Tag: blue

Being Late

I have a pattern of being later. I always get too involved in photographing wherever I’m and end up being late for photographing sunset wherever I want to photograph sunset. Or I wake up just a little bit late and late to photographing sunrise.

Sometimes it plays out well though. Like in this case I was driving to photograph sunrise at mountain Rainier and I was late, I was too late.

On the way there I was passing a lake as usual. The morning was very cold and steam was rising from the lake. The sky had just a touch of pastel pink from a distant sunrise. I decided that this scene was worth stopping and photographing. Even though I was in a hurry. And that’s how I met the sunrise.

Shapes of Water

I love moving water for an infinite number of shapes it can take. I can spend minutes, hours in one place photographing moving water and getting a new image every time.

Consider the following photos as an example of what I’m talking about. All of them were taken at The Lost Coast at around the same time of day at the same place.

Here the water is in a shape of a bird:

The one in a shape of a vortex:

And the one in a shape of a mountain:

Opportunity Gone

That’s interesting how sometimes we underestimate the changes that happen around us.

A while ago I took this photo near Reflection Lake at Mount Rainier. It is not as good technically as I’d like, or at least not up to my current more experienced standards of execution. But now nothing like this can be done.

This year I went to this spot again and found that the road near the lake has been widened and rocks have been places on a side of the road close to the lake and the place where this photo was taken was gone.

Suddenly not very original photo turned into the one that cannot be repeated again. Life is a curious thing.

By Reflection Lake
By Reflection Lake

Lonely Boat

Do you ever feel lost in space?

There seems to be a pattern of photos throughout the years I photograph, kind of lost in space photos with a subject lost in a lot of blank space around it. Like Stillness. Lost in Fog or Lighthouse.

On a trip to The Lost Coast (no punt intended) last May I took another lost in space photo. This time a lonely boat in the ocean.

Lonely Boat
Lonely Boat

Persistence Pays Off

I’ve passed by Lake Crescent many many times. It is a large lake and one of the important features of Olympic National Park with its deep incredibly clean water. Over the years I’ve stopped at different places around it and taken several photos,  but have not got any really interesting ones.

Eventually I gave up and was just passing it by on my way to the beaches of the Pacific coast. But as you know persistence pays off. So, this summer I was driving from the beaches back home and as usual my way back was around the lake. This time was different…

I saw this beautiful scene. Finally the lake opened up its soul to me. It was calm and serene. Mist was hanging over the lake hiding the west bank. Mountain ridges were coming down to the lake becoming softer and softer in the distance with shades of pastel blue. The water was like a glass perfectly reflecting the mountains and the pastel pink sky. Two trees were standing aside on the right bank. And one small next to them. Like a family that came out to the lake to have fun by its side.

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Dawn at Lake Crescent

Path of Light

Photography has been and hopefully remain as much about playing and experimenting. One of such fun things is to introduce an artificial light sources in a landscape. The official term for it is “light painting” but for me it is just playing with flashlights, imagining what a landscape can be, and then getting a surprising result.

Like in this photo that I took at the Second Beach in Olympic National Park just after sunset, when it was dark enough for a long exposure and dark enough for a flash light (actually 3 flashlights) to make a difference.

Path of Light
Path of Light

Depth of Field Matters

One of the things photographer needs to think about is a depth of field. When photographing grand landscape, I typically set aperture to middle point between widest and most closed to get most sharpness in the image. For a landscape overall sharpness of an image is typically more important than depth of field.

The story is completely different when photographing close-ups. Depth of field becomes extremely important. It can make or break the image. And getting everything sharp is not necessarily a good thing. And I just happened to have two images to demonstrate the difference.

First, an “everything sharp” image. The aperture was closed to the sharpest setting for the lens that I used (f/8). To me the image ended up too flat. There is no separation between the lupine and shed boards, the lupine seems to be carved in the wall.

Lupine by a Shed

The second image, which I like, is with the lens wide opened (f/2.8). The lens is well focused on the lupine. It is tack sharp. The wall is slightly out of focus. This creates a three dimensional feel in the photograph, there is a space between the flower and the wall.

Lupine by a Shed
Lupine by a Shed

Another interesting thing to note is that I experiment with different depth of field, light, composition while photographing. I took 38 photos of this lupine over two days. Later I reviewed and pick just one of them that I felt worked the best.

Fog over Golden Bridge

I always wanted to photograph Golden Bridge and Presidio in fog but in many times I had been to San Francisco I had never seen fog over Golden Bridge. Other photographers seemed to get it every time. Not me.

This May on the way back from The Lost Coast we spent a couple of days in San Francisco. One morning Very early before sunrise I went to photograph hoping to get lucky and see that mythical fog. And lucky I was. The was fog. And not just in the morning. It was there whole day. In fact it caused our flight to be delayed in the evening.

The fog was different from the one I used to. I’m used to fog in still windless weather. Golden Bridge fog was combined with strong winds. It was constantly on the move, thickening and lightening, lifting off and dropping back to the ground, letting sun in or blocking it off all together, constantly reshaping landscape.

It presented me with new and constantly changing photo opportunities. I could not get enough of it. I was running from one place to another and then back. The only limit was time.

On an Edge of Rain

We all have some small thing in our lives that we enjoy a lot. One of my things is to be under cover while it is raining. Not inside a house within four walls but almost outside, where I can smell the rain, feel a fresh breeze it is bringing, stretch my arm and feel wetness of rain drops. And yet at the same time feel protected from being completely wet. Like being in an open shed in a forest. Or just being in my garage with garage door opened, standing on an edge of the rain. Moments like that make me feel warm and cozy.

In one of those moments I photographed this iris growing next to my house:

Iris in Rain
Iris in Rain

The Lost Coast

Back in May my family and friends took a trip to Shelter Cove. It is a very small town located in the area with an intriguing name The Lost Coast. It is the only section of Pacific US coast that does not have Highway 1 following the coast. Once you get there you’ll understand why. Mountains with steep drop-offs come directly to the ocean. There is a small piece of flatland squeezed in between the mountains and the ocean. And that’s where Shelter Cove is located.

The road there is hard: long, narrow, windy and slow. That kept the place remote and less developed than the rest of the Pacific coast. There was no cell phone coverage, no Internet access, which made it into a nice experience. Suddenly there was so much time for family fun and games once those distractions were removed.

While this was a family vacation there was still a little bit of opportunity for photography. With the next few posts I’ll share the images and experiences I captures during the trip.