Turbulent Skies by Ryan Dyar

Turbulent Skies by Ryan Dyar

Processing Tutorial VideosNEW – Namibia Untamed
NEW – Lofoten Autumn & Aurora – With Stian Klo
Processing Instruction via Skype I should have known the trip was going to have problems before I walked out the door. Two hours before leaving with my wife and my bff Miles Morgan for a week of off roading, photography and camping, I went for a coffee run after loading up all the gear into my rig. I pulled back into my driveway and just happened to catch something out of the corner of my eye. Fluid. Fluid everywhere… all over the rear wheel. Now this was a sunny and warm day, so when one of your wheels is covered in fluid and the rest of the rig is bone dry, you get a little pit in your gut. Upon closer inspection it appears to be differential oil. Very awesome. Turns out a wheel bearing had basically been hulk smashed causing a failed axle seal and blah blah blah. I walked inside our house and told Candace “Uhh, yeah, we aren’t leaving today.” I think she wanted to hurt me when first said it. To clarify, this truck of mine has been a very slow and very expensive project. I’ve been throwing money and time into this thing to prepare it for a kickass trip like this. New bumpers for bumping stuff, sliders (which turns out weren’t small cheeseburgers), a winch for rescuing Miles when he inevitably falls into a well, completely new suspension set up to make sure the truck can carry my chubby self, etc. I’ve put more money into building this thing than the truck is worth (I’m super good with investing. I’d probably buy 100 pennies for two dollars). It was the first big inaugural trip now that it’s finally off-road worthy. Candace, Miles and I had been looking forward to this for almost a year. So, to have all this work go into the vehicle to get it all rugged so I can beat it up off road at 12k feet in the mountains, it really hurt to find out I probably couldn’t even safely drive it to Taco Bell. Story of my life and a bad omen. Well a major headache, some new parts, and a couple days later we were on the road. We made the 20 hour drive to the San Juan mountains in Colorado and had a week of thunderstorms, rainbows, lightning, flowers, and mountains. Our last day in Colorado found us here in American Basin. A fun trail, mostly easy, but a little bit of a “moderate” or 4lo section towards the end. We set up the roof top tents, scouted the area a bit, and were surprised that after an hour or so we had the place mostly to ourselves. Just one other photographer in an FJ who said he’d been there for several days… lucky guy! In between a couple passing storms the afternoon light was looking pretty good so I decided it would be a nice opportunity to fly the drone that I’ve had for 8 months and almost never used. Miles was pretty excited to see it as I had been bragging about all the cool aerial photos I was gonna get and telling him how I’m a better pilot than he is and could probably do his job since I can fly a drone. I got the thing into the air, did some flying around, and photographed the gorgeous light on the mountains. I was showing Miles all the cool features, camera settings, etc, when all of the sudden I realized I was shooting everything in jpeg instead of RAW. Such a rookie mistake. I fiddled around and tried to switch it back to RAW while I got an earful of “rookie” jokes from Miles when I was alerted by the drone that the battery was low and it was returning back to me using the built in GPS… it has this cool auto-return feature so dummies like me don’t end up losing them out in the mountains. Then it happened. I lost it out in the mountains. I don’t know what happened, but I got an “aircraft disconnected” message then never saw the thing again. So if you head out to American Basin this summer or fall, there is a DJI Phantom 3 Pro in the hillsides up there with some pretty cool jpegs on the memory card. You can have them. Obviously the “return to home” feature doesn’t work on it, so don’t bother trying to get it to me or my home if you find it. The only consolation prize was the light that evening. The sun came in and out of clouds towards the west while thunder and lightning pounded us from the east. Miles found this comp first, but then abandoned it, so I stole it from him. But he got some better stuff upstream anyways, so I don’t feel so bad. I have a massive amount of images to process from this trip, Namibia, Norway, etc… and am finally finding the time to process them. Also I have a brand new video coming out next week along with the shot that goes with it. So if you care at all, there’s that.

Ryan Dyar: Photos