Day Zero

These rocks might have lost the green skin of summer but the barnacles are determined to stand the augmenting cold weather.

Hasselblad X2D day zero

Smoke in the Mountains

The new “normal” late summer/early fall.

The Milky Way over Mt. Baker

Late summer is probably the best time to shoot astro - early nightfall, the temperatures are not below freezing and the skies are void of fall and winter clouds.

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.

A tale of two photographs

Photograph 1: Mount St. Helens

Moonset was around 9:30 pm and it was conveniently dark by that time in the evening, but the cauldron did not cast long and dramatic shadows in the moonlight. Therefore, I used one of the shots I took at sunset when the play of shadows and a beautiful dull orange light spotlighted the mountain, in the final minutes of the sun above the horizon. After the sunset, it was a test of patience - the wait for over two hours for the moon to set and the sky to get dark when it became possible to find the Northstar. Polar alignment of the star tracker took no more than a few minutes when the sky wasn’t completely dark and then another round of waiting game till it was dark enough for the Milky Way shot. Tracked for approximately 1000 seconds.

We listened to a bull elk occasionally but in regular intervals announced its presence in the valley below us and besides a few occasional park visitors the night was fairly quiet.

Photograph 2: The Feathers

One could only hear the bass and occasionally the drums from the Amphitheater where Dave Matthews Band was playing that night. It was the long weekend therefore, the Coulee was filled with cars, campers and visitors but it could not bother me as I was shooting in a direction the car headlights did not touch the basalt columns nor the foreground.

We got there an hour after sunset therefore I did not get a chance to photograph the foreground in daylight. Tracking was not as accurate as during the previous photo, so took shorter exposures. The foreground also shot around the same time (while the camera mounted on the inactive tracker) was a 4 minutes exposure at 1600 ISO, and a passing car (and I am thankful) painted the sagebrushes accidentally, glad I did not discard the shot.

Dust in the wind

Wind gusts were not as dry as I thought it could have been, for they were carrying both water (from Columbia below) droplets and dust particles several dozen feet above the ground. I wouldn’t have had luck using a tripod, the roof of my car provided adequate support for steadiness required for telephoto shots like these.

No, that famous song by Kansas wasn’t in my head but it felt like it should have.

Baker over Ferry

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

End of a day

After several days of very warm weather, we got a cloud cover today, that extended beyond the Cascades and over the plains to the east. The wheat fields were harvested but the farmers were kind to leave few rows uncut by the highway.

Creating digital art on a tablet

When working with a fabric canvas and with oil or acrylic paint one does not have the freedom of asynchronous layers deposition. I realized this advantage only recently, while working on this sort of first draw digital painting I made on a new iPad.

South Clayoquot Sound (Tofino)

I gazed at the mountains out of a tiny polycarbonate window of a DHC-2 Beaver, finding opportunities to photograph and carefully avoiding reflections on the window. The air was surprisingly thick at the altitude on this bright warm summer day, and my mind was clear.

Lavender farms

I’ve lived in Washington state for over fifteen years and yet I had not photographed a lavender farm until 2022.

Hidden creek

An unknown creek in the lower Cascades

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.

Effervescence (Timelapse Video)

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.