Getting up in the air to photograph a subject from above presents options you just can’t get from the ground. And since I like beer, I jumped at the opportunity last September to photograph hops and the hops harvest in the Yakima valley. Continue reading
It may not have felt much like spring on Thursday, February 23 as I drove to Seattle for the 2017 Northwest Flower & Garden Show. There was a bit of fresh snow on the ground as I drove down I-5 for my annual fix of gardening inspiration. I’ve been going to the NWFGS for 20 years, sometimes as a speaker but more often just to enjoy the display gardens.
One of my favorite places to explore the saltwater shoreline near Bellingham is Larrabee State Park . It’s just a few miles south of town on Chuckanut Drive, aka Washington highway 11. Larrabee is Washington’s oldest state park, established in 1915. Originally just 20 acres, the park now includes 2,683 acres from Bellingham Bay to forested upland ridges.
In this pair of photos of the daylilies growing by our back door, in the first frame you see all the spent blossoms. That might be OK if the story you’re trying to tell is that daylily blossoms don’t last long and they linger on the stems until they dry up and fall off. But if what you’re after is a nice photo of daylilies blooming, then I think the photo looks a lot better with the spent blossoms removed.
It’s always easier to clean up details like this before capturing the image. Imagine how much time it would have taken in an image editing program like Photoshop to remove the spent blossoms and replace them with plausible background material.
I apply the same principle when photographing people. Let’s get that cat hair off your jacket before I trip the shutter.
Visit the high country of the North Cascades and other mountainous regions of the west during the summer and you’re likely to come across masses of pink mountain-heather, Phyllodoce empetriformis. It’s one of our very common low-growing woody plants, lighting up the hillsides for a short period of time with nodding bell-shaped brilliant pink blossoms. Some people call it pink mountain-heath. Continue reading
It’s not exactly time travel, but you can freeze or expand time in your photos by choosing the right shutter speed. Grab your camera and take it out of its fully automatic mode and choose Shutter Priority instead. Now you can select the shutter speed that will treat moving subjects the way you want, rather than however your camera might randomly do it.
Moving water and sports action are two common subjects that benefit greatly from choosing the right shutter speed. Continue reading
Sometimes you’ve just gotta put your face, and your camera, right down on the ground. Yep, down on your hands and knees, elbows in the dirt, maybe up close and personal with your subject.
If you’re like most of us, you make the majority of your photos from your standing eye level. You’re walking around and see something interesting so you put your camera to your eye and snap away. Nothing wrong with that, except that it gets boring when you’re always seeing the world from the same vantage point. Continue reading
Every now and then when I’m hiking in the mountains I run across a really cool plant. Over Memorial Day weekend I was out with a group of friends on the trail to Lookout Mountain and Monogram Lake, off the Cascade River Road east of Marblemount in the North Cascades. We came across more candystick (aka sugarstick), Allotropa virgata, than I’ve seen in one place in the 25 years I’ve been hiking in the northwest. Continue reading
Last month Natalie and I vacationed in Yosemite National Park. It was her first visit, and I hadn’t been there in over 15 years. We spent a week in the park, enjoying early spring weather, grand views, waterfalls at their peak, and a few early wildflowers. While I briefly considered NOT carrying a camera on vacation, I couldn’t bear the thought that I might happen upon really wonderful light and weather conditions and not have the tools that would let me capture a unique view of this very heavily-photographed park. So I packed all my gear, some 30 pounds or so, and hauled it around on my back nearly every day. Continue reading
Creeping Buttercup (Ranunculus repens) is keeping me very busy weeding our garden this spring. A pretty little perennial, native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, creeping buttercup has been introduced and become naturalized in nearly every state in the United States. Left to its own devices, creeping buttercup sends out creeping stems that take root at the nodes when they touch the ground, forming a dense carpet that shades and crowds out more desirable plants. Continue reading
