Thursday, September 12, 2002
We left San Jose mid-afternoon on a flight to Albuquerque via Phoenix. Fortunately Walgreens came to our rescue in Albuquerque when America West lost our luggage. Some T-shirts, a fleece pull-over and some sweat pants that we cut down to shorts became our attire for the next morning. Fortunately all of the camera and computer gear was with us on the plane! The drive to Santa Fe was uneventful, and upon arrival at the La Fonda hotel, we found that we had a nice big room with a private terrace outside, with a perfect view of the Mission. For some reason we didn't fall asleep quickly, we tossed and turned until about 2am...

Friday, September 13, 2002
At 6am Dale Honning from TravelNerds met us in the lobby and we all piled into his van. There had been two other couples signed up for the weekend, but they had canceled at the last minute. Lucky us, we had a private instructor for the duration of the weekend!

After a quick stop for a breakfast snack, we headed South towards Bandelier State Park. Along the way we stopped and hiked up to a mesa overlooking a valley. We walked around the perimeter, taking pictures of the landscape and plants. We saw some caves and petroglyphs in the rocks. Returning to the car we drove to the state park and then hiked around some pueblo ruins and along the base of a cliff where an Indian town had been. The weather was great, starting out a bit chilly in the morning, but warming up into the 70's by 10am.

Around noon we headed back to Santa Fe and there were some storm clouds brewing. We decided that 3 hours of sleep hadn't really cut it, so we headed up to the hotel room for a rest, Dale would return at 4pm to pick us up for more touring. After a nice room service lunch and with the arrival of our luggage (yay!) we rested for a while and felt much better. Back in the van we headed East on the highway and the turned onto a dirt road headed through the hills. There were several thunderstorm cells following us around, but we managed to dodge them and get some great pictures. A few muddy spots in the road made for some exciting driving, lots of fun. As the sun started to go down we headed back to town. The concierge at the hotel was able to get us a reservation around the corner for dinner with 15 minutes notice (no small feat in Santa Fe on a Friday night). Afterwards we went back to the room, sat in the outdoor hot tub for a while, then passed out in bed.

Saturday, September 14, 2002
Dale met us in the lobby at 7am and we had breakfast in the hotel. French toast and eggs to fuel the day. We walked around the corner to take a few pictures in some shop windows, then got in the van and headed to Canyon road. Our assignment was to take some interesting pictures of gates, doors and windows. Santa Fe has some wonderful architecture, with adobe walls and amazing array of colors and styles for the main gates to each house. The sun was shining with a few clouds in the sky and we found that almost anywhere we looked there was an amazing shot to photograph. Dale was really great, never rushing, always ready make a helpful suggestion. One of the things we were interested in improving was composition and he did a great job of making suggestions and pointing out things that we might not have noticed.

We walked up Canyon road as we went, noticing some fun looking shops along the way. We knew we'd have to come back and check them out later on. Around 10:30 we decided to head back to downtown and grab something to eat. We started out on foot, wandering around the streets, looking for more things to capture. We walked in a big circle, ending up at a restaurant called Guadalajara where we ate lunch. As we waited to be seated we transferred our pictures to the laptops and started to look at them. We continued this through lunch and it gave Dale a good chance to see how our pictures were turning out. We were very happy with what we were seeing (as were some of the other guests at the restaurant who were looking over our shoulders!)

Since the weather was getting cloudy and there wasn't much direct sun, we decided to take a break from pictures and do some shopping. Dale graciously volunteered to drive us around, which was fantastic. We stopped at a couple of shops, first buying an amazing piece of chunky polished stainless steel art by Arlie Regier at Adieb Khadoure Fine Art, then a wind powered "parabolic gyroscope" for the back yard in Los Altos at Waxlander Gallery. They are both really cool and we can't wait for them to arrive! Afterwards Dale took us back to the hotel and we made plans to meet at 7pm for dinner. We made reservations at SantacaFe, which turned out to be a very nice restaurant. We had a great time talking with Dale and getting to know him, he's a really nice guy. Afterwards we made plans to meet at 7:30 in the morning to do a bit more 'gate' photography. It had been a really full day!

Sunday, September 15, 2002
After breakfast at the hotel we headed back to the East side of town, walking from one colorful little street to another, snapping away as we went. It's a good thing we had big memory cards (512MB) and laptops close by. We took close to 3GB of photos on the trip!

Around 10:30am we had pretty much taken a picture of every gate, door and window in town (it later turned out that we had 140 of them, which you can see elsewhere on the site). Dale took us back the hotel and dropped us off. He wished us well and we said we'd keep in touch (his Canyonlands class in Utah sounds very interesting... :-).

We packed up, grabbed some lunch and then headed South. We took a more scenic route, highway 14. It was fun driving around through the desert, but our big surprise when we found ourselves in Madrid, New Mexico (pronounced Mad-rid). There were a bunch of small galleries and it was really busy! As we drove through we noticed a Coal Mine Museum which had a full size steam engine; we had to stop! Once inside we realized we had stumbled on a photographic gold-mine. There we all kinds of mining machines and parts of mining machines everywhere. We ended up spending two hours and taking about 300 pictures between us. It was pretty surreal, having just completed a workshop and then having a perfect place to practice!

Afterwards we took a shortcut that was recommended to us across an 11 mile dirt road, then we took the highway back to Albuquerque. 75mph is so much nicer as a speed limit! Waiting in the airport we realized that the same Cal Poly soccer team that had been on the flights out with it was heading home with us as well. It made for some nice people watching <grin>. On the plane we looked through all of the pictures we had taken. It was really the first time that we had looked carefully at all of them and we were very happy with what we had taken.

We'd really like to thank Dale for all of his advice. He did a great job of making the weekend a lot of fun and very full. We'd certainly recommend him and his classes to anyone interested in getting more out of their digital camera, or just having a great guide to some awesome spots to take pictures. Thanks Dale!

Monday, September 16, 2002: Epilogue
After some time spent sorting and organizing, we began the task of cropping, adjusting and re-sizing all the pictures for the website. I think we'll need some extra space on the web server!

The Gear
Cameras: A Nikon Coolpix 5000 and a Nikon Coolpix 5700. These two cameras are almost identical, the difference being that the 5700 has an 8x zoom, while the 5000 has 3x. We also had a 19mm wide angle lens for the 5000. The panoramic mount for the 5000 is from Kaidan.

Memory Cards: We used 320MB and a 512MB Lexar Media compact flash card. Individual pictures were between 1.5MB and 2MB. The closest we got to filling a card was when Rick got down to 4 pictures left. Popping the card in the laptop had us ready to go again in a few minutes.

Computers: Randy's PowerBook G4-800 and a borrowed PowerBook G4-500.

Software: We used Apple's iPhoto to import, view and organize all of the pictures, and Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for image editing. Realviz Stitcher was used to put together the panoramas. The web pages were produced with Adobe GoLive 6.0. All of the files were uploaded with NetFinder for OS X.