The sunrise photo shoot on day two of this trip was mostly a disappointment. The features that I had hoped would get good sunrise light did not get sufficient illumination and those that did get light did not make really good subjects. With a big zoom, I was able to get only a couple of fair shots of a distant feature with colorful foliage in the foreground and middle ground.
I, also, tried shooting along the little creek behind my campsite, but the compositions were limited and not very appealing. There were some reflections of colorful trees in small portions of relatively still water, where I tried to get good images and even tried to get a number of images to focus stack, but I was not happy with any of those images.
Soon after breaking camp and beginning to scout for another site for late day shooting, it became very overcast with intermittent rain. I managed to get a few good shots of Courthouse Rock, standing in a light rain, shooting from the far side of the meadow, where the scene from True Grit (1969) of Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) and Lucky Ned Pepper (Robert Duval) charged at each other with guns blazing. I shot a sequence of photos here with clouds passing across the rock face. The shots vary from ones with nearly completely visible Courthouse Rock to ones with Courthouse Rock completely cloud enshrouded.
This looked like a good scene for time lapse movies, so I experimented with the built in time lapse feature of the Nikon D850, shooting short sequences of shots to convert into time lapse movies.
It may take a few moments for the videos to begin, so be patient after clicking one.
{This is open range cattle country and the meadow from which I shot Courthouse Rock was so covered with cow dung that I had to calculate each step to avoid it. I assume this was not the case during the shooting of the True Grit scene}.
I drove around quite a bit on this day, scouting locations for the next day’s shoot and looking for other places to shoot on a rainy, overcast day. I ended up going all the way back down to just before the start of forest road 858 to a campsite/view point from which the entire profile of Courthouse Mountain is visible. I had hoped to be able to shoot sunset photos from that view point, since I had seen a brilliantly lit sunset view of this profile from Ridgeway State Park, but obviously today was not going to be the day to do that. However, since I was there, I hiked up and over a ridge to the east of the parking area and made a few images with the big 80-400mm zoom. The images are not great, but here are a couple.
I did not find a campsite that really appealed to me more than the area near my first campsite. So I ended up setting up camp no more than maybe a half a mile from the first campsite. It rained off and on through the night and got fairly cold, but the temperature inside the van was still only down to about 50 degrees the next morning and I only switched on the furnace for a few minutes just after getting up, while preparing for day 3 along Owl Creek Pass Road, which will be the topic of the next post.
There is so much that goes into these trips to be at the right place, at the right time, with the right light and as always, the skies vary and then there is the hiking to get to a different viewpoint. Thank you for doing all of this so I can sit in my chair at my computer on a rainy day in Texas and enjoy the beautiful view and the fall foliage! And little energy was expended sitting here and writing this comment! And yes, my heater is going to keep the house above 50 degrees!
Thanks for the comment, Fay. Yes, the best planned photo trip, frequently does not go as planned. Even though, I factor the weather forecast into trip planning, the weather tends do do its own thing and changes unexpectedly. I’ve had perfect weather and a variety of bad weather during my trips. I have found that the most memorable trips are those in which the weather deviated from the long range forecast, forcing a quick change of plans. I guess this just proves that we tend to pay more attention, when things do not go according to plan.