I grow old, I grow old...

BBG_051708.macro.6U
Originally uploaded by Digital Sasquatch

OK, just middle-aged, but still. The weather was, once again, psychotic last weekend: approaching the 90s on Saturday. With gas prices slowly approaching what Europe already pays, and with a workshop coming up on the Palouse in eastern Washington, I've been practicing frugality and staying close to home...so it was back to Bellevue Botanical, this time with a tripod and with the new extension tubes.

Macro shooting is a whole different set of skills...I've shot close-ups using my 28-70L or my 70-200L, but that's nothing like using the tubes to cut the minimum focusing distance from two to three feet down to two to three inches...or closer. Actually, I wasn't that daring: of the 12-, 20, and 36mm tubes included in the Kenko set, I used only the 12mm with my 50mm f/1.8 II lens. That got me within five or six inches of my subjects.

The tripod and an angle finder become essential, at least for me. The DOF becomes very thin, so it's also important to ensure that the camera is as close to parallel with the focal plane of the subject as possible. In the posted image, the petals are fairly well in focus, but some of the flower's business in the middle are out...and the petal at the top is bending back just a bit, so it's pretty soft. I checked: the whole structure of that blossom was less than a quarter-inch thick.

Oh! About the whole "I grow old, I grow old..." line from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock: macro shooting is probably not for the bad of knee and vast of belly. Even with the big thunder gel knee pads, it was a painful b**** crouching and crawling and staying still while peering through the angle finder. In my landscape shooting, I try not to fall off of things; macro seems to be all about not falling into the subject! The quality and interest of the images, however, will certainly tempt me to clap on the kneepads again...but I'll try to remember to get the anti-inflammatories down my neck before I go.

Legless at Bellevue Botanical

Daffodils at Bellevue Botanical Gardens. 2008.2U
Originally uploaded by Digital Sasquatch

After the adventure in the snow out on the coast, I ran into a little tripod trouble, and had to send my legs back to New Jersey for service. Since it's been beaten into me that, as a landscape shooter, All Photos Are Better Taken From A Tripod, I felt a bit at sea without my legs. I tried to 'knit' a new tripod from bits and pieces of two older, @#$%ier sets of Amvona legs, but then couldn't get my ballhead off the center post. But the sun was out, and stuff was poppin' over at Bellevue Botanical Gardens.

I am constantly reminding myself how lucky I am to have a world-class botanical garden within five minutes of home...I know the name of maybe one out of every 50 items that are cultivated there, but for a photographer, it's an incredible place to practice working with light and to see a landscape—even a manmade one—change through the seasons.

Spring is, as may be surmised from previous posts, running late this year in the Pacific Northwest...it was almost May, and the daffs were still up and fresh-looking. So, slightly bereft without tripod, yet still needing to capture something, I decided it would be a good time to practice my hand-held shooting. I loaded up my 4XL photo-vest (a vast thing, capable of smuggling an ultra-compact car in its various cavernous pockets) with the essentials, and drove over to the gardens. Turns out 'essentials' did not include memory cards, as I forgot the wallet and had just the 1-gig card in the camera.

That turned out OK: I found that shooting hand-held made adjusting compositions easier, and more spontaneous, which in turn encouraged faster shooting: knowing I only had 95-110 shots available, however, persuaded me to slow things back down and compose with care. It all balanced out, and I had a great hour and a half, and got some fine images, including these bashful backlit daffs.

I went back the next week, early on a Monday morning (my flex day), and shot most of four 1-gig cards in about the same amount of time. Have yet to process those images but, based on what I'd learned this day, I was able to really concentrate on using the morning light and DOF, so I'm looking forward to see what came of it all. The next day, of course, my tripod arrived from NJ, and the weather and my free time have been uncoordinated since. As a result, I haven't had a chance to play with the new set of Kenko extension tubes I purchased for close-up work.

Olympic Experience...Forks, Not Beijing

I'm a week late in writing up my adventure on the Olympic Peninsula, so it looks like I'll split into two long segments. My optimistic statement that the journey to Forks and the North Coast beaches wouldn't be affected by the possible snow was laughably wrong, as I ended up behind a snow plow on Highway 101 between Sappho and Forks.

I got on the 7:10 boat Saturday morning, and made excellent time...good enough that I felt comfortable stopping at my favorite waterfall, Madison Creek Falls at the Elwha entrance to Olympic National Park. I learned about 'Mad Creek' during Jim Altengarten's Olympic National Park workshop in 2006. It's so easy to get to, I try to visit every time I'm out on the North Coast...there's a seemingly endless three-minute hike up a rugged paved trail from the parking lot, and then a beautiful 50-foot horsetail falls with a great plunge that sort of folds over and in on itself. If you don't mind pushing the bounds of good taste by jumping the fence, or getting your feet a bit wet, it really rewards with different looks throughout the year and an amazing variety of views. Spending 30-45 minutes there almost always yields a solid, workable image, if not several.

Once I finished at Mad Creek, I headed west again, carefully driving the speed limit past Crescent Lake: from experience, it's about a $150 ticket for speeding through there, and because it's in the park, it's a federal warrant if you don't pay up promptly...and the rangers were out trolling. I got past without legal entanglement, and as I reached the crest of the hill by the Sol Duc turnoff, the snow got serious. It fell harder and harder the farther west I got, but I still didn't take it seriously...I was more interested in some of the comps I saw as I passed over the Sol Duc river, and besides, I was headed toward sea level! All of a sudden, I notice red lights ahead. A car behind TWO snow plows. It seemed like overkill for a bit, but again, the farther west we got, the more sense it made...along about Bear Creek, there were six to eight inches accumulated off the side of the road. In most years, we don't get that kind of lowland snow in December or January, let alone in APRIL!

Eventually, I made it to Forks, where the white was quickly turning to slush. I'd called ahead, and the people I was meeting were still holed up due to the 'blizzard,' so I went on to the Pacific Inn and got checked in and unloaded before heading over. We decided on a quick run out to Rialto in hopes of catching snow at the beach, but, while there were some traces on the drive out, it had fairly well melted. We were there, though, and with about $25K worth of gear between us, we were shooting something. The waves were working pretty hard, and I had a new nine-stop neutral density filter I wanted to play with, so we spread out. Within about 10 minutes, I turned around, and saw Martin's sister Rosemary looking a bit wet...I looked a bit closer, and she was soaked to the bone and looked scared and done in. A sneaker wave had caught her and bashed her around amongst the driftwood south of where we were. Martin and Richard (the other brother) took her back to their hotel, and Tim and I were left with several miles of beach mostly to ourselves.

No real joy with the new filter, but some images may be keepers with a bit of PP...several likely candidates for B&W conversion. I'll post later. Tim actually got an IR shot of me that I almost like. We packed up after a bit and, after some lunch at the Mexican restaurant in town (not bad at all for Texican), went back to check on Clan McLeish. Rosemary was OK, if a bit shaken. Once she'd warmed up, we decided we'd head out to Ruby Beach for sunset. Ruby's about 40 minutes south and west of Forks, and we had to drive through snow, sleet, and some rain to get there. Great pools of sunlight were breaking through the clouds, but sunset never really materialized when we made the short hike down to the beach. Nobody got munched by waves, which was nice, and even though the light never quite delivered, Ruby Beach is always beautiful. We traveled back to Martin's hotel, and he feasted us with a superb dinner of chicken with a fine mushroom and wine sauce. Not the most productive day photographically, but a lot of fun.

That Whole Global-warming Theory Takes a Beating

A photography friend is in the Northwest all the way from the UK. He has family strung across western Canada, so, once or twice a year it seems, he takes aims this way, stops in Alberta, BC, or both, then works his was down the west coast. I'm headed over to Forks on the Olympic Peninsula tomorrow to meet up with him, a sister and a brother, and another friend who lives in Sequim.

One slight...issue...has presented itself, however: it's friggin' snowing! Not where I am...too low and too close to Lake Washington. But an unseasonable cold snap has sneaked into the region, and snow is falling north of Seattle and east into the Cascades...something near a foot is expected up in the passes. In April. In April! This is, after all, the PNW, where a half-inch of snow can bring everything to a screeching halt...seriously: the local news has "embedded" reporters and camera operators and there will be updates throughout the evening and into the night.

The trip out to Forks shouldn't be affected in any serious way, as the cold front out of Canada appeared aimed toward the Cascades, not the Olympics, but it's going to be below freezing over there, and there are a few high-spots on SR 104 and Highway 101. Let the adventure begin! Had enough of that when I got snowed in over at Quilcene in early December. But I just got a Hoya nine-stop ND filter and really want to try out some long exposures on the surf and the rocks at one or more of the beaches. More once I get back.

All the Weather, All at Once.

Somewhere between 78 and 84ºF on Saturday; rain, hail, and wind today. Saturday, I did as all dutiful middle-aged sons should do and drove to T-Town to do the mom thing...the forecast was accurate for once, so she had decided we would go for a ride. I'm fairly sure the mom will be 78 this May, so 'we' means I drive and she happily asks random, unrelated questions at a pace guaranteed to make my brains bubble up and run out my left ear.

The problem is, I actually have to listen because, on occasion, she'll toss in a cogent, well-conceived little hand-grenade of an inquiry that may actually bear on our current situation and near-term plans. So. She makes me a bit nuts, but she hasn't gone little-old-lady nuts herself...she's always been mildly nuts, the way a lot of highly intelligent women of her time are, given the limits women operated under in the middle of the century (don't want to be a housewife? Secretary or teacher...no matter what kind of talent you have) ...their creativity often turned a bit sideways.

Now, however, she's a little bit less focused and a lot more don't-give-a-tinker's-damn. The original plan was to head out to Orting and take a look at daffodils or tulips, which are a bit behind schedule this year. She had a moment of clarity and remembered that this past weekend was the Daffodil Festival in Pierce County, and that there would be 300K of our closest friends out viewing the parades in the valley...especially with the weather prediction.

Instead, we opted for a dash over to Gig Harbor, which was originally a quaint Scandinavian fishing village that was actually populated by Yugoslavians...Scandinavian sells better in the PNW, though. The day was definitely a teaser: soft air, warm but not hot, clear, with just a touch of vapor haze...people wandering about, looking not quite settled in their summer cloths, lots of pale blue Northwest legs in evidence. And the Mountain was out, and Gig Harbor's a very scenic spot almost any time, but especially when Rainier overcomes its shyness.

It's an unspoken agreement we have: she gets to chatter as I drive, I try hard not to point out that most of the questions serve no purpose and, in exchange, I get to take a few pictures here and there along the way.

Putting the Spurs to It

So it's sometime after 11:00 on a Friday night, and I'm sitting here, a big angry housecat at my feet, Food Network in the background, setting up a blog. Probably tells you more about me than any profile I could fabricate.

I am not particularly sure what I intend to accomplish by inflicting yet another blog upon the world: I write passably well, I take fairly decent pictures, I'm somewhat grumpy and opinionated, and, while I don't mind meeting new people, the circle of friends is pretty small, and many of them are sort of fixated on landscape photography.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is an old saw we've all been force-fed, and it may be true, even in an age where some serious photo technology can be had in a $200 point-and-shoot from WAAAL*mart and where people are dropping the entire unedited contents of their two-gig SD cards onto their favorite photosharing site. I lug around considerably more gear than a $200 P&S, and still, the stories behind getting the pictures can't always be captured with a click and an adjustment layer in Photoshop. I post images on Fred Miranda and Flickr, neither of which are particularly set up to accommodate rambling stories about the pictures in question.

So I guess that's my focus here...the little stories, the minor adventures, the occasional misadventures that occur as I try to capture the large and small beauties in western Washington and beyond. I'll try to to keep the generalized snarking and the out-and-out rants to a minimum, but hey, I've got a stump now, so fasten your belts.

Dave