Category: color

Keep on Moving

Last weekend I made a short two day trip to the Palouse – an area in Eastern Washington famous for its rolling hills covered with patches of fields. It is very beautiful and photogenic place. Some call it American Toscana.

My first day of the trip in the Palouse was dreadful. Grey solid sky, no light, little color. Just as if it could not get any more discouraging, suddenly the rain started. It was pouring down heavily. Most people would stay home in that weather. Not me. I went on scouting around.

The rain stopped just as suddenly as it started. Heavy clouds and soft light were majestic.

I even caught a glimpse of warm pink glow in the sky from a light of the Sun settling for the night.

Just one small piece of advice: don’t drive dirt roads there when it is wet. The dirt is a fine grain clay that becomes extremely slippery when wet. You’ll lose any control over your car. I am talking about it from experience.

Rhododendrons or Not?

Recently I went with a fellow photographers to photograph rhododendrons which are common on eastern hills of Olympic mountains. We were hoping for fog to have a good separation of rhododendron bushes from trees in background.

There was fog but not where we needed it. The only option left was to use shallow depth of field. My fixed 50mm lens got second life. I had not used it for a while but it was most appropriate in that case since it had the widest aperture of all my lenses.

Rhododendron
Rhododendron

The other options was to let it blend with with forest, make it part of it.

Spring Green
Spring Green

Did I mention there was fog but not where we needed it? Well, we ended up spending most of the time photographing that fog that was somewhere else:

Fog Over Lowlands
Fog Over Lowlands

Fog Over Puget Sound
Fog Over Puget Sound

Freeway Poppies

California poppies can be found in Western Washington only along roads. I’ve spotted one of such places along one of freeways while driving my son to gymnastics. The hills was burning orange covered with poppies.

The next morning I woke up a little bit earlier to get to that hill and photograph poppies before work. I parked the car at the nearest parking lot next to a store and walked to that hill. The poppies were as good as the day before – an island of the Nature beauty in the middle of a city.

So, there I was, lying on a ground photographing poppies with cars passing by at a high speed. Here are a few photos I took:

Photo Accidents

Sometime I find a photograph just by accident. Like this one.

I was photographing flowers in a forest. The flowers were across a small creek that I could not cross. So, I was photographing with my hands stretched out, composing by looking at a live view on a screen on the back of my camera.

As my hands got tired I let my camera hang on a strap. That’s when I saw reflections down in the stream on the screen. I was immediately captivated by interweaving mesh of branches and interplay of continuously changing reflections in a moving water.

Flower Hill

As I wrote in my previous post (Good Night, Ladybug) there is a hill close to my house that has various wild flowers blooming every year. Here are a couple more photos that I took at that hill recently.

Good Night, Ladybug

I love the place where I live. There is a hillside not far from my house that surprises every year with a grand display of various wild flowers.

It changes every year. The first year I moved here it was covered with California poppies (well, I’m not in California, I’m in Washington, nevertheless we have occasional California poppies here). The next year it was covered with lupines. The year after that it was red poppies. Then chamomiles. This year it is a mix of various flowers.

I don’t know what’s the secret of this hill but I certainly appreciate the opportunity for close up and macro photography that the nature gives me.

Here is a photo I took at that hill recently just after dusk at twilight. The ladybug settled in chamomile flower for the night and the flower was slowly closing up.

Good Night, Ladybug

Soft Light

There is no such thing as bad light.

When I just started photographing the only good light I knew was a sunset or sunrise. Then I added daylight with sunlight breaking thru the clouds which was creating an interplay of shadow and light on the ground. But for longest time I thought grey overcast day is bad light that is not suitable for photographing anything.

Well, I was wrong. I just did not develop my eye enough to see what a beautiful soft light an overcast day can give. That’s the best light for photographing deep in the forest where direct sunlight falling down thru a thick canopy of leaves and branches create extreme contrast.

Overcast day on the other hand creates nice soft light that is smoothly descending thru every opening and canvasing the ground with soft highlights.

What a perfect opportunity to photograph this flower that is blooming deep in Pacific Northwest forests whole spring and summer. I love its perfect triangle of three petals and three leaves.

San Francisco Post Card

My family and I have just returned from a week long vacation in a small ocean shore town in an area with intriguing name "The Lost Coast". This is the only section of US Pacific coast that does not have highway 1 following the coast line.

This is probably the only remote place left on the west coast. No cell coverage, no internet for 5 days. And we’ve survived! More than that it was pretty enjoyable. Lots of fun for kids and parents. And a lot of photographic opportunities.

On the way back we stopped in San Francisco for a couple of days where I had fun photographing Golden Gate and Presidio in fog.

I’m just starting to dig thru all the photos I took on the trip. Meanwhile here is an image I made a year ago. A photograph of iconic Golden Gate bridge overlaid with a texture of a rock that I found just about where I took this photo of the bridge.

_MG_7313
Golden Gate Post Card

PS I’ll keep posting to my blog from my backlog of photos while I’m digging thru the images from a trip to The Lost Coast.

Tulip Fatigue?

Every year there is a tulip festival in Skygit Valley. It is probably one of the best events in the northwest. It attracts a lot of people and that includes photographic crowd. I’ve photographed there many times of the years.

This year I went to photograph there too. Strangely enough I ended up with no photographs of tulips. I photographed workers picking up bunches of tulips for sale. I photographed dirt roads, fences, trees, and everything else around except tulips. Do I have tulip fatigue and don’t respond visually to fields of tulips anymore?

Workers Picking Tulips
Workers Picking Tulips

Bus at the End of the Road
Bus at the End of the Road

Look Up, Look Down

After taking panorama of cherry trees in blossom at University of Washington campus I started photographing individual trees. Always my favorite shorts of trees looking up into the sky with a wide angle lens. I love the mesh of branches:

And then I focused on individual flowers and brick pattern with a macro lens: