The John Muir Trail’s 220 miles are the prize of the Sierra Nevada and many say of the whole PCT. It’s not surprising given that there isn’t a wasted moment from when the trail rises above the calamity of Yosemite Valley till topping out on Mt. Whitney and descending down the 99 switchbacks to Whitney Portal. The trail winds it’s way through an all-star roster of parks and wilderness areas including: Yosemite National Park, Yosemite Wilderness, Inyo National Forest, Ansel Adams Wilderness, Sierra National Forest, Devils Postpile National Monument, John Muir Wilderness, Kings Canyon National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon Wilderness. The mountainous landscape lends itself to panoramas, but there are also plenty of critters in the mountains. On my trip the most notable sightings were a white-tailed jackrabbit, an american pika, many mule deer and yellow-bellied marmots, a few grouse, and plenty of birds and trout. There were also a good number of fellow hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail hiking north who were always willing to trade details on the conditions at their last pass.
Buying camera lenses can be difficult without properly test-driving and the fact that new lenses don’t always have good example images available to show the range of zooms (especially for APS-C sensor cameras paired with EF lenses). In this post I’ve gone through my archive and selected images that were taken from the same vantage point at both the widest and narrowest zoom settings. This will hopefully help those considering purchasing any of these lenses (or lenses of comparable zooms) for an APS-C equipped camera.
This is the kit I bring with me for Adventure times and while they aren’t the fastest lenses, they allow me to cover a range of 10-400mm or the 35mm-equivalent of 16-648mm. This is a pretty awesome range to have with only three lenses.
All the images below have been processed with Lightroom 3 and exported at 1440px widest side and are, unless noted, uncropped and unrotated. I’ve also noted the zoom (unconverted), f-stop, and shutter speed in the file name and in the lightbox if interested. My camera is a small, light, and humble, 7-year-old Canon 450D with an APS-C size sensor that results in a 1.62x crop factor. As such, this post is primarily for those with the same size sensor (latest models are Canon EOS 7D Mark II, 70D, & 760D).
Also, off topic but relevant to this post, note that Safari is having issues with my CSS columns and insisting on unevenly distributing the text in the columns to the left, so there are always two more rows of text on the left than the right, even if there are only two rows of text total. As I look for a fix please consider viewing in Chrome.
