Best Of 2009.1
































So I´m back from my spring road trip through Arizona and Utah! And I must say, it was absolutely worth it going at this time of year - in my opinion from a photographer´s point of view it was a really successful trip! I haven´t experienced light moods and rapidly changing weather like this before! It is really a difference if you go in June and have blue skies almost all of the time (which must not be a bad thing at all), or if you go in spring and have constantly changing weather and light. But despite all the sand- and snow storms I was really lucky with the weather, because mostly I had sunshine at sunrise and sunset, and also during the day, with the exception of a few thunderstorms - but these helped with a few impressive images as well...
All in all it was a lot colder than usual at this time of year, but that was not so bad at all, and when camping, with two sleeping bags temperatures below freezing can be handled easily :-) Unfortunately I could not do all the bike trails I had planned to, for example Thunder Mountain was still too snowy and the ground was still too muddy, in Sedona it rained all day, and one day biking in Moab was canceled due to a broken window in my car, probably caused by a small chunk of ice thrown up from the street. So I had to drive all the way to the next Alamo station in Montrose and back, the closest station that had intermediate SUVs available. But I liked the Ford Escape I got there even better than the Jeep Liberty I had before, so it didn´t matter too much :-)
Very nice was meeting up with Isa, Steffen and several american photographers like Tony, Ron and John at the Mitten Shadow Event in Monument Valley. It was a pleasure meeting you, greetings and all the best to you :-) Definitely a highlight of the trip!
Other highlights included the hike to Neon Canyon and the Golden Cathedral, which I finally achieved after something had gotten in our way the last two times, biking on Gooseberry Mesa - a mountain biker´s dream, which replaced Porcupine Rim on top of my Best MTB Trails list -, and the 20 minutes of sunshine during the snow storm at the Grand Canyon, which I hadn´t planned, but couldn´t resist driving to after getting up in the morning in Flagstaff and discovering 4 inches of snow had fallen :-) 200 miles for 20 minutes - but it was worth it! Not to forget the 10 seconds of sunshine right before sunset at Blue Canyon after it had been cloudy all day... I could go on and on...
So, to start off here is a collection of my favorite images from this tour. New galleries and updates of existing ones will follow in the next weeks and months - and it´s only five months until the next trip - so stay tuned, there´s lots of new stuff coming :-)