Awesome trip Peter, I got word of your travels from a hiker on the trail and wondered if I might run into you but no such luck.
Wonderful images of course! really shows me that I have so much to learn about taking photos, I can never get the sharpness that you seem to have, this year I took most of my images with a decreased aperture trying to get more sharpness because I was sick of landscape images with the focal point in the center and the rest of the photo looked a bit blurry even when all objects are far away but it didn't help. =/
It's going to take me forever to get my images up.
You went through Fish Valley without stopping at the Iva Bell Hotsprings!? shame on you! lol I spent two nights there.
Hey, we thought of you when we came up Pinchot - we stopped at the same place we chatted in '09 and took a panorama of Lake Marjorie.
Not sure about your sharpness issues - have you ever swapped lenses and compared the results? Shoot something similar to the resolution testing images you see at places like DPreview.com and see if you have a technical issue in the camera or lens. I only had 12 megapixels and two $200 ebay lenses this year, so no magic in my equipment bag. The camera was really only bought for the JMT - it's light, it's almost disposable at half the price of what I was originally going to buy, but it worked out very well. Only lost the flimsy Flash card door, which I covered with some gaffer tape and that was fine until I got home. The $50 battery grip was great - allowed me to use AA Lithiums - just two sets of 6 for the entire trip, all videos and over 1500 exposures, lots with flash.
I shot mostly AF (51 point matrix) and rarely ever did an override. Maybe it's the RAW processing that makes my images come out snappy. I never shoot in-camera JPEGs - you lose all kinds of control and the ability to recover crappy exposures, of which I had a LOT at the beginning, because I didn't realize that when I set up bracketing to go off in one of the self-timer modes, it retained that setting over subsequent images in single exposure mode, so for a few days I had every third frame just right, every third frame +2 stops and then every third frame -2 stops. That messed up a few of the panoramas, like the one at 1000 Island Lake - could not recover those shots. Also, all the HDR I shot is just garbage, at least in Photoshop CS4, I can't get anything out of those bracketed frames I like. I may have to break down and buy the proper software Photomatix, I think. In general, though, I think HDR is not fo rme.
Anyway, some of my images are soft because I had sweat on the polarizer ;-) Then there are the night exposures mostly out of focus because I could not find the infinity setting on these cheap AF lenses in manual mode in the dark, and after I messed up the setting when drying the massive dew off the camera that had accumulated over 3 hours following sunset, it was all messed up. At least one frame was ok, but that's the one I didn't expose long enough.
As for depth of field - I shot almost everything at the lowest iso 200 for low noise, and somewhere around 1/60-1/125th of a sec, getting the max depth of field. On the D90, I also enable "auto iso" and I think I set that to 1/20th of a sec, meaning any time the shutter went down below that time to get the proper exposure, the camera would just boost sensitivity. That's great for snap shots and other stuff when you have to make sure you get the shot. Most of those are still ok because of the VR lenses, but for landscapes that's rarely useful.
Iva Bell - we had a thunderstorm roll in just before the intersection to the Goodale Pass trail, spent about 2 hours hiding under trees, cursing at Gregory Packs for selling me junk that fails in the middle of nowhere (hip belt semi-failed, rest of the hike hanging on by a thread - literally), so there wasn't a lot of interest in heading to a warm water hole that evening. We knew we could make it to our great camp site from the year before, with water fall and flat ground half way up the big climb to the valley above. The trail was a river for the most part - without gaiters this would have been a very cold and wet climb, but we did ok and stayed dry with just one cold wet crossing half way up. I think when going north, Iva Bell is more tempting, as you usually have more dirt on your body. Coming from the hot showers at Reds that same morning, we never feel the pull to go to Iva Bell.
Looking at your trip - I think I will have to do something like that in the coming 1-2 years as well, especially if the kids drop out and let me head out alone. I've always wanted to do something like a yo-yo roaming up and down the mountain range, and combine non-JMT with JMT to reduce the overlap of the two directions to an absolute minimum. That kind of plan would justify being up there for a month or so, maybe a little longer.
