Tulips
Every year I tell myself to not go back to the tulips farm and every year I go back.
Plants
I love photographing columns of sunlight percolating through thick vegetation and illuminate plants and their characteristics near ground. It reminds me of the very different tropical and sub-tropical forests in the place where I lived twenty years ago.
The first species in kingdom Plantae appeared about 1200 million years ago in water and complex plants appeared just 200 million years afterwards. First members of animal kingdom appeared after another 400 million years down the timeline.
Weekday in Marymoor
Tungsten experiments (feat. CineStill 800T)
Shooting with film at night has never been this much fun.
Long exposures with CineStill 400D
Seattle and Port Townsend
10 sec at f/5.6, CineStill 400D
10 sec at f/5.6, CineStill 400D
30 sec at f/16, CineStill 400D
10 sec at f/5.6, CineStill 400D
Museum of Vancouver
Last night I was looking for a place with classic cars and neon signs to photograph in the CineStill 800T film stock, and came across Museum of Vancouver that has a classic car and a handful of neon signs. I wanted to spend only a few minutes here today but we ended up spending several hours going through the exhibits and educating ourselves with the rich history of this beautiful city on the west coast of Canada.
1/30 sec at f/4.8, ISO 400
1/20 sec at f/2.8, ISO 400
1/10 sec at f/2.8, ISO 400
1/125 sec at f/4.8, ISO 400
1/90 sec at f/2.8, ISO 400
I look forward to developing the film roll I shot today!
36 documented photographs (Lomography 400 Color Negative)
Nikon FM2 | Lomography Color Negative ISO 400
The edge of Fidalgo island with a new analog camera
I have been shooting 120 film for a while but did not have a 135 film camera until now. Well, I started photography with a K1000 but that was long time ago - a period I would like to erase if I can.
To fill the 135 format gap I bought a Canon AE-1 Program and shot two rolls (few photographs here) with it. It’s a really nice camera that featured a “point and shoot” mode as well. Then I found a Nikon FM2N in excellent condition - I had to get it. Paired with a 50mm f/1.8 AIS pancake lens and a roll of Kodak Portra 400, drove to Washington Park in Anacortes to test it out.
Old trees
Yoshino cherry trees (December, 2022)
Kowa Six | Ilford HP5
Winter day in the sun (Seattle)
An unusually bright sunny day in the first Saturday of December, 2022 - I could have driven to the mountains away from the city. But instead took a short trip to the city.
Mt. Baker and the North Cascades (from the air)
It was the last day of sun in a span of a week that was ending with overcast weather and then rain in the following days. This crisp fall weather in the Pacific Northwest has always been my favorite time of the year to go shooting in the mountains for reasons including early golden hour and the wilderness generally lacking people.
Photographing the ground from airplanes, helicopters and even unmanned aircrafts over the past 15+ years has been not quite satisfactory for reasons such as (but not limited to) resolution, image quality (filming through perspex or glass windows) and image stabilization. Switching to a larger sensor addressed problems around resolution however, there were miles to go before it could be deemed satisfactory. Enter into the area the new Hasselblad X2D with a gargantuan 100 MP sensor and 7 stop IBIS: A camera worthy of arial photoshoot with the issues I mentioned in the first two sentences of this paragraph. There are two main benefits of shooting with this camera: Fist the obvious advantage of 7-stops IBIS that is key to appropriately eliminating vibrations while shooting from inside a small aircraft, and second but not least is the vast 100 megapixel canvas to crop the desired composition, and remove things such as the aircraft wings or sun glare on the perspex window from the shot.
Day after the storm
Beautiful winter day in the sun
The Milky Way over Mt. Baker
Late summer is probably the best time to shoot astro - early nightfall, the temperatures are not below freezing and the skies are void of fall and winter clouds.
Smoky sunset in the woods
Dense forest fire smoke from Bolt Creek fire started pouring over Western Washington on September 10th, 2022 but the air quality wasn’t great for a while - possibly due to smoke traveling from other fires in the region. These photographs were taken on the 9th during an evening walk in the forest - I was not expecting to find smoke trapped in the trees and in the sky above, rendering fog-like scene especially at sunset.
1/160 sec at f/4, ISO 800
1/180 sec at f/8, ISO 3200
1/40 sec at f/6.8, ISO 3200
Baker over Ferry
The Northwest face of Mt. Baker over Strait of Georgia.
Lavender farms
I’ve lived in Washington state for over fifteen years and yet I had not photographed a lavender farm until 2022.
Hidden creek
An unknown creek in the lower Cascades
Old Robe Trail
Huckleberries dominated the upper parts of the canyon, and salmonberries took the lower parts of the trail near the river (South Fork Stillaguamish).
When the sun bleeds through the clouds
Every photograph has its story, but I can remember only a handful of them weeks and months later and this is one of those untold stories.
This photograph is a composite of three exposures, an HDR image that I created in Lightroom then color graded (also in LR). I am not a fan of auto-bracketing since my cameras don’t allow me to select a multi-point metering matrix for it to auto-bracket. A linear exposure stops bracketing rarely gets it right.
The three photographs with manually bracketed exposures were shot on June 18th, 2022 around 9:00 PM Pacific at Picnic Pt. Park. The month of June in 2022 has been unnaturally cold, with clouds and rain lingering around for an extended Spring and deep into summer, creating great opportunities for shooting sunsets. We arrived at the park about an hour to sunset - we knew the area fairly well because we had been to the place many times. I started off shooting a beautiful algae bloom over the beach but the sun was too bright for photography - the kind off lighting that I was hoping to find in that cloudy day. It made sense to wait till the sun is at the horizon or below it, for it could light the clouds over the horizon.
Minutes before sunset the sun peeked out from the clouds and suddenly the clouds started to catch the light. I had very limited time to capture it. I wanted to put the pier ruins in front of the island at distance and below the sun at the horizon but also make sure the pier stumps are not over the dark island mass in the background. The tide seemed high, so I had to shoot from a distance, an unusual spot that I was not familiar with and had not explored before. Once I was at a convenient spot with the view I desired, switched from 21mm to 45mm lens because I was far from the subject and quickly started shooting.
Fast forward to today, July 3rd evening when I was culling through my Lightroom catalog came across these bracketed RAWs. I quickly put them together, searched for a BTS photo on my phone and wrote this blog post.