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September 5, 2010, a Sunday
near North Rim, Arizona, USA
— Photographed sunset from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon
[You may view a map of Grand Canyon National Park, North Rim in PDF format.]

I got up before J and worked in the office. I downselected the images since Gould to get ready to assign final file names. Then I had Clif Bars for breakfast and started to assign final file names and convert the RAW files to TIFFs for the recent images. J left to go for a walk around 9:30, and I finished assigning final file names and converting the RAW files to TIFFs for the recent images.

I had lunch around 12:20 then backed up image data. The upper tray door of my Sans Digital TowerStor TS2UT external hard drive enclosure got stuck in the locked position after the latch broke so I couldn't remove one of my hard drives. Fortunately, I had just received a replacement iStarUSA v7AGE220-SAU external hard drive enclosure, that's practically identical to the TowerStor, so I opened up the TowerStor case to extract the hard drive then installed the new iStarUSA case. J made a batch of her sour cream chicken enchiladas. I processed the recent blog images that had been assigned final file names for a stock submission, then I started to process other images for a stock submission. We left in the Jeep around 4:00.

We went by a group of wild turkeys with lots of young ones.

We went to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park and headed to the lodge to get cell phone reception and Wi-Fi. Along the way, a flicker met its demise on our windshield. I saw it flying towards the road from the right, and it hit right in front of J and scared her to death! There wasn't any Wi-Fi at the lodge (it's at the General Store near the campground), but there was cell phone reception so we could check voice mail.

We went to the campground and topped off the Jeep at $3.319/gal full serve. Yes it's expensive, but the next closest gas is about 20 mi (22km) north near the De Motte Campground. Then we went to the General Store and J used her iPhone to access the free Wi-Fi to take care of some things online. We left around 5:25.

We went to Point Imperial so J could check out the photographic possibilities. It was windy and hazy, so we just looked. Then we headed towards Cape Royal and stopped at Vista Encantada where I took some shots. Then we stopped at the Walhalla Overlook to look.

We reached Cape Royal, the end of the road, around 6:30. Instead of heading out the trail to Cape Royal proper, we explored the rim near the picnic area and wedding point. We photographed from that area even though the wind was blowing like crazy! I was drawn to a fin that stuck out into the canyon from our side of the rim and the way it looked backlit from the low sun (below left). I waited around for the sun to set and J headed back to the Jeep. I used the shift function of my Canon TS-E 24mm f3.5 L II to look down into the canyon without tilting the camera down so I wouldn't create an inverse key-stoning effect, and the 3-stop hard grad ND filter was perfect again for the image below right. We left at 7:15.


We returned to the RV at 8:20. I downloaded the images from tonight, downselected them in Capture One (C1), then processed two of them for the blog.