2021 continued the 2020 trend of photographing birds locally, mostly by kayak, with many compromises due to Covid. All but three favorites were shot with my Sony A7 III and Sony 100-400mm f5.6 lens. Two shots used a tripod. Seated in a kayak, I mostly rested the lens on my palm or on a padded […]
With my farthest photo travel since March a 58 mile jaunt to Ice Caves State Park and 59 miles to Whidbey Island, this year was about staying home. My odometer clocked 2,500 miles. I didn’t backpack due to knee issues, but paddling locally, I found fresh photo ops. Bird nest searches returned engaging photos as […]
On July 10, 2020, I launched a kayak from Joseph Whidbey State Park, Whidbey Is, WA, and paddled to Smith Is. My photo target was Tufted Puffins. Flat-top, 400-acre Smith Island is not a destination for paddlers. The five-nautical-mile, open water route crosses a shipping lane with barge traffic and speeding watercraft. Wind from the […]
Alpine Lakes Wilderness Photography Field Report from October 7-9, 2014. Rich and I got the bad, not unexpected, outcome. Early October is prime time for the Washington State Enchantments, when golden larch skirt the stark, granite spires. Vying with a dozen hopefuls for the single, 7:45am permit draw─we lost. Our backup was Horseshoe Lake. The […]
Mt. Rainer National Park. I’m in my office, doing Lightroom repair work on an ancient, 2006 image from Indian Henry’s Hunting Ground. The photo didn’t make my (publish) cut years ago, but it wasn’t because composition, light or uniqueness were lacking. It passed those tests. The problem was mosquitoes, which streaked like blobs across sky, […]
In the spring of 2016 I shot footage of a hummingbird nest in Marymoor Park. After researching hummers the following winter, I wrote a script and created my first video production, titled Anna’s Hummingbird. It showed at the East Side Audubon Volunteer dinner. In 2017, the female re-built her nest at the same location; I […]
I’m sitting in a kayak at the Sammamish River mouth on Lake Washington. Three hundred or so Common Mergansers flock nearby─in the slough fishing, roosting on the lake or flying in-between. The heavy birds fly at 40 mph up and down the tree-lined slough, a gauntlet that challenges the electronic viewfinder (EVF) and auto-focus of […]
Adobe updated Lightroom Classic CC last week (October, 2018). Two additions of interest to me are the One-step Merge to Panorama and the new Color/Luminance Range Mask. The One-step Merge creates HDR panoramas with a single select and click, where beforehand you needed the separate steps of creating multiple HDR images, and then select and […]
Everything was going according to plan. At home, I consulted with www.stellarium.org for the Milky Way location, NOAA for cloud cover and Google Earth for orientation at Palouse Falls, WA. An October Milky Way shoot looked probable. I also checked the Palouse River stream gage, which was flowing above normal, not high but good enough. […]
Since 1996 I’ve paddled Potholes Reservoir near Moses Lake almost every year to see and photograph the Western (and Clark’s) Grebe mating dance. Some years, I led kayak birding groups where the paddling was more social then photographic. More often I went solo. Most years I struck out, seeing no dance at all or merely […]