I preplanned a location photography outing and on this day, I intended to make the most of the daylight hours, from sunrise at 07:08 to sunset at 18:01.  The weather forecast was perfect all day, ranging from 15°C (59°F) at sunrise to a high of 25°C (77°F), with low cloud cover in the morning to sunny for the remainder of the day.

 

I began my outing by arriving at Starved Rock State Park shortly before sunrise where I photographed the early morning sunlight across the state park from the overlook atop Starved Rock.  One planned project was to take a series of overlapping panoramic photographs covering 180 degrees along the horizon from northeast, to southwest; then in post production I blended and merged the images together to form one large single panoramic photograph of the state park shortly after sunrise.

 

By late morning, I ventured to an area of the state park which I had never visited.  From a small parking lot at the far western edge of the state park, I hiked the Bluff Trail to a fork in the trail where I took the interior trail to St. Louis Canyon; I then backtracked to the fork in the trail and continued to follow the Bluff Trail which connected Kickapoo Canyon, Sac Canyon, Aurora Canyon to the state park lodge.

 

After my leisurely outing at Starved Rock State Park, I went to Matthiessen State Park around mid-afternoon.  I had visited the state park once before, but it was many years ago while out on a group motorcycle ride.  Being unfamiliar with the state park, my intention was to explore the main trails to get a general layout of some of the parks features, and take few scenic photographs.

 

While on the way home, I had one more planned stop.  I traversed the countryside exploring a nearby wind farm containing numerous GE Energy 1.5sle Wind Turbines.  I found a suitable place to stop and photograph some of the wind turbines against the colourful evening sky with the setting sun.

 

After a long day out, exhausted and a wee bit mucky, I arrived home just after sunset.  The challenge now was to organise and edit all the images I had taken.

 

About This Photograph

The above photograph was taken at St. Louis Canyon.  The canyon walls are deceptively high, as are many of the other canyons throughout the state park, which average approximately 25 meters (82 ft) in height.  This view of the canyon is from near the top of a sandhill opposite where a small waterfall might be during a heavy rain storm.  The interior trail to reach this canyon extends to the right which then leads up to a Bluff Trail.  I took this photograph using my ultra-wide angle zoom lens to capture as much of the canyon features as I could in a single picture.  The central canyon features, however, are compressed which is a design feature of this lens.  What makes this lens ideal for a scene such as this is not particularly obvious in the picture, the lens does not distort the original landscape scene with the typical fisheye perspective of ultra-wide angle lenses, rather, the lens maintains an honest horizontal and vertical perspective of the original scene.