Hiking Mt. Sunapee in Newbury, NH

Although I have been skiing at Mt. Sunapee for years I had not been on any of the hiking trails until this year.

I had Friday, October 26th off from work and decided to go hiking. Although the foliage had peaked the weather was perfect for hiking. One of my goals for the day was to scout the Summit Trail so that I could return later with people from one of the local Meetup.com groups that I belong to.

The Summit Trail is just one of several trails to the summit. I could get to the trail either from the Mt. Sunappe base lodge or the trailhead on Old Province Rd. I chose to start at the Old Province Rd. trailhead for this hike.

I made a couple wrong turns (and ended up on the ski trails) but eventually made it to the summit. As usual the view of Lake Sunapee was fantastic. When skiing I usually don’t have my good DLSR camera so this was an opportunity to get some better photos than I can get with a phone camera.

The photo below was taken from the top of the Skyway Ledges ski trail.

I also made a panorama photos from the top of the Wingding trail.

I switched to my 300mm lens and was able to get some shot of the White Mountains in the distance. The photo below is looking past the wind farm in Groton, NH towards an area of the White Mountains known as the Pemigewasset Wilderness.

Below is a photo looking past Mt. Cardigan (the first range on the left had side of the photo) with the snow covered mountains of Franconia Notch in the background.

It took a little longer than I expected to go back to Mt. Sunapee with the Meetup group. I was not able to schedule a hike until November 17th. By that time we had some early winter storms and had 5 inches of snow at the bottom and 7 to 8 inches at the summit. It was also cold and windy so I only took a few photos before getting out of the wind and heading back down the mountain. Although there was heavy cloud cover over the lake during my first few photos, I was lucky to catch a moment when the sun broke through to shine on Great Island down on the lake.

Nature Photos and Adobe Illustrator Artistic Effects

One of the fun graphic design project that I did this year was to apply Adobe Illustrator artistic effects to some of my underwater and wildlife photos. A couple of my favorite artistic effect are the Poster Edge and Watercolor effects.

The first images that I started working with was the Reef Shark photo from my trip to Key Largo last summer.

Below is the image with the Poster Edges effect applied.

Next I worked with an old image of some Banded Butterfly fish that I took while in Bonaire back in 2007.

Below is the same image with the Watercolor effect applied.

Next I thought I would try working with some wildlife photos. I decided to start with a Whitetail Deer that I photographed back in July of 2015.

Below is the same image with the Poster Edge effect applied.

Below is the same image with the Watercolor effect applied.

The Poster Image effect is pretty cool but I think I like the Watercolor effect a little better.