Category: Travel

Banff Mountain Film Festival #5

A few weeks ago, Nick, Mona, Susan, Dale and I flew to Canada to rub elbows with movie stars at the annual Banff Mountain Film Festival. (Sounds pretty exotic doesn’t it?) Dale documented our adventures beautifully and posted his pictures online. For the full visual accounting of our trip, click here.

Who’s excited for Banff?

I am! I am! Just two weeks and counting!

What I’m going to do with my first sabbatical

I’ve been interviewing for my dream job with a law firm in Wenatchee the last few weeks. The work sounds just amazing, the people are people I can related to (work hard, play hard types), and once you make partner, you are asked to take a six-month paid sabbatical every 5 years. It doesn’t take much to get me dreaming about what I could do with a lawyer’s salary and 6 months off. The Tour d’Afrique is at the top of my list:

Of course, if some of the mess in the Mid- and Middle-East gets sorted out, the Silk Route doesn’t sound too shabby either.

What would you do with six months off and half your annual salary?

“You must have great software”

I realize I run the risk of being labeled the magician who gave away her secrets, but this is so amazing that I can’t not blog about it. (Sorry Mrs. Tennis. That double negative just slipped out.) My dad’s been using a program called Photomatix for a while and has been able to create some amazing pictures using it. I never fully realized just how magical this program was until I tried it on two images I took in Banff.

Now before you get all critical of my photography I purposely “underexposed” the pictures to preserve the sky, figuring it was easier to pull details out of dark than light. And boy was I right. Look what this little program can do:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

(Apologies for the watermark in the “after” pictures. I haven’t bought the program yet and this is the author’s trial version concession.) The clouds aren’t quite right, but I’m sure they’ll get better with a bit more practice.

The big tease

We’re back from our whirlwind tour of British Columbia. We visited many popular destinations and even more not-so-popular destinations. I’m sorting through pictures and cajoling Nick to write the travelogue. In the mean time, I’ll tease you with the postcard picture of the Chateau Lake Louise.