Shooting timelapse at Vista del Malpais

I've experimented with timelapse shooting a few times in the past.  Here's a brief result from our recent trip to Vista del Malpais, overlooking the badlands of Anza Borrego Desert State Park


These aren't my best results, but for posterity, here's the setup for the new "sub-Kilo" timelapse system I'm putting together:

• GoPro Hero2, 5s interval shooting
• Turnspro panning station, 75deg pans over 20 minutes each
• Mini tripod
• LRTimelapse for post-processing

Total weight: ~600g 

Improvements for next time:

1.  Adding a bubble level to the rig - with the small and lightweight rig, it was very hard to eyeball "level" and the original shots ended up visibly tilted. Correcting those tilts in post is the likely cause of the slight judder in the video.
2. Switching back to a small Canon P+S hacked with CHDK so we can get raw images for improved processing, or upgrading our venerable GoPro...

Thanksgiving 2016

This year the Choose Adventure crew decided to take REI's #OptOutside one step further and actually celebrate our Thanksgiving in the beautiful Anza Borrego Desert State Park.  It's been a couple of years since we've enjoyed the Blair Valley/Little Blair Valley area, so we loaded up the van for a single over-nighter - just 26 hours of adventure, but it was great!

California Coast Road Trip

Some of my fondest memories as a child were of the epic multi-day road trips we'd take as a family.  Dad would drive us across the desert to see Arizona's natural and archaeological wonders.  Mom would blast through Nevada in an effort to maximize the number of days spent fishing in Colorado or Montana.

Annika has proven to take after her mom a bit - prone to motion sickness, and not as enamored of long car rides as her old man.  That notwithstanding, I figured we were due for a good old fashioned Family Road Trip.

Easter Weekend in Anza Borrego

I wanted to share some of the highlights of a recent weekend trip. I was inspired by a the concept of the 36 Hour Adventure. I really resonated with the notion that we can miss lots of great short trips if we focus too much on the long expedition-style trips. Too often lately I'd been burning weekends reworking the sleeping arrangement in my van, or building a chuckbox.

Instead of waiting until we could manage an Epic adventure, we set out to see how much we could pack in to a weekend. Well, I think we did ok. In our 36 hours, here's just some of what we were able to accomplish: