A (Big) Mistake, and a (Small) Rant

Sunstar and Reflection, Lake Wanaka, New Zealand
Sony a7R IV
Sony 12-24 GM
1/320 second
F/18
ISO 100

By the time you read this, I’ll be done with my break and well into my Death Valley Winter Moon workshop. I’ll have gone from a stretch of two-and-a-half months with no workshops, to a stretch of one month with four workshops (and all the travel that entails): Death Valley, Iceland (10+ days), and two in Yosemite. And while I’ll kind of miss going through my old unprocessed images, I’m also really looking forward to creating new stuff—and there’s comfort in the knowledge that I only scratched the surface of my old images, and they’re not going anywhere.

I wrote that paragraph more than a week ago, on the day before I left for Death Valley, fully intending to complete last week’s blog post during workshop breaks. The plan was to expand on a prior post about how I seek and create new takes on scenes I’ve photographed many times, using the above newly discovered and processed image of the solitary Lake Wanaka willow tree in New Zealand.

So. Imagine my alarm (among other things) when I arrived in Death Valley at around 8:00 p.m. Sunday night (the day before the workshop started), and realized that I’d forgotten my computer. Oops. Suddenly, how to squeeze this week’s blog into my busy workshop schedule was the least of my worries, replaced in a heartbeat by concerns about how I’d run my workshop, and my ability to run my business.

I’ve been doing 12 to 18 workshops per year for more than 15 years and have forgotten many things, ranging from dental floss, to my Kindle, to important lenses, but never my computer. I mean, even forgetting my camera bag (which I’m proud to say has never happened…, well, not exactly) would be more frustrating and disappointing than the actual existential crisis this felt like.

Not only was all my workshop material (roster, permits, presentation material, and so on) on my computer, I have to connect my computer to a flatscreen TV to deliver my workshop orientation, training, and image reviews (a major part of the trip). And then there’s the business stuff I need to deal with each day—not just writing my blog, but answering e-mails, organizing upcoming workshops (see list of my next month’s workshops above), website maintenance, social media posts, among many more things that need my attention every day. Some can be accomplished on my iPhone, but at the cost of much time—a rare commodity during a workshop—and great effort.

Following a few minutes of hyperventilation (punctuated with a variety of choice words), I started working on solutions. With my brother Jay assisting me, I reasoned that I could use his computer to display the orientation and training material—which of course is at home on my computer. No problem, since all that material is on Dropbox too, all I have to do is login to Dropbox on his computer and download the files I need. With that insight I started to breath easier, until…

Also in the bag with my computer is the HDMI cable I need to connect to the TV in the meeting room. But surely, even at a place as remote as Death Valley, someone must have an HDMI cable for sale or loan. Apparently not—not even the general store in Furnace Creek (which, it turns out, is pretty much worthless), or the hotel front desk (which I thought must have a box of cables and adapters abandoned by prior guests), could help. My optimism was further dashed when, at some point during my cable search, I realized that even scoring an HDMI cable would be of little value without the USB-C adapter that allows it to connect to the computer.

So I pulled up Google on my phone and searched for the closest Walmart (desperate times), and found one only an hour away, in Pahrump (not a typo), Nevada. Since I’d always dreamed of making the two-hour roundtrip to Pahrump on the morning a workshop starts, you can probably imagine how thrilled I was. But like I say, desperate times…

Workshop solution in place, I went to work on solutions for handling the business stuff. First, I drafted my wife to box up my computer and overnight it first thing Monday morning—UPS Next Day Early ($$$gulp$$$). Next I logged into Dropbox on Jay’s computer, downloaded my business and workshop material, which went refreshingly smoothly. Then I went to bed.

Early Monday morning I made the drive to Pahrump without drama and was back with the necessary cable by 10:00 a.m. This pretty much solved my short term workshop problem, but since Jay’s computer is set up completely differently than mine, and he doesn’t have a mouse (pretty essential for the image review), I was still quite anxious for my computer to arrive.

As simple as that sounds, rest assured, it was not. After dropping the computer with UPS, we learned that FedEx might be better delivering to Death Valley, so my wife retrieved the box from the UPS Store (kudos to them) and drove it to FedEx. So far so good.

Now might be a good time for me to digress and express my overall frustration with national park concessionaires in general, before moving on to Xanterra in Death Valley in particular. Since national park concessionaires win a bid to service their parks, once they’re in they have little competition and, it seems, even less incentive to make their customers happy.

Since I have similar frustrations at all national parks, I can only assume that the concessionaire experience at the parks I don’t visit is similar. But I’ll limit expressing my specific frustrations to the concessionaires at the parks I visit most frequently: Yosemite (Aramark), Grand Canyon (Aramark, Delaware North, Xanterra), and Death Valley (Xanterra).

Most hotels and restaurants out in the real world seem to bend over backward to satisfy their customers, but at the national parks every request seems to be an inconvenience. My latest reminder of this was the difficulty I had simply taking delivery of my computer (that I’d spent significant dollars to get delivered as early as possible on Tuesday) in a timely manner.

For some reason the front desk at Furnace Creek Ranch doesn’t accept packages for customers (maybe this is a thing, but I’ve never encountered this at other hotels), with all incoming shipments going to either the commissary (open 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.) or Post Office (open 8:00 a.m to 4:00 p.m.). Worse still, for any given package, no one seems to know which one will get it.

Since my iPhone wouldn’t connect to the WiFi network (don’t know if the problem was on my end or theirs), and Death Valley cellular service is virtually useless for anything but phone calls, I spent most of my Tuesday break time (between the morning shoots and 1:00 p.m. image review) running around between the front desk, post office, and commissary trying to determine whether my computer had arrived. At each spot all I got was a shrug before being sent to one of the other choices.

It eventually became apparent that I wouldn’t have my computer in time for the Tuesday image review, but surely I’d have it afterward, so I could at least catch up on my business stuff Tuesday evening. When it still hadn’t arrived by the time we departed for our afternoon/sunset shoot, I remained confident that it would be waiting for me when I returned—especially since I’d made it abundantly clear to all parties (front desk, commissary, post office) how important it was that I get it today.

I returned after our sunset/moonlight shoot to learn that my computer had in fact been delivered to the commissary that afternoon (yay!), which as promised had tried to give it to the front desk for me to pick up later, but the front desk refused it (boooooo!) and instead hot-potatoed the package to the post office—which closed at 4 p.m. By the time I picked it up Wednesday I was so far behind with other stuff that finishing my blog was no longer a priority. So here we are, a week late…

So, did anyone die because I didn’t get my computer on Tuesday? No. But I don’t think I could have been more clear (and respectful) expressing my delivery’s importance. Just the slightest effort on the part of the people at the front desk (where my greatest frustration lies) would have meant the difference between an extremely satisfied and an extremely dissatisfied customer. If I treated my customers with the same disregard, I’d be an ex photo workshop leader.

End of rant…

Everything else about this workshop turned out to be wonderful. I had a fantastic group—lots of fun, and across the board extremely good photographers who thoroughly enjoyed each other. And the photography conditions were off-the-charts—between water at Badwater (reflections!), nice clouds (including unprecedented fog!) and great light throughout, spectacular sunrise/sunset color, and a couple of excellent sunrise moonset shoots, this was probably the best overall photography I’ve had in 15 years of Death Valley workshops. But since I haven’t had time yet to process my images, I return you now to the original programming…

Sunstar and Reflection, Lake Wanaka, New Zealand

Rather than duplicate the information in my June Variations on a Tree post, I’ll just add to what I wrote there with a few more words about this New Zealand morning in June 2022.

Every time I Don Smith and I take a workshop group to Lake Wanaka, I try to find a new way to photograph this tree. I’ve featured clouds, sunrise/sunset color, fog, reflections, submerged rocks, the moon, the Milky Way, and stars. I’ve also varied my perspective, focal length, and orientation to vary the background and framing. But for some reason, I’ve never tried a sunstar.

It didn’t take long to realize that this crystal clear morning was ideally suited for checking the Wanaka Tree sunstar box. Not only was the morning sky virtually cloudless, the lake surface was unusually disturbed, making for less than ideal clarity and reflections.

Anticipating the sunstar opportunity with the approaching sun, I put on my 12 – 24 lens (great sunstar lens), dialed my aperture to f/18, and positioned myself for a horizontal frame with the sun offset from the tree. As soon as the sun appeared I started clicking like crazy, adjusting my shutter speed with each click to maximize my exposure options later (not to blend, just so I’d have a lot to choose from). After about 30 seconds of this, I spontaneously decided to race along the lakeshore to align the tree and sun, and had enough time squeeze off a handful of vertical frames before the sun rose too high.

Join Don Smith and me in New Zealand