Pocket Camera on the Easy Pass Trail
Last Saturday I made a trip up the North Cascades Highway to scout out locations to take my Pocket Camera Wildflower Photography class at North Cascades Institute on Tuesday. The trail I used the last time I taught the class, Heather Pass and Maple Pass, was reported to still have a lot of snow. So I chose the Easy Pass trail, which climbs reasonably gently for a couple of miles through wonderful forest and then breaks out into the subalpine and alpine splendor.
Since I was teaching pocket camera photography, I only carried my Canon S70 with me to photograph the flowers. My idea was to create a video slideshow to introduce my students to the trail they’d be hiking and to show what can be done with little cameras.
The class has now come and gone, with 15 delightful students who learned a lot. I learned from them, too. The North Cascades Learning Center on Diablo Lake is a great place to have a class, with comfortable facilities, a splendid setting, and outrageously good food. The evaluations are coming in and they’re looking good. I hope to be able to teach the class again next year.
In addition to hiking to Easy Pass, we also hiked and photographed on Sauk Mountain, one of my all-time favorite easy-access wildflower hikes. Following our Tuesday hike and photo session everyone chose three favorite images and we had a group critique with their photos on the big screen. Some of the students had some very nice photos to share.
The slideshow was created in ProShow Producer, a Windows-only program. I used the random effects tool, and then manually adjusted image movement and transitions when the auto feature produced something that I didn’t like. All the images were processed in Adobe Lightroom 3 before bringing them into Producer.