Chesterfield In Winter

Chesterfield, Idaho is an agricultural ghost town in the southeastern part of the state.  It was founded in 1880 by Mormon pioneers.  It was a hard place to make a living, and gradually became a ghost town due to drought, harsh winters, and the depression.

Today, Chesterfield is undergoing a revival of sorts as descendants of the early families are restoring the town.  The Chesterfield Foundation recently purchased the beautiful Muir-Butterfield house, and has started restoration by rebuilding the porch.

The LDS Meeting House is probably the best preserved building in town.  When I first started visiting Chesterfield it was a museum, but now it has been restored back to its original form.  In summer, many of the buildings are open for visitors and tours.

In winter, the town is boarded up, deserted, and resting quietly in the snow and cold.  Linda and I visited with three other members of our Sharp Shooters Camera Club.

There is a lot to see and photograph in the quiet of winter.  A restored tractor is parked near the shadow of rusty farm equipment, and interesting details are everywhere.

Old equipment, frosty fences, interesting buildings, ancient gas pumps, snowdrifts – the photo opportunities are wonderful.

The buildings include log cabins, stately brick homes, religious structures, and stores.

A windmill stands alone on a hilltop.

There are 41 buildings in the historic district, and most near the center of town have been restored, but many around the outskirts of town still are in “ghost town” condition, so there is a nice mix of photography subjects.  If you want to see the interiors and talk to knowledgeable people about the town, visit between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  But if you want to see Chesterfield when it is deserted and quiet, visit in the winter.

Please note that all of my photos are copyrighted and must not be used without my permission.

Bear Lake Valley Fog

Every winter, there is a week or so of heavy fog in the Bear Lake Valley.  If the temperatures are cold enough we are treated to a display of hoarfrost on the trees and fences.  Some years, the temperatures stay low enough to allow the frost to build up over several days to amazing thickness, as I showed in this 2014 post:
http://rosswalkerphotos.blogspot.com/2014/01/hoarfrost-in-bear-lake-valley.html

So far, this year has been a little different because the temperatures have warmed up enough in most places for the frost to melt in the afternoon.  So, every night a thin layer of frost starts to accumulate in the fog over again, but we haven’t had the very thick hoarfrost like last year.

But the fog is still beautiful, and a challenge to photograph.  My autofocus had difficulty with many scenes because objects are so indistinct.  Setting the camera on a single spot focus helped when I placed the sensor on the most distinct area I could find.

I walked around the edge of the golf course in Montpelier, Idaho, then a little way up a steep hill in fairly deep snow, and had the place to myself.  There was more frost here than in some other places, perhaps because the hill blocked the sun quite a while.

Later, Linda and I went out for a ride, looking for more fog scenes, and enjoyed this barn in Bloomington, Idaho.  The fog helped clean up the background clutter, and added some nice frost to the tree.

These big fog events can totally fill the valley with fog, and I had never seen it from above the clouds, so we drove to Garden City, Utah where we could find an overlook.  I wanted to go on an old abandoned road that has a great view, but it has been blocked off, so instead hiked along a ridge in fairly deep snow to get this view.  It is hard to believe that big, beautiful Bear Lake is buried in those clouds.  It was fun to see the valley from a new perspective.

These photos are all copyrighted.  Please do not use them without my permission.

Christmas At Temple Square

Linda said that one thing on her bucket list was to see the Christmas lights again at Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah.  I’m not crazy about visiting the city, but we left our peaceful valley to confront the crowds and traffic.  We saw a Christmas play, “The Forgotten Carols”, ate some great food, shopped, and marveled at the amazing Christmas lights.  I even hiked into the hills to photograph an historic old lime kiln.

Temple Square is a ten-acre park-like location that includes the famous temple, tabernacle, visitor’s center, and more for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), often called the Mormon Church.  Linda is a member of the LDS Church, so this visit had extra significance for her.

The Christmas display is one of the best anywhere.  There must be millions of lights, and several pools reflect the colors.  This shot was taken at dusk.

The grounds and buildings are gorgeous.  The Assembly Hall architecture was beautiful in the colorful light.

A tripod is helpful to hold your camera steady for high quality images, but today’s digital cameras can also take beautiful hand held photos after dark using high ISO settings, if you can live with increased digital noise.

A remote shutter release helps minimize camera shake.

This photo was taken at ISO 12800.  

The spectacular display at Temple Square is a wonderful, family friendly place to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas.  There are beautiful reminders everywhere about the birth of Jesus Christ.

All photos are copyrighted by Ross Walker, and cannot be used for any purpose without permission.

Small Town Christmas

I get a kick out of the Christmas celebration in downtown Montpelier, Idaho.

This year, December has been unusually warm so a nice crowd came out for the festivities.  Bonfires were set up along Washington Street and people roasted hot dogs in front of Radio Shack.  Horse drawn hay rides went around the city where there were living nativities and other scenes to see.  Santa was at the visitor’s center, there was a traditional Christmas tree lighting, and a Christmas craft fair was in the old abandoned hotel.

I spent the night experimenting with long exposures to capture intentional blur.  (20 seconds, ISO 100, f 10).  There were a heck of a lot of deleted photos.

The sidewalk looks empty in this photo, but the long exposure blurred movement so that people nearly disappeared.  (15 seconds, ISO 100, f 10)

There is a small park with a statue of Old Ephraim, a legendary grizzly bear that was finally killed in 1923 after devastating livestock for years in the Bear Lake Valley.  Now he guards the community Christmas tree.  (5 seconds, ISO 400, F 13)

My wife Linda (left) and her sister, Jo Ann had a table at the craft fair downtown.  Linda sold her crafts and our photo notecards, and Jo Ann sold her books.

Christmas in Montpelier, Idaho seems more laid back and peaceful than in the bigger cities.  The celebration may seem small and old fashioned, but everyone had a good time.  There is no way I would trade it for the commercialism I see most other places.

May your Christmas be filled with the true spirit of this amazing season.

All photos are copyrighted by Ross Walker and can not be used for any purpose without permission.

Photo Piracy

Photographers need to be aware that there are people who will steal your photos off the internet.  I have caught several people lately and would like to share the experience with you so you can protect yourself.  None of these photos were used with my permission, and none gave me credit for the images.

First, who are these people, where do they get the photos, and how do they use them?

This photo was used on Facebook for an outdoor oriented radio station in Montana, posting a regular outdoor editorial feature.  It was taken from our personal web site.  Someone tipped me off about the misuse.

This photo was used as her own on 365project.org by a photographer in India.  She got it from my posts on the same site where I posted a photo a day for two years.  I recognized photos from many other 365 photographers, and alerted them as well.

Three photos, including this one, were taken from this blog by a prominent former resident of the Bear Lake Valley and used in his own blog.  His written information was even similar to mine.

This one was used by a Salt Lake City law firm on their business web site.  It was taken from our personal web site.  They certainly should know better.

All of the above photos were removed upon request.  No one offered to pay for the images.  The next one is purely a scam.  There is no way to directly track down the people doing this.

This is another one taken from our personal web site and it was used on a commercial wallpaper web site with false contact information.  There are tips on the internet on how to get these people, but it is complicated.  I may give it a try.

How did I find these?  All of my photos have embedded key words that show up on image searches. I googled key words like “Bear Lake” and found my photos attributed to other web sites.  There are also web sites that can search by image content, like tineye.com, but I have never found anything that way.

How can you protect yourself?  You can be sure that if you have photos on the internet, they can be stolen, and people won’t want to pay you.  It is common for photographers to take credit for someone else’s photos.  Many people simply think it is OK to use anything that is on the internet, but it isn’t OK.  It is illegal.  Other people know it is wrong and will try to use other people’s photos for profit.

First, embed copyright information and key words in the metadata in the photo.  Knowledgeable people can look at this and see who the owner is and that it is copyrighted.  One way to embed data is in Photoshop Elements, File > File Info > Description.

Second, put a visible copyright notice on the edge of the photo, such as © Ross Walker 2014.  It can be cropped off, but if it is, that is proof that there was intent to steal the photo.

Third, a semitransparent watermark can be placed across the image.  I choose not to do this because it degrades the quality of the photo too much for my taste.

Fourth, be vigilant.  Look for violations and contact people who are stealing your photos.  Let them know that what they are doing is wrong.  They are in violation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  It doesn’t hurt to ask for payment, but good luck collecting!

All images on this blog are copyrighted by Ross V. Walker, and can not be used for any purpose without permission.

Pickleweed Autumn

Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge covers about 19,000 acres of the Bear Lake Valley in southeast Idaho near Montpelier, and most of it is bulrush marsh, open water, and flooded meadows.  But, this year I found a surprising landscape on the eastern edge of a public tour loop.

This red salt marsh must have been placed here just for photographers!  There are acres of pickleweed scattered over several large areas east of the main driving tour loop.  Normally this stuff is green, but it turns red in autumn, and this year the color is really vibrant.

 Pickleweed (genus Salicornia)  is also known as glasswort or samphire.  It thrives in salt marshes where it stores excess salt in pod-like sections.  It is edible, in the same family as spinach, and has even become a gourmet delicacy.

We didn’t see much wildlife, but there were insects living in the pickleweed.  We found a few dragonflies that didn’t cooperate very well, but this huge spider (argiope aurantia) posed for photos with a grasshopper that had been a recent meal.  Geese nest in the grassy islands scattered around the marsh, and we found a few broken egg shells.

The red color varies a bit depending on the direction in relation to the sun, so we saw variations of red, pink, and magenta.  No filters were used for any of these photos.

The salt marsh had dried enough to explore on foot, and we found some yellow pickleweed. It added a little variety to the red scenery, and a wide angle lens emphasized the great distance to the mountains surrounding the valley.

Several photographers from our Sharp Shooters Camera Club have been here, and I returned to the scene three days in a row.  I found this Z pattern on the last day.  There is always something interesting to see at Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Thompson Springs, Utah

My camping buddies and I explored Sego Canyon on our June 2014 annual camping trip.  On the way back to our campsite in Green River, Utah, we stopped at the modern semi-ghost town of Thompson Springs.  As a ghost town hunter, it turned out to be one of my favorite photo opportunities of the trip.

The town had some importance from 1890 when a post office opened, to about 1950 when the Sego Canyon coal mines closed.    The community was a railroad shipping point for ranchers in the area, and Amtrak was a flag stop here as late as 1994 or 1997.  The town was doomed when  I-70 bypassed it by just a couple of miles.

Today, downtown Thompson Springs has many derelict buildings, including the Thompson Motel, a café, the railroad depot, and several vacant houses.

The motel was an interesting photo opportunity.  It is boarded up, but the lobby door was open, and the inside has had a lot of abuse.

I explored the interiors of several abandoned houses, the railroad station, and a few other derelict buildings.  Most were in pretty bad shape and had been trashed by squatters, but there were a few interesting things to photograph, like this sign.

One house had a story to tell about a failed subdivision.  This story has been repeated hundreds of times across the deserts of the western United States.  I wonder if anyone paid $5000.00 for a membership.

The café was different from the other abandoned buildings.  It was locked tight, so my photos were taken through the windows.

It was eerie.  It looks like it could open again tomorrow, except for that huge hole in the ceiling.  But, someone has cleaned up the ceiling debris, and the sugar, salt, and pepper are still on the counters waiting for customers.

There are plans to clean up a uranium mine near Moab and bury the tailings near Thompson Springs.  Who knows… maybe those jobs will bring customers back to the old café?