Gold in Silver

Closed | October 30th, 2009 | Posted in Professional, Travel and location recommendations

As the end of the Northwest “shooting season” draws near, I (along with many other of the area’s photographers) find myself rushing to get in as much of autumn as I can before hunkering down to the coming four-to-five months of steady rain, slate-gray skies, bare branches, and brown vegetation.  (Not that there’s nothing to shoot up here in winter, it’s just that you don’t have the great day-in, day-out opportunities you have the rest of the year.)

Thus it was that I found myself making not one but two round-trips to the Oregon border and points further south this past weekend.

The first was a shooting excursion/family trip along the Columbia, then back up through Trout Lake and Klickitat Canyon before returning through central Washington in the evening.  Unfortunately, this trip only offered a few good photo opportunities.  (While setting up a shot, I encountered one of the residents of Trout Lake, who mentioned to me that the foliage had been a lot better before a storm came through the night before, stripping many of the remaining leaves from the trees.  Go figure.)  The day wasn’t a total loss, though, as I got a few decent autumn images, including the two you see here.  (The one above is of Mount Adams, the third-most-famous volcano in southwest Washington, after Rainier and St. Helens.)  And I certainly discovered a new area to which I’ll be sure to return next year, hopefully under better conditions.

It was on Sunday, however, that I “struck gold”…literally.

Getting up at an ungodly hour after the previous night’s late return, I found myself taking the same route down to Portland in the darkness of early morning.  (Thank heaven for the working cruise control on my replacement for “Big Blue,” along with the new Beatles reissues on CD!)   This time, however, I continued on I-5 down to Salem, arriving at Silver Falls State Park, a renowned fall foliage location, just after the clouds had rolled in, making for an ideal day for waterfall photography.

I had never been to Silver Falls before…I was unprepared for the overwhelming beauty I found there.  Although it doesn’t have the variety of falls found, say, in the Columbia Gorge, it does have a whole collection of impressive waterfalls plunging into deep, narrow canyons which, in autumn, are filled — almost bursting — with golden big-leaf maples, evergreen conifers. and the bright green of moss and ground-cover.  On many of the falls, you can walk behind the fall itself and view the autumnal forest with the water’s plume as a ghostly foreground.  For the nature photographer, it’s almost a case of sensory overload. I only made it to three of the ten falls before the predicted autumn storm arrived, cutting my trip short, but it’s just as well.  Had I remained any longer, I woudn’t have been able to pull myself away until winter had stripped ever last bit of fall color from the canyons.

First on my route was South Falls:

Then, on to North Falls:

Finally, Upper North Falls, where the rains moved in moments after I took this shot:

Only time will tell if this was, indeed, the last major photo session of 2009 for me.  All I can say is, if so, the Northwest “shooting season” ended on the highest possible note I could imagine.

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Hoh, Hoh, Hoh

Closed | October 29th, 2009 | Posted in Professional, Travel and location recommendations

While rewarding, the Hoh Rain Forest is, by far, the most difficult forest subject I’ve ever shot.

Compared to the Hoh, other forests in Washington state (including the Sol Duc Trail, Grove of the Patriarchs, and so on) have a certain flow — there’s a layering of trees, undergrowth, rivers, and other features that make compositions easy to find.  Not so here — at least one other photographer has, quite accurately, described the Hoh as “chaotic,” a jumble of different elements thrown together in such a way as to make composition difficult.  Imagine, if you will, that you’re an architectural photographer, used to taking images of building interiors.  Now, imagine being placed in a warehouse full of priceless antique and designer furniture in no apparent order, and being charged with coming up with well-composed images of the contents…but without being allowed to move or rearrange any of the contents.  That’s what a shoot at the Hoh is like for nature photographers.

When shooting here, I had to especially keep in mind the old photographer’s adage of “close one eye first.”  Much of the order that first seems apparent as you hike the Hall of Mosses or Spruce Nature Trail is due to your two eyes and brain combining to give you a 3D image.  But close one eye, and what seems like an appealing foreground-middleground-background composition becomes a flat 2D “texture squash” with no discernible pattern or order.  Simply by closing one eye, you can avoid wasting time and memory-card space on images that will prove to be disappointing.

The second adage to keep in mind is a reversal of the usual proverb:  “Don’t miss the trees for the forest.”  When confronted with an enveloping environment like the Hoh, one’s first instinct is to try to find a “grand landscape” that takes in the whole essence of the rainforest.  Try that, and you’ll be guaranteed frustration.  Instead of photographing the forest, photograph the trees.  Zoom in on interesting details, and small sections of the forest where you can discover an overall logic of lines and patterns.  While I didn’t do this myself this time, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to visit the Hoh armed with only a telephoto zoom (maybe a 70-300mm for D-SLRs), so that you’re forced to find interesting compostions that don’t take in a large portion of what’s before you.  And, of course, zooming in avoids the perennial problem of trying to compose to cut out the undesirable white overcast sky (and don’t even dream of trying to photograph here in sunlight!).

A final observation:  there’s a tendency, when shooting in any forest with giant trees, to primarily go with vertical compositions to bring out the strong up-and-down lines of the trees.  Indeed, I did the same here, but found that, for whatever reason, my best images on this day were almost all horizontal.  Perhaps a large number of parallel vertical lines, however short, are preferable to a smaller number of more-extended verticals.  Go figure.

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Mount St. Helens, twenty-nine years later

Closed | October 28th, 2009 | Posted in Professional, Travel and location recommendations

The first thing you notice are the crickets.  There are hundreds of them — colliding with you, getting in the way of your compostion while the shutter is open, perching on grasses and stones.  Why so many?  You start to wonder what could explain the cricket population — is there a typical predator that hasn’t made it back to the blast zone?   Then, you suddenly notice the silence…and realize, even after almost thirty years, there are no birds here.

All of us have seen photos of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.  On my trip to the Pacific Northwest before moving here back in 1982, my ex-wife and I pulled off the interstate and drove to the closest-allowable vantage point, then dozens of miles away, to stare at what was left of the mountain in the distance, a faint steam cloud emerging from its crater.  But this year marked the first time I actually made the drive to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, a mere five miles from the mountain, and the place where the late David Johnston radioed his final words on the morning of May 18, 1980:  “Vancouver! Vancouver!  This is it!”

Whatever you may have seen second-hand, nothing will prepare you for the overwhelming strangeness that is Mount St. Helens.  The word “moonscape” has become overused when describing the blast zone, but I can’t think of a more-accurate description.  As you gaze at St. Helens, you reflexively follow the sides of the slope up to a no-longer-existent summit, and imagine that whole immensity of mountain exploding into dust, dust that covers all you can see, in a matter of seconds — and imagine the young David Johnston standing in this spot as his doom swept down upon him.  The oppressive sense of absence, of a lack of life and growth, is almost overwhelming.  This used to be a forested mountain with reflecting lakes, much like so many other beautiful peaks in the Cascades.  How could all that have been wiped away, replaced with this barrenness stretching over hundreds of square miles, in but a few minutes?

And yet…I overheard a ranger speaking to a group of tourists, pointing out that, while the common reaction of first-time visitors is similar to mine, those who return after several years express an amazement at how much the area has recovered.  Dry grasses form sere meadows in patches here and there along the Plains of Abraham; one such meadow, directly in the shadow of the mountain, hosts a herd of elk. Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels can be found in quantity around the Observatory, begging or stealing handouts from visitors.  (And, despite my earlier observation, birds aren’t entirely absent in the Monument; late in the afternoon, a pair of hunting Peregrine Falcons swooped and pinwheeled through the sky above Johnston Ridge, their wings making the sound of miniature helicopters.)  Wildflowers sprout here and there in the ashy soil.  The lava dome continues to grow; it won’t be much longer until it reaches the top of the crater rim, then surmounts it.  In coming years, St. Helens will take on the appearance of a mini-mountain set in the middle of a larger, truncated one — and, of course, one day in the distant future the mountain will have regained something close to the conical form it had before 1980.  Needless to say, I will be long-gone before that happens, or before the forests return to what, nearly three decades later, is still a severe, uncompromising landscape.

When dealing with Mount St. Helens as a photographer, I found that there were two different, diametrically-opposite approaches that each worked well.  The first was to emphasize the returning life that can, indeed, be found there, seeking out  foreground features such as flowers or vegetation, and boosting the saturation slightly to bring out the many subtle differences in the shades of rock found on the mountain and along the canyons formed by the eruption.

The second is to take the opposite  route, and resort to black-and-white imagery that emphasizes the harshness of the terrain.  In the past, I have been very pessimistic about black-and-white conversion of digital images, finding them inferior in tonality to monochrome images from 35mm film.  Fortunately, the color controls in Lightroom add a whole new level of flexibility in being able to take any color in an image and map it to a specific shade of gray.  For the first time, I am getting black-and-white images from digital files that I’m not hesitant to share alongside my color work.

Will I return to Mount St. Helens?  I assume I will do so at one time or another; in particular, I missed peak wildflower season, and maybe the addition of paintbrush and lupine will relieve the overwhelming sense of deadness that, at least for me on my first visit, was present everywhere I looked.  Still,  I don’t see St. Helens becoming one of my favorite photo locations in the Northwest.  I’m drawn to life, color, and freshness — qualities that were anything but present on my trip to the Monument.  And I hope and pray that I’m long-departed by the time my beloved Mount Rainier, inevitably, follows in the path of its neighbor in the Pacific “ring of fire.”

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Farewell to "Big Blue"

Closed | October 9th, 2009 | Posted in Personal, Professional

When one speaks of a favorite piece of photo equipment, it’s usually a reference to a camera body or lens; a tool used to capture an image.  Sometimes, it’s something like a tripod or backpack; a tool used to support the equipment needed to capture the image.

In this case, though, I’m talking about a “tool” used to take me and my equipment to places where I could capture images.

On August 24, half-way up Mount Rainier, my 1991 Honda Accord finally gave up the ghost, its engine blown.  Over eighteen years, and 429,653 miles, “Big Blue” had carried me, my family, and my equipment everywhere from up a dirt road to Mowich Lake to 400-mile “day trips” out to the Olympic peninsula to motion-picture shoots all over western Washington (not to mention the more mundane tasks like commutes to day jobs and shopping trips).

20051009_0080web(For this post, I went through my files, trying to find a photo of my Accord.  Unfortunately, I guess I was too busy shooting nature to have taken the time to get a good photo of something human-made, particularly something I figured would last forever.  The best shot I could find was from a trip to North Cascades National Park in 2005, when it found itself as an inadvertent perch for a gray jay.)

Sure, it would have been possible to replace the engine.  But it had hit that point in its life where small to not-so-small things were failing on a regular basis (over the past few months, I’d had to replace both the clutch and starter), and it had a laundry-list of costly maintenance items needing attention soon.  It was clear that, to continue a useful life, my Accord would need to belong to someone with a mechanic in the family.  So, I gave it to the Honda specialist at the local Greg’s Japanese Auto (highly recommended for those in the Seattle area), so he could restore it for a new driver in his family.  And, as for me?  Well, I now have a 1999 Accord sitting in Big Blue’s former place.  It only has 95,000-odd miles on it, so it should hopefully be good for a decade or so…

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Forty years after "The Star-Spangled Banner"…

Closed | August 19th, 2009 | Posted in Uncategorized

On the morning of August 18, 1969, Jimi Hendrix mounted the stage as the final act of the now-legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair.  (In fact, he was supposed to be closing the festival the previous evening, but delays — including a massive rainstorm — on Sunday afternoon meant that the music continued all night long and into Monday morning.) Midway through his set, he launched into an unforgettable instrumental improvisation on the National Anthem that became his signature, and an icon of the anarchy, passion, and chaos of the last years of the 1960s.

Thirteen months later to the day, Hendrix was dead at age 27.

Jimi Hendrix was born in Seattle, and his family lived in Renton.  Upon his death, he was buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in the Renton Highlands, not far from my home.  On Tuesday, the fortieth anniversary of Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock, I visited his memorial and took the photograph included here.  Although not my usual subject material, it’s an important place in the Pacific Northwest, as well as an important place for those who grew up in those times.

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Wildflower Heaven!

Closed | August 4th, 2009 | Posted in Professional, Travel and location recommendations

If you have the chance and live near Mount Rainier, drive up to Tipsoo Lake sometime this week.

Rainier is known for its wildflowers, and rightfully so.  Thousands of people have visited Sunrise (now slightly past prime) over the past month, and tens of thousands will visit Paradise during the remainder of this month, hiking the many trails up there, jaws dropping at the beauty of the meadows.  But what if you could get the same experience in a short (less than 1/2 mile) and almost level walk?

For the next week, Tipsoo is it.  Of course, you can hike the Naches Peak Loop, which includes Tipsoo lake, and probably get even more in the way of great vistas.  But, for a super-condensed version of what makes Rainier special, take the short loop around the lake.  Preferably, you’ll take it clockwise.  Once you make the first turn, you’ll see Rainier reflected in the waters of the lake — this is a great sunrise location, by the way, but bring the bug repellent! — with lupine and magenta paintbrush lining the shore.  Then, swing around the other end of the lake, and find yourself knee-deep in pasqueflower, mountain daisy, broad-leaf arnica, Sitka valerian, plus the ubiquitous paintbrush and lupine.  All you need to do is use a long lens and zero in on groups of flowers, or shoot through an entire field, using a wide aperture to isolate fitting blooms among a riot of color.  The photo I have included here is merely the first shot (out of almost two hundred!) that I finished processing.  But, seriously, if you love Rainier wildflowers, or if you’ve never visited the mountain during bloom season and want to know what all the excitement is about, I can’t think of a better way to experience it in a “crash course” than a walk around Tipsoo Lake in the next week.  After that, I suspect the flowers will start fading soon, so hurry!

POSTSCRIPT:  As promised, here are a few more photos from the same shoot.  I was back up there a couple of weeks later and, as I expected, most of the flowers were completely gone.  It still made for a nice hike, but I wouldn’t count on Tipsoo as being a good choice for  photography much after early-mid-August.

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It's always something…

Closed | July 27th, 2009 | Posted in Professional

We all have our dreams of having the “perfect” something-or-other:  the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect girl- or boy-friend, etc.  For nature photographers, it’s “the perfect shoot” — one where you arrive at a location, instantly find great foreground-background combinations in ideal lighting conditions, and merely have to set up your equipment and snap away to get Ansel Adams-level images.

Well, needless to say, that happens rarely, if ever.   Generally, you have to take the imperfect conditions you’re given and find a way to create compelling images out of them.  But the photo of Mount Rainier in the masthead of this journal is a reminder that some conditions, as Orwell might have said, are more imperfect than others.  And that shoot, from a couple of weeks ago, was an all-time classic in terms of taking things as they come.  (It must have been the feast-day of St. Murphy the Lawgiver.)

My goal had been to get some sunrise (the time) shots at Sunrise (the location on the northeast slope of Mount Rainer) while the wildflower meadows were in bloom.  The night before, this looked like the ideal situation:  I had already scouted Sunrise, and found some promising spots on the Silver Forest trail.  The weather forecast was predicting clear skies giving way to “partly cloudy” just at about the time of sunrise.  Since weather patterns always flow from west to east around here in summer (this is called “foreshadowing”), it would mean the clouds would be starting to flow in from behind the mountain, hopefully catching the colors of the rising sun.  It would be the perfect shoot!

So, I drag myself out of bed at 2:30 A.M., gulp down some coffee, and hit the road.  Despite the ungodly hour, I am feeling excited.  As I reach the Sunrise turnoff on route 410, and start the climb up the mountain, everything is looking great:  I’ll be there in plenty of time, and, in the clear air, the surrounding mountain peaks look close enough to touch.

And then…I get to the fallen tree.

A large tree has somehow come crashing down in the middle of the night, blocking the entire road to Sunrise.  I’m obviously the first person on the road that morning, and, thus, the first to encounter it.  When the rangers come on duty in a few hours, someone will tell them about it, and they’ll probably have a work crew up there clearing the road by mid-morning, but that’s obviously too late for any sunrise shooting.

Oh, well.  On to plan B.  A bit further up 410 is a pulloff with a nice view of Rainier and the White River valley.  Although there’s no real foreground to speak of, and only one possible composition from that spot, at least I’ll get the mountain and, since weather patterns always flow from west to east around here in summer (remember…”foreshadowing”), hopefully some broken clouds catching the rising sun.  I get there in plenty of time, set up the camera and wait.  Soon, over the mountains behind me, I start seeing the pink glow of sunrise on the clouds.  It won’t be long now before the rays hit the scene in my viewfinder.

I wait.  And wait.

The pink glow in the east goes away.  What?

It’s then that I start tracking cloud movement, and realize what is probably already obvious to each of you by now:  for once, the weather pattern isn’t running west to east, but southeast to northwest.  And, to the east of me, hidden by the mountains, a cloudbank has moved in, blocking the rising sun.

I got up at 2:30 in the morning for this?

Nonetheless, I wait around.  If the clouds are moving in from the southeast, maybe an interesting pattern will come in above Rainier itself.  And, indeed, one does — a very interesting pattern, at that.  But the sun is still being blocked in the east, leaving everything a dull shade of gray.  The cloud moves just past Rainier, and heavier, more solid clouds start to move in.   Then, just as I’m about ready to pack it in and call it a wild-goose chase…the sun does break through the clouds.  Not soon enough for me to get my idealized vertical comp of the cloud directly over Rainier, but, by going horizontal, reframing to cut out the river valley and pulling back (making the mountain a “bit player” in its own drama), I manage to capture the image above, which I title Rainier Overshadowed.  I get a few more shots, including the one on the masthead, before the clouds roll in for good.

So, although you hear it hundreds of times, I can only repeat the old cliché:  when photographing, and particularly when things appear to be a bust, stay out there until after the point where you’re telling yourself it’s hopeless.  Generally, it’s just after that point that you’ll get the opportunity you’ve been looking for, if you can think quickly enough to abandon your pre-visualized notions and photograph the scene that’s before you in the here and now.

P.S.:  A few days later, I did finally get my chance to make it to Sunrise for sunrise.  Here’s an example of what I had been hoping to get on the feast of St. Murphy the Lawgiver.  Aside from there being no photogenic broken cloud, it was…the perfect shoot.

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Secrets of Art Festivals

Closed | July 24th, 2009 | Posted in Professional

In my last post, I commented that I should really write an article about how to submit and present your work to local art festivals and shows.  You asked for it — you got it!  Here it is…enjoy!

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Art Festival time!

Closed | July 23rd, 2009 | Posted in Professional

At least here in the greater Seattle area, summer is the time for community festivals, most sponsored through the Seafair organization.  And where there’s a festival, there’s generally a juried art show attached.

Last week was the turn of Covington Days.  I was pleased that my ”…in the widening gyre…” was a prize-winner at that festival, but the big news, as far as I’m concerned, was the overall excellence of the photographs on display there.  In past years, I found that much of the photography submitted to local festivals was of the “I took a nice snapshot on our vacation to that national park, so I’m going to enlarge it and put it in a nice frame so all my neighbors can admire my work at our town’s Art Festival!” variety.  Not this time — at Covington, we had several walls filled with work that was not only technically excellent and well-composed, but reflected a variety of unique photographic visions, of using photography in different, original, and evocative ways.  My congratulations to Daniel and Stephen Rice, Doug Sims, Mark Jacobs, Larry Lindstrom, and many others whose names I didn’t get.

This does remind me:  I’ve done enough festivals in recent years that I’ve learned some important guidelines for how to improve your chances of getting your images accepted for showing (hopefully with a prize ribbon hanging beside them!).  I should write an article about it soon.

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Well, here goes nothing…

Closed | July 22nd, 2009 | Posted in Personal

One thing you can count on, when you run across a nature photographer’s blog, is an initial post saying, essentially:  “Well, I’m finally dragging myself into the 21st century.  I’ve always avoided computers like the plague before, preferring to concern myself with the wonders of nature and the pure process of image-making, but everyone else is doing it, so I guess it’s time I reluctantly did the same.”

Well, that’s all very well and good, but how on earth would such a statement apply to me?  After all, far from being a technophobe or computer-averse, I spent a good chunk of my past life writing software for a living, and had years of 12-plus hour days churning out C++ code without ever touching a camera except during rare vacations.  It’s safe to say I know my way around a computer.  So, why have I taken so long to make the plunge into this?

Well…it’s mainly laziness.  I’ve had a website up and running, obviously, for years, and added an Articles section last year, for sharing my thoughts on various aspects of photography.  But I’ve fallen way behind in posting material for that section (on which I do intend to catch up, by the way).  And I’ve found a lot of my observations aren’t fitting subjects for a self-contained article, but are more bits and pieces of thoughts that come to me every so often.  In other words, good subjects for a “daily notes” section.  The journal format is ideal for such subjects, so I’m finally getting around to creating one.

By the way, the one technophobic comment I’ll make:  it’s a journal, not a “blog.”  I can’t stand that term!

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