Back from Acadia

[CRIANA]

If you live in the Northeast of the US or in the Eastern side of Canada, I can't recommend enough a trip/vacation to Acadia National Park. I'd also say try to go at the beginning or end of the season, since I'm sure it can get quite busy there.

We saw plates from: VA, MI, NY, NJ, PA, MA, NH, VT, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, CT, CA, FL, GA, IL, and I think that was it.

This is my 2nd year taking a full week of camping up there. I put on about 1000 miles on the CR-V driving, up, around and back home.

There isn't much for offroading there, although you can drive your CR-V across the ocean and onto Bar Island ;-) I did that last year and it was a cool experience.

There is the wonderful drive up Cadillac Mountain which offers beautiful views of the surrounding area and great sunset shots.

We took our bikes again, and rode the carriage trails.

Prior to the trip my CR-V ended up with a bad solenoid, which I'm grateful didn't happen on the trip. Other than that issue, there were none for the rest of the trip. We got around 19-22mpg (I have larger tires on and do about 75-80 on the highway).

Here's a few pics.

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_12/IMG_1391.sized.jpg
The bikes

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_12/IMG_1396.sized.jpg
iQue guiding, iPod supplying tunes, and Treo supplying communications

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_day2/IMG_1485.sized.jpg
Sunset on the auto road

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_day3/IMG_1538.sized.jpg
Foggy Harbor and the Margaret Todd

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_day4/IMG_1574.sized.jpg
I want a commute on a road like this everyday...haha

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_day8/IMG_1714.sized.jpg
The carriage trails

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_day8/IMG_1798.sized.jpg
Sunset on Cadillac

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/acadia05_day8/IMG_1853.sized.jpg
Cars going by

I experimented with panoramics this trip too, none with the CR-V in it though :-(

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/pano/harbor_fog.sized.jpg

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/pano/hadlock_pano.sized.jpg

http://www.dianaleroi.com/gallery/albums/pano/cadillac_sunset1.sized.jpg

[Racoon]

Beautiful.

:)

[wildswing]

Nice! What make/model camera were you using?

I like taking panoramics too, but I have to do it using a tripod then stitch the pictures together. They never come out quite right because of the way the camera mounts to the tripod (paralax errors). There are special tripod mounts (http://www.kaidan.com/Detail.bok?no=146) available to get the lens lined up correctly but I'm too cheap to buy one. Although you can make one yourself (http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/panhead_d60.htm).

Check out the cool interactive QTVR panoramic pictures on this site (http://www.fullscreenqtvr.com/). Click and drag to move your view. These are all made up of digital stills. Pretty cool stuff.

Here's some info on taking panoramic pictures...
http://www.solev.net/tutorials/pano_guide.htm
http://www.panoramicweb.com/shooting.htm
For info on making QTVR objects just google "making QTVR".

Here's another more affordable tripod head (http://gregwired.com/pano/Pano.htm).

[CRIANA]

Racoon,
Thank you very much :-)

Wildswing,
I'm using a Canon G6. Many times I used the Vivid feature to get the colors the way I was seeing them with my eyes.

I left the tripod at home :-(

The G6 has a nice panoramic option, you can set which way your going to be moving, left to right, or reverse, and then it does a kind of onion skinning technique, showing you what you took originally and need to line up with.

I then used the Photo Merge feature in Adobe Photoshop CS to put the photos together. Sometimes I had to do a little retouching and assistance as it didn't put them together perfectly.

That QTVR site is incredible. Craig will love the ones of the Grand Canyon. Thanks for the link!!!

I want to try to make those the next time we go, and definitely bring the tripod.

[wildswing]

Updated my previous post.