Billy Goat Trail

So yesterday, Carrie, Burns and I went out for a hike at the Billy Goat Trail. It is a fairly intense, very rocky path along the Potomac River that requires some climbing, but its a fun trail to hike. The scenery is always nice, but fall is probably better than any other time of year. Unfortunately we were probably 2 or 3 weeks early for really bright oranges, reds and yellows, but there were some trees starting to turn.

This was the first time I really got to bust out the Canon in a nature setting. I didn't really have any idea what kinds of pictures I was going to take, and I didn't want to slow us down by taking pictures every few minutes so I mostly only got shot when we were stopped taking a rest. The other thing preventing me from taking spontaneous photos was that I could not keep the camera out around my neck because of the climbing of rocks and jumping off them and branches everywhere, I did not want to damage my camera. A lot of the pictures this day were taken while we were stopped for our little picnic.

The sun was very bright and I could not see the photos that I was taking on the lcd very well because of how bright it was. Therefore I couldn't see what I needed to do to adjust the settings. Because of this, a lot of the landscapes are very bright with too much sunlight. I mostly used my 55-250mm lens as everything was pretty far away from me.

I got some pretty good shots and more importantly, I had a lot of fun climbing and hiking and the weather was amazing (last time we did this hike it was 98 degrees), so I'd say this day was pretty successful.