Smoky sunset in the woods

Dense forest fire smoke from Bolt Creek fire started pouring over Western Washington on September 10th, 2022 but the air quality wasn’t great for a while - possibly due to smoke traveling from other fires in the region. These photographs were taken on the 9th during an evening walk in the forest - I was not expecting to find smoke trapped in the trees and in the sky above, rendering fog-like scene especially at sunset.

Baker over Ferry

The Northwest face of Mt. Baker over Strait of Georgia.

Old Robe Trail

Huckleberries dominated the upper parts of the canyon, and salmonberries took the lower parts of the trail near the river (South Fork Stillaguamish).

When the sun bleeds through the clouds

Every photograph has its story, but I can remember only a handful of them weeks and months later and this is one of those untold stories.

This photograph is a composite of three exposures, an HDR image that I created in Lightroom then color graded (also in LR). I am not a fan of auto-bracketing since my cameras don’t allow me to select a multi-point metering matrix for it to auto-bracket. A linear exposure stops bracketing rarely gets it right.

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The three photographs with manually bracketed exposures were shot on June 18th, 2022 around 9:00 PM Pacific at Picnic Pt. Park. The month of June in 2022 has been unnaturally cold, with clouds and rain lingering around for an extended Spring and deep into summer, creating great opportunities for shooting sunsets. We arrived at the park about an hour to sunset - we knew the area fairly well because we had been to the place many times. I started off shooting a beautiful algae bloom over the beach but the sun was too bright for photography - the kind off lighting that I was hoping to find in that cloudy day. It made sense to wait till the sun is at the horizon or below it, for it could light the clouds over the horizon.

Minutes before sunset the sun peeked out from the clouds and suddenly the clouds started to catch the light. I had very limited time to capture it. I wanted to put the pier ruins in front of the island at distance and below the sun at the horizon but also make sure the pier stumps are not over the dark island mass in the background. The tide seemed high, so I had to shoot from a distance, an unusual spot that I was not familiar with and had not explored before. Once I was at a convenient spot with the view I desired, switched from 21mm to 45mm lens because I was far from the subject and quickly started shooting.

Fast forward to today, July 3rd evening when I was culling through my Lightroom catalog came across these bracketed RAWs. I quickly put them together, searched for a BTS photo on my phone and wrote this blog post.

Smokestacks

We have entered the realms of summer - finally!

Summer means short and only partially-dark nights but comfortable outdoor weather for astro and nighttime photography, as long as the gnats and other blood sucking creatures aren’t around.

Over the hills and far away

The Memorial Day long weekend of 2022 was unnaturally cold and wet, even east of the Cascades. While we braved two nights in camping, took these photographs across the Upper Cascades as we drove around in search of dry weather.

I have to admit - I love to take photos under an overcast sky, and with waterproof/weatherproof gear, could care less about the rain…

Diablo lake was not milky teal but those clouds hugging the mountains across the water was a treat for the few folks who stopped by the famed vista point in this weather.

On the other side of the pass the sky was still not blue but the rain became thinner and the air drier. As we lost altitude, started noticing beautiful spotted white trunks of birch trees and lush spring green leaves filling the gaps in between the trunks.

Our final stop was a ghost town in the Far East and North. Still cloudy and occasional rain kept us indoors/in the car but I managed to take a few photographs when it was dry.

L'homme en Rouge

Colors of the clouds

Digital photography has come a long way in terms of device capabilities to record (or emulate) colors of nature.

Photographing Iceland in Winter - Part II

The colors from the 80's

It is still a bit cold for the animals in hibernation and the cold blooded crawlers to be out on these trails in Central Washington but not cold enough for the creeks and small lakes to be frozen. It almost feels like the end of winter but the lack of a lush green skin on the hills will remind one of the remaining days of winter with warmer days just around the corner.

It is the time of the year when nature in this region is engulfed in pastel colors.

Snow covered jetty

Hints of life beneath the snow and rocks, yellow ochre grass made me stop the car, get out and photograph this unknown, unnamed jetty in northwest Iceland.

Photographing Iceland in Winter

The winterland will always be exotic to me, and winter being my favorite season it is no doubt I enjoy photographing sceneries like these more than anything else and any other season. I have been to Iceland many times in the past during winter but somehow managed to avoid winter storms until 2022. Call it a fortunate or unfortunate fate but this has got to be the most unique of all visits to Iceland, not only from photography PoV but also the experience of driving in blinding blizzard through mountain passes in search for clear skies, search for a hot meal at 3 am in the morning amidst a pandemic, to name a few.

From the moment we landed in Keflavik till now there has been very little “gaps” in between snowfall and strong wind. This was certainly not the weather I was hoping for when I booked the trip in Aug ‘21 but I was mentally prepared for it about two weeks before the trip after looking at extended weather forecast. We packed our best winter gear for the trip and it pay off well. Although it is not extremely cold (temperature in the 20s F) the feels like was in the teens and sometimes single digit Fahrenheit especially at night with high wind blowing fine snow dust across the plains. The weather is not deterring us at all from going out every day, and capture these amazing winter sceneries across the west side of the country (I plan to drive eastwards later in the week).

While most of the roads in Reykjavik’s vicinity are cleaned very frequently, the highways became frozen as we went farther from the city. The temperatures being way below freezing was a good thing: kept the roads dry and therefore, less slippery. I have a Honda CR-V with studded tires that has decent handling on the snow. In between shooting I kept the camera inside a woolen hat so that the battery does not drain quickly, kept my hands warm in the insulated pockets of my jacket because I do not own fitted gloves for my wide hands short fingers and at times used the car to shield the tripod from wind gusts.

Sunrise is around 9:30 am and sunset around 5 pm everyday. Waking up at 3 am due to jet lag actually helped me get to destinations before sunrise, ahead of tour buses arriving with people.

I would like to think this type of weather with more than a foot of snow around coastal Iceland is not common, since it is so close to the ocean, making this trip a special and unique experience.

Frosted power lines

Besides the primary subject in this photograph, snow covered power lines illuminated by car headlights…

It was the weekend night out on the plains east of the Cascades, I was testing (new) Hasselblad’s widest lens for X system: the XCD 4/21. Arriving at this scene I realized very quickly it was not the best lens to frame the shot. There was only two ways to fill the view with the subject (the house): walk closer to it or use a less wide lens. A combination of sense of being respectful to private property and deep snow on the ground made me not choose the first option, and a desire to stick to the new lens made the second option less savory.

Light pillars in the lake

It is incredibly beautiful how lights at the edge of a water body form long pillar-like reflections on the water, especially when viewed from the other side of the water body.

Stacks in tide

For a world less square [from XPAN brochure]

Far from home

I don’t know many people who would drive four hours for a sunset but there are creatures like me - they exist!

32 sec at f/16, ISO 100 Hasselblad XCD 4/45P

32 sec at f/22, ISO 100 Hasselblad XCD 4/45P

Another weekend, another place to shoot at sunset.

Tacoma - half day

The weather changed from clear sunny skies to rolling storm clouds in just an hour, providing me excellent opportunities to shoot in varied lighting and other variance while I learn to shoot with my (new) medium format camera. When you’re shooting with the (Hasselblad) X1DII 50c, autofocus (AF) is not your friend. There are two ways to operate or get help with manual focus (MF): focus peaking and zoom. In my experience, I found focus peaking to be very unreliable, or perhaps I was using it wrong. The earlier part of the day while using focus peaking, most of my shots turned out soft but I got lucky with a handful.

Later in the day, I started using magnify focus method and got lot more reliable result. The camera being on the tripod (for long exposures) made it easy to use this MF method.

All in all, I am very happy to be shooting in medium format: the large sensor and large pixels makes a difference added Hasselblad color science and DR. I am not going to express myself on how much I love the physical design of this camera, and keeping that aside the features I love the most about this new system based on a very short period of playing with it are:

In-lens shutter system eliminating vibrations especially for those extremely long exposures
Appealing and somewhat acceptable noise grain at high ISO, keeping aside the fact that you’re getting less noise than FF cameras. Say goodbye to destructive noise reduction steps in post-processing tools like LR
Superb color reproduction and sharpness
Greater dynamic range, even better than (long time king) Sony FF cameras I own
Weather sealed - I have not taken the camera out in the rain but when you are living in the PNW chances are you will, very soon

4:3

After years of shooting in Full Frame, started a new chapter with Medium Format. Of the twenty something photographs I shot today, here are my favorites.

And now a few obligatory photos of the new gear…