Night Joggers, Hermosa Beach Strand

October 3, 2010; Hermosa Beach Strand: This image was taken as a homework assignment. The assignment was to take an image that illustrates the following quote:

"Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not at all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks." -- Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cartier-Bresson was a master at street photography, and excelled in capturing 'the moment' in very well composed images. He worked in black and white. To attempt to capture an image in his style, I went 'hunting' with tripod and camera on the evening of October 3, and sat at this spot for almost one hour. I took 30+ images, and liked this one the best. Since I disagree with his quote in that I do care what happens after image capture, I processed this one to get a nice range of tones. The image was already noisy, having been taken at ISO 1600, but to enhance the grittiness of the night shot I added a bit more noise of my own.

Sea Stack 2, Second Beach

September 8, 2010; Second Beach, Olympic National Park: More nice sea stacks. This one is a color  image, the previous one was black and white. Not much difference, but there is some. Again, the lighting was very soft with fog in the air.

Of the two, this is my slight favorite. The foreground rock adds nice depth and more texture to the image, and the sea stack in the far background is in the haze. This image file is df100908_1193

Sea Stack 1, Second Beach

September 8, 2010; Second Beach, Olympic National Park: It was a one mile walk from the parking area down to second beach. The weather conditions were the same as at Rialto Beach, but the sea stacks here were very impressive. The tricky part of working on this image was boosting the contrast enough to get an interesting image. The lighting was very very soft. I added quite a bit of mid-tone contrast.

Let me know what you think about this image and the following one. This image file number is df100908_1189.

Rialto Beach #1

September 8, 2010, Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park: These three stark naked trees are hard by the path right out of the main parking lot at Rialto Beach. You can just feel how harsh the environment must be on these beaches. They face the winter storms that come in off the North Pacific. The fog was thick that day, and the ceiling must have been only 50 or 100 feet off the deck.

There was almost no color in the original image, so I made a slightly tinted black and white image. I think it works. File is df100908_1160.

Hoh Rain Forest #2

Here is another forest detail image from the Hoh River Trail on September 7. Growths of this white fungus were numerous. I liked this one against the small plants and the red trunk. Tricky to hold detail in the fungus (don't overexpose) and yet hold some detail in the dark trunk. But, it worked, using a bit of photoshop work to compress the dynamic range. File df100907_1149.

Log Detail, Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park

On the seventh of September we hiked the Hoh River Trail in the Hoh rain forest. It is a very interesting area for a hike, with a lot of plants and trees representative of a temperate rain forest. It is also very difficult to capture the mood of it with photographs. I decided to work on small details part of the time, which is sometimes easier. I liked this piece of log. Something in the red cedar log created the nice crosshatched pattern. The green plants in the lower left offer a nice contrasting color. Used a tool to enhance local area contrast, and then blended in a bit of NIK's midnight filter, especially around the edges. File is df100907_1130.

Marymere Falls

This is a vertical panorama, consisting of three images merged into one. I decided to convert it to black and white, and I think this works well. A computer screen does not do it justice - I printed this 18 inches high by 5+ inches wide and that was nice.

This falls is at the far end of the hike that we took on September 6, 2010 out of Crescent Lake. I like the long skinny log sticking out of the top of the falls, and the semi-transparent look of the top part of the falls. Exposure time was 1 second per frame.