Greenlake (Film/Analog)

Shot on Fujifilm 400H Professional

Americana

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.

Port Townsend

Fall colors were abundant event this time of the year in spite of multiple winter storms that have passed through this region. But more interesting than the fall colors was the Prussian Blue abundant on the walls and structures in this beautiful town in the Peninsula.

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.

Above the treeline

Tall peaks of the North Cascades

Front of the Camera

It doesn’t feel good not comfortable to be in front of the camera hence why I am a photographer.

Photograph by Emily:

Day after the storm

Beautiful winter day in the sun

Day Zero

These rocks might have lost the green skin of summer but the barnacles are determined to stand the augmenting cold weather.

Hasselblad X2D day zero

Smoke in the Mountains

The new “normal” late summer/early fall.

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.

A tale of two photographs

Photograph 1: Mount St. Helens

Moonset was around 9:30 pm and it was conveniently dark by that time in the evening, but the cauldron did not cast long and dramatic shadows in the moonlight. Therefore, I used one of the shots I took at sunset when the play of shadows and a beautiful dull orange light spotlighted the mountain, in the final minutes of the sun above the horizon. After the sunset, it was a test of patience - the wait for over two hours for the moon to set and the sky to get dark when it became possible to find the Northstar. Polar alignment of the star tracker took no more than a few minutes when the sky wasn’t completely dark and then another round of waiting game till it was dark enough for the Milky Way shot. Tracked for approximately 1000 seconds.

We listened to a bull elk occasionally but in regular intervals announced its presence in the valley below us and besides a few occasional park visitors the night was fairly quiet.

Photograph 2: The Feathers

One could only hear the bass and occasionally the drums from the Amphitheater where Dave Matthews Band was playing that night. It was the long weekend therefore, the Coulee was filled with cars, campers and visitors but it could not bother me as I was shooting in a direction the car headlights did not touch the basalt columns nor the foreground.

We got there an hour after sunset therefore I did not get a chance to photograph the foreground in daylight. Tracking was not as accurate as during the previous photo, so took shorter exposures. The foreground also shot around the same time (while the camera mounted on the inactive tracker) was a 4 minutes exposure at 1600 ISO, and a passing car (and I am thankful) painted the sagebrushes accidentally, glad I did not discard the shot.

Dust in the wind

Wind gusts were not as dry as I thought it could have been, for they were carrying both water (from Columbia below) droplets and dust particles several dozen feet above the ground. I wouldn’t have had luck using a tripod, the roof of my car provided adequate support for steadiness required for telephoto shots like these.

No, that famous song by Kansas wasn’t in my head but it felt like it should have.

Baker over Ferry

The Northwest face of Mt. Baker over Strait of Georgia.

End of a day

After several days of very warm weather, we got a cloud cover today, that extended beyond the Cascades and over the plains to the east. The wheat fields were harvested but the farmers were kind to leave few rows uncut by the highway.

Creating digital art on a tablet

When working with a fabric canvas and with oil or acrylic paint one does not have the freedom of asynchronous layers deposition. I realized this advantage only recently, while working on this sort of first draw digital painting I made on a new iPad.

South Clayoquot Sound (Tofino)

I gazed at the mountains out of a tiny polycarbonate window of a DHC-2 Beaver, finding opportunities to photograph and carefully avoiding reflections on the window. The air was surprisingly thick at the altitude on this bright warm summer day, and my mind was clear.

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