This week I received some good news! I’m happy to announce that my photo shown here, “Brilliance at Boundary Bay” was selected to be part of the juried art show at this year’s Edmonds Arts Festival. The festival runs Father’s Day weekend (June 15-17th) in downtown Edmonds. The festival has close to 240 artist booths in addition to the juried art displays. It’s really a great time so come visit!
Five weekends in a row of sunshine? Amazing. Temperatures were flirting with 70 degrees but I still had winter somewhat on the brain. Due to our normally abundant snowpack, I wanted to scout out a “pseudo-winter” shot I’ve been visualizing for a while. It centers around the White Salmon Creek, which flows away from the sheer cliff face of Mount Shuksan’s northwest face. There’s a certain level of commitment to my vision so I really wanted to be sure of its possibilities before attempting it.
White Salmon Creek lies outside the Mount Baker Ski Area, and it’s that ski area that provides the best and most direct access. The ski lifts stopped running at the end of April so the best time to make an attempt is now. Winter snowpack is still close to maximum and the travel is much easier (White Salmon Creek has a reputation for Sitka Alder thickets which abuse anyone who dares travel through them).
It’s only 0.75 miles from the White Salmon Day Lodge to the base of Chair 8 and under bright, cloudless skies it was a pleasant 30 minute snowshoe hike. Much to my surprise, White Salmon Creek in the valley below me was buried under deep snows. Hmm. So much for my plans. On some level I was a bit relieved to see this. The sun was BAKING the snow and I know I would have had quite an ordeal to posthole back out of the valley.
It was still a fantastic day so I set up my tripod and scoped out Mount Shuksan. On my hike in, I was following a pair of skin tracks which continued on towards Shuksan. High above on the mountain’s slopes, I could see their skin track uphill and graceful figure-8 turns from their descent. I had come this far, lugging my snowboard, so it was time to make it worth my while. I double-backed to the base of Chair 8 and proceeded to hike up towards the top of Chair 8.
Since the ski area’s closure, the snow has continued to fall. In fact, enough snow has fallen to freshen up every slope within the ski area. Moguls, ruts, mounds…all gone. My visit also was the first in a quite a while to this part of the ski area. As I plodded along, I looked back at my progress and my snowshoe tracks were the only tracks in sight. For a few hours, the ski area was all mine.
The higher I progressed, the deeper the snow got. My trekking poles would easily sink into the snow at least a foot and my snowshoes were slogging through 4 inches of sun crafted corn. My goal was to reach the top of Chair 8 but time was running out for me on this day. I settled for a spot where Chair 5 spills out and joins Chair 8’s traffic. Not the top but still over a mile long descent and 1,000 vertical feet. A fabulous day in the mountains and another reminder of how blessed I am to live here!
Spring means warmer temperatures. And warmer temperatures mean avalanches! This is what prompted me to make a trip up to Big Four Mountain this past weekend. Tucked in the heart of the North Central Cascade Mountain Range, the mountain features an impressive 4,000 foot vertical face on the mountain’s north side. The view is amazing, and in the early 1920s, one of the early industry magnates from Everett thought it would make a great location for a hotel. The Big Four Inn was constructed near the base of the mountain, burned down in 1949, and was never rebuilt. Today, the site of the inn has become a “picnic” area and the only remnant of the inn is the fireplace which still stands in a large open field. For more info about the inn and its history, click here.
The mountain and inn site are located about 25 miles east of Granite Falls and accessed via the Mountain Loop Highway. During winter, the road is closed and gated at Deer Creek (about 2 miles shy of the site). We weren’t sure what to expect for travel conditions since the last report was by the Forest Service almost 2 weeks ago. Optimistically, we brought some cross country skis hoping for a nice glide out and back. As I mentioned a few posts ago, the low elevation snowpack has been melting quick. Here on the Mountain Loop Highway, we experienced the same thing and had to carry our skies a couple times during the initial part of our trip out.
The skies were clear, the sun was out, and it was getting warm. When we arrived at the picnic area, we had the whole place to ourselves. I decided to set up in the shade of the old fireplace. I spent my time taking several frames for some potential panoramic photos of the face before turning to my telephoto lens and some more intimate scenes of the mountain. We had hoped to witness some nice sized avalanches off the mountain; in reality, it looked like we might have been a week or two late for that. With time, we started to hear cracks and rumbling in the general vicinity of where we were at.
We did have a time constraint so we packed up and headed up the trail towards the Ice Caves viewpoint, which is located near the base of the mountain. The ice caves are a summertime phenomena in which melting snow water hollows out the large piles of avalanche snow that accumulate at the base of the mountain. Caves form and last throughout the summer due to the shade afforded by the mountain. The caves are dangerous and fatalities do happen; the most recent death was a young girl in 2010. This link has a lot of nice old photos of the ice caves over time as well as the Big Four Inn. Once at the viewpoint, our time was limited, and we left within ten minutes. The viewpoint is much too close to the mountain for photography (and safety for that matter!).
I was actually a bit eager to head back to a particular spot back out along the highway, about a half mile before the picnic area. Here, the South Fork Stillaguamish River makes a sweeping turn in the foreground with Big Four in the background. The sun wasn’t overhead but wasn’t too far from it. I had to use my graduated neutral density filter technique to slow down my exposure times. The landscape version seemed to work out well but the portrait version had a weird artifact in the lower right corner where the sun reflected on the river’s surface. I don’t know if it was a reflection off one of my ND Grad filters but I was able to correct this in Photoshop with some dodging and burning.
My sunrise days are just about over until fall as sunrise times creep earlier and earlier (I’m not much of morning person!). Last week, we had a cloud free sunrise but really wonderful valley fog at just the right elevation to sift in and out of trees in the Snohomish River valley…
The last few years, I’ve made an annual winter trip to the Ohanepecosh River valley in Mount Rainier National Park. I’ve made my trip around mid-February but didn’t get a chance this winter until this past week. I convinced a friend of mine to take a day off from work to join me. Given our abundant snowfall, I was quite shocked by the LACK of snow once we turned off Hwy 12 and onto Hwy 123. It looked like we were going to be in for a repeat of last winter’s trip.
The highway was snow-free all the way to the gate (3 miles off of Hwy 12) where we parked. There was a lone DOT worker who was responsible for opening the gate for DOT vehicles (who are performing the annual highway clearing northward to Cayuse Pass). I chatted with the worker for a little bit and he told me the highway was snow-free all the way north to Panther Creek (which is about halfway between the Cayuse Pass and the Stevens Canyon Entrance to the park). He went on to say that the snow WAS here at this low elevation but it’s been melting fast.
My friend and I wisely decided to ditch pretty much all of our “winter” gear and just walk the road north to Silver Falls. From the Ohanepecosh Campground north, snow appeared in patches throughout the forest. As we arrived at the Silver Falls area, the sun made its appearance. Normally, this would be great unless you’re there to taking photos of waterfalls and a flowing river. All is not lost when you’re faced with these conditions. Many of the photos in this post were taken in sunshine and are single exposures.
Here’s how to do it-
Use a set of soft edge graduated neutral density filters (ND Grads). Because of techniques like HDR and exposure blending in Photoshop, many people have moved away from having and using these tools. I include myself in this camp for the majority of situations but a set of ND Grad filters doesn’t weigh very much so they are always in my bag. In many of these photos, you’ll see a bright portion of the scene but then the light drops off as you travel away from the bright spots. This sets up well for use with a soft edge ND grad filter.
Generally, my waterfall or stream photography exposure times range from 0.4 seconds up to 0.8 seconds, and sometimes out to 1.3 or 1.6 seconds. Without the use of the ND grad filter, I wasn’t able to come anywhere close to a 0.4 second exposure. On some photos, I was able to just use a 0.9 strength ND grad filter; other times, I stacked my 0.9 and my 0.6 strength filters together to get up into the exposure range I like. I’ll also note that I handhold my filters; my Pentax DA 12-24mm lens has a slim mount circular polarizer (which also helps slow exposure times) and does not have any threads.
The lack of threads on the front of the lens prevents me from using a filter holder (I use the 4″ x 6″ sized ND grad filters BTW). Hand holding your filters in front of the lens can take some practice but isn’t that bad and keeps you shooting when time is of the essence. If you hold the filters against the front element of your lens, you might introduce some shake (or blurriness) into your photos. If you hold the filters just in front of the lens, be sure to review your photos for and light reflections from the surface of the filter back towards the lens. It might sound like a lot but it’s really not- and it will become second nature with a little time.
Using the ND grad filters helped get me back into that 0.4 – 0.8 second range that I wanted but weren’t the end of the story. While I was able to contain the dynamic range into a single RAW file, some areas were too dark either due to shade or the use of the ND grad. To counteract this, I will “double process” the RAW file which simply means I open one copy set up for the highlights and a second copy set up for the shadow areas. Once I have both open as layers in Photoshop, I blend the two versions together using layer masks. This gives me a usable starting point to perform my remaining adjustments (color correction, sharpening, etc).
Getting back to my story, we spent over an hour at Silver Falls taking photos of the falls and the stretch of river immediately upstream of the falls. I still wanted to check out the Ohanepecosh Campground area so we packed up and headed back south. My friend suggested we follow the trail back to the campground instead of the road and that was a great idea. It’s a lovely forest and the trail was mostly snow free expect for the occasional two foot deep snow patches.
Along the way, we spied an interesting stretch of river with a brilliant orange rock in the middle; we just had to check it out. Back on the trail, we made the remaining distance to the campground in short order. Although not open for visitors, the campground reverberated with the noise of heavy equipment clearing snow and windfall throughout the campground. We made our way down to the bridge over the river and my friend spied a harlequin duck that was diving for bugs directly below us.
As quickly as I could, I pulled my tripod and zoom lens out of my backpack and set up on the railing to take some photos. The river still had a pretty good current so the duck started to drift downstream away from us. We crossed the bridge over to the west side and moved around to a rock outcrop which we used as cover. For about ten minutes, we watched the duck dive for 10 seconds at a time, dislodge rocks, and then pop up to the surface. I rattled off a lot of shots hoping for at least SOME decent stills and then recorded a few quick videos using my camera (only the second time I’ve used the video feature).
The water running through the campground has some wonderful, deep turquoise pools with small sandy beaches. On the south end of the campground, there is an impressive landslide scar which has its origins near the Stevens Canyon road, nearly 1,000 feet above the valley floor. It looks like an avalanche path but is actually the result of a landslide from the November 2006 storm event which dropped enormous amounts of rain. We wandered through the campground back to the road and then followed it back to my truck parked at the gate.
Experiencing this part of the park in the winter is a great experience. First and foremost, solitude is possible and most likely probable. The scenery is certainly breathtaking but being there without the sounds of cars traveling on Hwy 123 or campers throughout the campground really makes it a special experience. Before completely leaving the area, we headed just a few miles further east on Hwy 12 to the Pinnacles viewpoint. At the viewpoint, andesite lava flows take the shape of vertical columnar formations with yellow lichen on their surface. The cloudy skies finally made for better photo conditions and I took advantage of the abstract patterns that the formations provided.
Finally, here’s a quick, Zapruder quality video of the harlequin duck diving for bugs:
Harlequin Duck – Mount Rainier National Park from Steve Cole on Vimeo.
This past weekend brought the sun-starved Northwest a magnificent weekend. Lot’s of sun and warm (ok, spring-like) temperatures. Hallelujah! How did I celebrate this momentous weekend? By visiting the deep winter snowpack, of course. To be more specific, I wanted to shoot sunset from Artist Point. I’ve meant to do it all winter but things just haven’t come together like this weekend. As luck would have it, a full moon would also be rising after sunset in the vicinity of Mount Shuksan. Winning!
I grabbed a friend and we made our way up to the Mount Baker Ski Area. I always have the best plans in mind when I start but good ‘ole Murphy makes an appearance. The hike from the ski area parking lot up to Artist Point takes me a little more than an hour, and another half hour to make it out to Huntoon Point. Our start time of 6:15pm didn’t bode well (sunset was at 7:50pm). At 7:10pm, we were about halfway up the last steep pitch below the Artist Point. The light was entering the “magic hour” but we clearly weren’t where we had hoped to be.
After some debate, we decided to settle down nearby so we didn’t miss any photo opportunities. While we couldn’t get a view of Mount Baker, we still had a great view of Mount Shuksan as well as the many peaks to the north and northwest. The high slopes of Mount Shuksan absorbed some nice, warm orange light before it quietly faded into the coming night. Some occasional winds chilled us to the core and I began to evaluate the second component of our evening- moonrise. Apparently I misread my moonrise app and thought moonrise was at 9:12pm (roughly an hour wait). When I checked the time again, it was 9:42pm.
Neither of us relished the idea of waiting close to 90 minutes up here for the moon to rise so we decided on Plan B. It was too dangerous to (cross county) ski back down to the parking lot so we walked out instead. My friend originally thought we should take our moonrise photos from Picture Lake buuutttt the 25 foot high snowbanks surrounding the lake convinced him otherwise. I knew of a particular turnout along the highway between the lower and upper lodge which has a nice full view of Mount Shuksan so that’s where we headed.
I stamped out a platform in the roadside snowbank and set up my camera. In addition to moonrise shots, I wanted to get a photo of the stars above the mountain so that’s what I worked on. One common technique is to take two photos, one photo taken with a high ISO to capture the stars in the sky and then a second photo at low ISO to capture your foreground of interest. The two different photos are then blended together in Photoshop to come up with your finished photo. In order to keep the stars “stationary” in your photos, the exposure times have to be no more than 20-30 seconds. The high ISO (1600 and above) and a wide open aperature of F2.8 is what makes this happen.
Provided you have a newer camera, this is the easy part! The harder part, at least for me, is determining the length of exposure for the foreground part of the photo. Using an ISO like 100 requires a lengthy exposure time to sufficiently expose the scene. I haven’t practiced night sky photography enough so I have to experiment to get things right. Many cameras have a “feature” built into them to reduce noise on long exposures. This is accomplished by taking a second photo after your first photo for the same length of time, but as a black image. The theory is that any noise becomes apparent and the camera can then subtract that from the first image taken.
The problem with long exposure noise reduction is that for a 4 minute exposure, you have to wait another 4 minutes for the black reference image to be taken. This makes it difficult to hone in a proper exposure through trial and error. Most cameras allow you to disable the noise reduction feature so this is recommended since you can do a better job using Adobe Camera Raw and third party plugins within Photoshop. I experimented for about an hour but it was clear the moon wasn’t going to crest above Mount Shuksan anytime soon due to a low trajectory. We still had close to a 3 hour drive home so we hurried to pack up and get going. After dropping off my friend, I finally got home at close to 2am.
I wasn’t all that excited at the time about the photos I shot but I changed my tune as I spent time processing them. It turned out to be a great caper on the day.
Last winter I visited the Deception Creek Trail in hopes of reaching a particular waterfall in order to capture it in a winter setting. That attempt ended prematurely due to time constraints. This winter I never really had the chance to try again until this past week. I didn’t have high hopes since our weather has finally shifted away from full-time snow & rain to a more transitional phase. I parked near the Deception Falls picnic area and started my hike up to the trailhead. It’s always a bit dangerous to be walking along a road with a 60mph speed limit but drivers are considerate for the most part.
The hardest part is also the most hilarious- ascending and crossing the snowbank created by the highway snowplows. This year, that equates to climbing up onto a four foot high bank consisting solely of unconsolidated snow with the consistency of sugar. Once atop the bank, I donned my snowshoes and took two steps. And quickly sank down to my waist. Whoops. While one snowshoe was outside of my little burrow, my other snowshoe was buried by backfilled snow and became an impromptu deadman anchor.
I spent the next 5-10 minutes digging out my foot by hand in the glorious sunshine. Having freed my foot and retrieved my snowshoe from the black hole of snow, I regrouped and mushed forward to the trailhead. There was about 3 feet of snow out in the open but that diminished slightly to about 2 feet once I was in the forest. Due to the snow filled access and limited parking, I was assured of a solitary experience. The skies above were partly cloudy so sunshine would beam through the old growth forest from time to time.
I followed some old snowshoe tracks along the official trail and made my way deeper into the forest. In short order, I passed the spot I turned back from last winter. Sure enough, the spot I coveted was only a short distance further. Doh! I climbed up into position and began to fire away. As anticipated, the snowpack was “spring dirty” with fir needles and cones. The wide shots will have to wait until next winter so I focused more on isolating little scenes throughout the area.
As I finished up, a very quick snow squall drifted through while the sun continued to shine. A great, fun day but it was time to head back. Once back at my truck, I thought about making another stop just a bit further east but talked myself out of it. On the drive back to town, The summit ridge of Mount Index was knifing through some passing white clouds. I pulled over and took some shots thinking they might make some nice black & white photos. Behind me, the summit of Baring Mountain was doing the same thing.
I was more than happy with the day so I packed up and called it good. Just another great day in the Cascades!..
Two weeks ago, I stopped off at the Horseshoe Bend trail along the banks of the North Fork Nooksack River after a day on the slopes at the Mount Baker Ski Area. I ended up trying a number of variations of this particular boulder in the river along with the two gnarled trees along the opposite bank..
I stayed closer to home this weekend and decided to check out the potential for a new spot I found via Google Earth. Gunn Peak, Merchant Peak, and Baring Mountain are the most recognizable peaks in the Skykomish River valley foothills. Due to their prominence, they can capture and reflect the golden light of sunset. The valley in this area is fairly narrow with some level of terracing. During my searches with Google Earth, I spied a small hill in a clearcut that appeared to be easy to access.
It was only a 25 minute drive so I gambled with Saturday’s sunset to check it out. I haven’t spent much time in this area, mostly because of a controversial gate issue associated with a Forest Service Road (FS Rd 62). It’s a public road but one that provides access to the checkerboard of private ownership that exists in some portions of the central Cascades of Washington State. The timber company who owns these in-holdings expressed concerns to the Forest Service in the past about the danger to its employees from (illegal) target shooting. To the dismay of many, the Forest Service allowed the timber company to eliminate public access to one of it’s own roads.
Anyways, in the last year or so, the interim gate closure was finally eliminated and access has been restored. I have to admit, though, that I’m still a bit leery of the gate and still feel the idea of being “locked in”. I went for it anyways, and was soon parked at the gate to the secondary spur road that I would be walking up to reach my destination. It was an easy 10-15 minute walk and I was soon greeted with a nice, expansive view of the valley below me.
On my far right was the impressive north face of Mount Index’s North Peak. The left side of my panoramic view was highlighted by Jumpoff Ridge and it’s most notable summits- Gunn and Merchant Peak. Finally, the sloping summit of Baring Mountain and Klinger Ridge were visible further up the South Fork Skykomish River valley. It was quite breezy and clouds were shading Jumpoff Ridge when I first arrived. I was on site about an hour before sunset so I had plenty of time to wait for conditions to change.
Luckily, they did change and the sun broke through the clouds as sunset drew closer. This particular sunset was only a six on a 1 to 10 scale but I really only wanted to check the spot out; anything beyond that would have been pure gravy! As summer gets closer and the days get longer, I might be visiting this spot more since it is so close and easy to visit..
I tried to shoot sunrise yesterday from Everett but things didn’t work out as well as I would have hoped. Skies were partly cloudy but those cloudy parts were east towards the mountains. Despite the presence of higher clouds, the sunlight never reflected off of them so that’s why I’m naming this “cloudrise” instead of sunrise! Making the best of it, I did notice some more interesting cloud formations towards the southeast of my location..
