As amazing as it seems, although I’ve been living in the Pacific Northwest for more than a quarter-century, virtually my entire time has been spent west of the Cascades, with a few trips over that ridge to shoot foliage and festivals on their eastern slope. Until this past July 3rd, the furthest east I had [...]
The recent failure of a couple of hard drives on my system (fortunately, not connected to my photo storage) made me think about how to make sure hard drives can be reliably used in a DAM — that’s “Digital Asset-Management” — system. Since this seemed like a more-permanent issue than just a blog post, I [...]
Like every photographer, I have a “bucket list” of locations I have yet to visit, but where I want to eventually shoot. In the immediate Northwest area, my top “must-photograph” locations going into 2010 were places such as Shi-Shi and Second Beaches, the lavender fields at Sequim, more of the Oregon coast, Crater Lake, and [...]
A week ago, my computer monitor expired. No great surprise there — I’d had it for many years, and was surprised it had lasted so long. Anyway, those cool new widescreen flat-panel monitors were available everywhere, for a much-lower price than I had paid for my monitor the last time around. Piece of cake, right? [...]
As much as it galls me, as a Washington resident, to have to admit this, but there’s no better place for tulip-field shooting than Woodburn, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Don’t get me wrong — the Skagit Valley area north of Seattle still has far more tulip-growing areas than Woodburn, and offers, in Roozengaarde, the best [...]
Unlike last year, when the tulips only reached their peak in the last days of April’s Pacific Northwest tulip festivals, we’ve had a very early spring this year, with some fields already coming into full color by the beginning of the month. Peak color should be lasting for the next two weeks. Although I normally [...]
Traditionally, I’ve always considered the annual Pacific Northwest “photography season” to begin with the first daffodils appearing in the flower farms of the Skagit Valley (whose much better-known tulip season begins about a month or so thereafter). Last year, after the notorious 2008-09 winter, the daffodils didn’t make their first appearance until mid-March, and weren’t [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
