors.

I’m going to treat this as a project. My hope is that once I’m done with it, I’ll have a model that I can use for future trips — and that I’ll be able to use it while traveling so that it’ll fairly current.

The hike to the bottom of the Tower Creek canyon and the base of Tower Falls in Yellowstone National Park has always been one of our favorite hikes. It’s been a fascinating place for people to visit for many, many years. It was named by the Washburn Yellowstone Expedition in August 1870 and Nathaniel P. Langford described it in The Wonders of the Yellowstone. (I’ve published part of that description at Haw Creek Out n’ About.)

Unfortunately, this year, we were not able to make it to the base of the falls. We had gone most of the way down when we came to a sign that said that the trail was closed. Apparently there had been a slide in 2006 or before and the trail was blocked. We were a little upset about hiking all of that distance only to find that the trail was closed. There should have been a sign at the top saying that it was closed or the trail should have been closed higher up. There are a lot of people who have used the trail over the years and many probably remember it fondly — though climbing back up can be rough, especially if it’s hot, you didn’t bring water, and you’re wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

I send a complaint to the park service about the lack of posting higher up, but, of course, there’s been no response.

That was just part of a day that didn’t go the way we intended which I posted about in Today sure didn’t go as planned, and I didn’t get some of the photos I thought I had — but that’s okay!

I had always assumed the Old Faithful got it’s name because it was faithful in it’s eruptions over a long period of time. Not so. If you’re interested, I’ve published a small narrative by one of the men involved in naming the geyser. It’s over at my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog.