Fort Bragg, Oregon

Video Blogging

I've been watching YouTube videos produced by Thomas Heaton. He's a young Englishman who is turning into a terrific photographer. His videos are wonderful on so many levels ... technique and humor and emotional connection. He generates such amazing content and the images he produces are beyond wonderful. I recommend his YouTube channel to anyone who is interested in improving their game behind the lens.

I'm thinking about doing something similar. I spend 3-4 months a year on the road, visiting interesting places and finding the most amazing images to capture. It would be a good way for me to gain some exposure and fill the long hours I spend waiting for the right light. I already have all the equipment and software I need so there's very little expense involved. I'm a pretty good storyteller. It just seems like a good idea. And maybe I can make a little money along the way which isn't a bad thing. At least I could maybe pay for some new equipment and my travel expenses.

Trip Plans

I haven't made definite plans yet but things are starting to come together for the next trip home. It looks like I leave in late February and return to Crimea in mid-June. I want to get to Grand Canyon while there's still some snow and I want to get to the far north in Idaho, Montana and Washington which means I have to stick around until the snow melts in late May. I'm planning to revisit quite a few places I've not seen in a while and to add a long list of new venues to my already long list. Because the West is so big and there's so many places to see I'll be occupied for many years to come just filling out all the holes in my catalog. Hopefully I'll have my trip plans in place before Feb. 1 and will let you know my schedule.

Fort Bragg, Oregon

No, it's not FB, NC. No military base for miles around. Just a small, coastal town north of the California-Oregon border. I spent a few days there exploring the local beaches. Lots to see but the weather wasn't really conducive to getting around so my catalog is a bit thin. Most of the ground was saturated and unwalkable so I had to confine my shoots to blacktop areas and turnoffs. But what I did find was really nice. Like this rocky coastline. Not sure what it's called but wow, what a beautiful area. The sea was really angry and taking panoramas like this one are very difficult when the water is tossing and turning. You have to carefully match your shot times so you get waves in roughly the same place each time or it's impossible to stitch the images together without funny breaks and transitions. What I usually do is to pick a spot where the waves are hitting a known obstacle (usually a rock sticking out of the water) and that's when I start the bracketing sequence. It works pretty well as you can see.

This is a 3 image sequence, 10 sets all told, run through Photomatix. I spent a lot of time on this particular set of images because I was testing out alternative pano stitchers and wanted to see which one did the best job. I downloaded trial copies of PTgui and Auto Pano Giga and ran the images through them along with Photoshop. I wish I could say there was a clear winner but I can't. They all had issues with the image and it was frustrating to see how they each stumbled at one point or another. Stitchers look for similar features in each image which they use as reference points during the stitch. The problem is 1) waves are not static so the stitcher struggles to find matching points on the water. It generally punts and finds references on the ground and in the sky. That leads to 2) problems when the clouds are moving relatively fast so the reference points don't really match up very well. This leads to issues on the horizon with the water not being flat ... big steps giving really funny results like a staircase. So you have to get the best you can and then go into Photoshop to correct the horizon and to fix the discontinuities in the water. It gets very nasty very fast. I've got a lot of experience with this and can fix it somewhat but I need to get one of the other stitchers because Photoshop doesn't give me access to the various images being stitched. PTgui lets me output each image so I can blend them in Photoshop if I want. APG does some serious blending internally and that's OK but it's not as easy to get to the base images. I'm still debating which one to buy (and there's another option --- Hugin which is free and open source but isn't quite as advanced as the commercial offerings but, did I mention it's free)! The commercial offerings are expensive so that's a consideration as well.

Anyway, after several weeks of messing with this image I went back to Photoshop. I had to do some tonal adjustments to the various images as some were darker than others and Photoshop doesn't do a really good job fixing those problems. Then I just messed with the various settings in PS until I got something I could live with. There's a lot of work getting this image right but I think the result is pretty good. Love the rich colors and how the water is crashing on the rocks. It's lovely and I can still feel the wind in my face as I stood on the bluff taking these images. Will definitely return soon and, this time, I get the name of the beach. Promise.

Fort Bragg, Oregon! Enjoy!

Fort Bragg - 24mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Heceta Light - redux

Cassini's End

I don't know if you are a space nut ... someone who hangs on everything NASA and others do in space ... but you can't be uninterested in the Cassini mission to Saturn. What an amazing piece of engineering and human persistence. Almost 20 years from beginning to end and essentially flawless. And the science they accomplished ... it is hard to even comprehend everything they discovered. Such an amazing place with the rings and the moons. There may very well be primitive life on at least one of those moons. And what a spectacular place Titan has turned out to be. An actual methane driven atmosphere with a 'water' cycle of evaporation, rain and flowing rivers along with large lakes of liquid methane. There will be more missions to explore this moon and all the others plus someone will eventually put a probe into the Saturn atmosphere that can survive for some time and see exactly what lies at it's core. Put the pressures and temperatures are extreme so it will have to be a truly magnificent machine. I won't be around for it but my kids will.

Heceta Light - redux

Last time I showed you a picture of the Heceta Lighthouse, in Oregon. It was done using HDR and Photomatix. I had some major issues with that image and finally was pushed to make the leap to blending in Photoshop as a way of fixing the problems. In particular, when you use tone mapping to blend different exposures, major defects show up. For one, if there is any noise in the images, tone mapping accentuates them horribly until they look like popcorn all over your image. The only way to eliminate this graininess is to either noise reduce all the bracketed images before you run through HDR or to aggressively noise reduce the final image afterwards. The image from last time used the latter approach. But removing all this noise also softens the image and it just doesn't look all that attractive. Second, any dust on the sensor really shows up in the final image. I had to remove dozens of these spots from the HDR image. It takes time and the results aren't always that good. I have some images that I can't even show you because the sky is just so "dirty" from the HDR process that it's embarrassing. Finally, the tone mapping process distorts the true colors in the image and I often see sunsets that are just "weird" and not nearly true to what I saw. So, especially with sunrise/sunset images I have to find another process that isn't so brutal to my vision.

A few months ago I found a photographer who has come to the same conclusion. His name is Jimmy McIntyre, a scotsman. He tried HDR and was not impressed. He has developed a complete set of actions for Photoshop that make blending bracketed shots almost easy and the results are really nice. Not to say there are's issues but one can always find ways to correct them. I bought a set of his actions a while back (RyaPro) that are a big help and he's put together a complete course that you can buy at the same time that shows how to use blending to get really spectacular images. I'm not shilling for him and not getting any compensation for telling you about his stuff ... just pointing out a nice resource to make blending in Photoshop a bit easier.

Anyway, a few days ago I jumped into this whole blending process and ran the bracketed images of the lighthouse as my first attempt. It wasn't easy and wasn't without some issues but the result, shown below, is a big step up from the HDR image I showed last time (I've included both below so you can toggle back and forth to see the differences). Notice how much sharper the blended image is. There were almost no dust spots in the blended image and the noise was much reduced. Also, notice how the water by the white walls is distorted and softened in the HDR image. I see that quite often in HDR images and am not sure what causes it. Almost always shows when transitioning between dark and light areas. It's called a halo and is a big artifact of HDR. I've lost count of the images I've had to throw away because a halo showed up when I got into Lightroom.

So compare these images. Don't worry about the contrails, I just didn't take the time to remove them from the HDR image. But look at the lighthouse and especially the light. The red roof is actually red in the blended image, not magenta like in the HDR. And the sunset just looks more natural, don't you think? I really like how this image came out. So if you use HDR and it's not really making you feel great about your images, look into Jimmy's stuff and study blending in Photoshop. There are a lot of nice tools there just for this process. It's actually forcing me to learn how to use PS ... not a bad upside to the whole process.

Heceta Light - HDR version

Heceta Light - Blended version

Heceta Light

The Cleanup

Irma is now history, except for some lingering rain in the southeast. We dodged a big bullet as the eye went to the west of Miami, sparing the city a big disaster. But the flooding and wind damage in the Keys and along the west coast of Florida is still extreme and it will take years to mend the damage. Not going to get on any soapbox this time, just extend my best wishes and thoughts for all those who were impacted by this storm. I hope you can recover and carry on with your lives. But I fear that Irma is just the first of many storms that will pound the US and the Caribbean in the coming years. I know we are not ready for any of this. Our politicians and far too many of us have ignored all the warnings and now we face the future with our heads firmly planted up our collective a$$. Welcome to the future.

Hillary's book

I see that the Clinton has penned yet another book. "What Happened" without the "?" is a good title but she should have put that extra punctuation there because it really is a question. Not one she wants to honestly answer unfortunately. So vain that she can't look inside herself and see what a horrible human being she has become. It's testament to her badness that, even now, with all the bad stuff we know about Trump, there are still questions about whether she would have been worse. That's really sad.

Heceta Light

I really like this lighthouse. The location is spectacular and it's location high on a cliff gives it so much more prominence. I spent much of a day there, shooting and just drinking in the amazing atmosphere. I spent some time talking with the guides who give tours of the house and tell the history. They were very helpful in showing me a hidden path up the hill, behind the light. where I was able to take this image. It would have been much better had the clouds cooperated and the ever present jet trails not been there but one cannot control that which is uncontrollable. Vapor trails are now a fact of life that all landscape photographers have to deal with. I could go into Photoshop and remove them, of course, but it would be a long and difficult process to get right. I've seen enough photographs with "ghosts" in the sky where the process was not correct and I've done enough repairing of images to know just how hard it is. This is especially true around clouds. I'll probably take the image for a spin in Photoshop sometime in the future and, if things work out, I'll repost the results. I also want to try blending the images to see if the funny "halo" around the white base goes away. That's an artifact of HDR that is hard to remove. Blending may just do the trick.

Anyway, this is composed of 3 bracketed images, run through Photomatix to blend them together and then finished in Lightroom. Amazing location.

Heceta Light - 35mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 200,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Multnomah Falls

Too Many People...

I've written about this before but it needs to be talked about a lot. There are too many people in these venues and they are causing lots of problems. This is pertinent to my image today because this particular falls, in the Colombia River Gorge, is literally overrun with people. They come by car and by bus and it's getting more and more difficult to take pictures with them all over the place. The bridge in this picture was constantly filled with people and their presence spoils the mood I'm trying to create. I'll talk more about this later but I do want to make some points now. First, there is a striking lack of reverence toward the venues being visited. This is particularly a problem with foreign visitors, many who show absolutely no respect for either the venue or the other people who are there to see it. They swarm the place like ants, talking loudly, standing in front of the other photographers and just making asses of themselves. Some just can't resist vamping for pictures which is disrespectful in the extreme. I remember last year when I was in Arches NP, at Delicate Arch, and there was this woman who insisted on dancing in the middle of the arch with a huge purple scarf while her husband/boyfriend took pictures. Delicate Arch is a very special place and this stupid behavior was not right. Certain nationalities seem to have this idea that the venue is nothing more than a backdrop for their selfies. They are in every picture, hogging the spaces where serious photographers need to set up and take their images. I've had confrontations with these people on several occasions and it's really irritating. This leads to the second point which is just about volume. My generation, unfortunately, has this idea that the ideal retirement involves a huge RV and driving all over the country. These monstrosities take up lots of space and are very noisy. I use generators for my computers but I always respect the hours posted as I know how irritating it is to listen to a noisy generator when you are trying to sleep. But I've had that happen all too often when people park next to my truck in the middle of the night and fire up their generators. They literally don't care if it bothers you. This last trip was especially bad for some reason. I've almost always been able to find a campsite in the national parks but this last trip I had major problems finding places. When you look at the campgrounds all you see is these big RVs and camp trailers. They have satellite dishes and ATVs ... hell, one guy even projected movies on a screen and invited everyone to come watch. All the comforts of home. But the bedlam they create is hard on everyone around them including the animals. I don't have an answer unfortunately. They have the right to do whatever they want but the impact on these places in major.

Multnomah Falls

I'm sure most of you have seen a picture of this waterfall. It's part of the Colombia River Gorge NP. What an amazing place. Because it's so popular there is a major issue with crowds. I talked about this above so I'll keep it short. Too many people spoils the mood of a place like this. You really want to just stand quietly and drink in the beauty and serenity of this location. Almost impossible because too many loud, obnoxious people are swirling around. The parking lot was almost full. And because this is a popular spot there are signs everywhere about taking your valuables with you so no one can steal them. I always laugh at that because my truck is filled to overflowing with valuables and there's no way I can take even 10% with me. I have a suggestion for the local authorities ... if this is such a big problem, why not station law enforcement around the lots to keep people from breaking in. You make a lot of money off this traffic and maybe you should spend some of that on keeping people's valuables safe. Maybe?

Anyway, there's always a problem with photographing such a venue. It's been shot millions of times, often by professional photographers and the basic image is well known. How do you shoot a place like this in such a way as to be different? No photographer wants to take a "me too" shot. Well, in my case I wanted to really capture the serenity of this place. That's best done without people. People spoil the shot. I also wanted to take a very long exposure so the water took on a soft, almost dreamy quality. That required me to use a 10 stop neutral density filter and that lead to exposures of 3 minutes or more. Keeping the bridge empty for 3 minutes was almost impossible so I had to take many shots of the same scene, hoping at least one would be sans people. I got lucky with this one shot.

This is a single exposure of almost 3 minutes. I ran it through Lightroom to bring out the colors and that's about it. There's very little done to "fix" this image. I really like how it came out. I understand why this place is so special. It just grabs you and won't let go. It's on my bucket list for another visit, early in the morning before the crowds arrive. I just want to shoot this place over and over. It's that special.

Multnomah Falls - 35mm,f/18,151 seconds,ISO 100, license CC BY-NC 4.0

Cape Blanco Light

Politics in America

I've always been interested in politics. I can remember watching the conventions leading up to the second term for Eisenhower. I was 12 that year if I remember correctly. It was hypnotic ... all the pomp and bluster just enthralled me. I was really hung up on the whole patriotic thing when I was a kid.

Now fast forward to this moment. We have a certifiably insane person in the White House and a building full of crooks and liars just down the street on Capital Hill. The Supreme Court is a joke and the idea of being patriotic is more like a nightmare.. I haven't voted in years because it makes no sense to even make the effort when I'm given the choice between 2 corporate bootlickers who are essentially the same except for a few cosmetic differences. I'm all for gay rights and a long list of social issues but it's really hard to focus on those when the political elites of this country are hacking away at the very roots of our most basic liberties. Because I travel around a lot I run into the police state all the time and it's very troubling. Drive around southern New Mexico or Texas and you come across BCIS checkpoints where a heavily armed border guard asks you very probing questions about who you are, where you come from and where you are going. Getting in their face is an open invitation to trouble. Did you know that there is a 200 mile wide "rights free" zone all along the border? You basically do not have your constitutionally guaranteed rights whenever you enter that zone. You are well advised to not pick up any hitch hikers in that zone as they could be illegals and you might find yourself in a cell being charged with transporting illegal immigrants. Now, maybe you think that zone just applies to the Mexico border. WRONG! It applies to the entire country and think just how many large cities are within 200 miles of a border. Most of us live in that zone and don't even know it. So far these check seem concentrated near Mexico but it wouldn't take much for them to expand. We live in a police state ... a fact I've been reminded of on many occasions when I talk to foreigners as I travel around. They are very concerned about the "in your face" presence of heavily armed cops. Even the National Park's rangers are starting to display gestapo tendencies. Something you and I should be thinking about whenever we tell someone we live in "the land of the free, the home of the brave." Neither applies I'm sorry to say.

The Fallen

I'm going to be adding a new section to this blog the next time I head back to the states. I see a lot of homeless people as I travel around and I want to start documenting their plight. I have all my camera gear and an ability to approach people as I often look like them as I drive around in my ratty clothes and beat up truck. They are in desperate straits and only a few people, like Chris Arnade, are talking about them. They need more places that are telling their stories. So look for "The Fallen" when I make my next trip to America.

Cape Blanco Light

There are lots of light houses in Oregon. I guess in the old days there was a light every 30 miles or so but many have been retired. Some are gone, some are in disrepair and a few have been turned into tourist attractions without working lights. Cape Blanco is an actual working light as far as I can tell. It was running while I was there. No one really needs them anymore as most ships have good radar and GPS so they know their locations very accurately. But in the old days they served a big purpose. As a ship navigated along the coast, it could tell it's location by finding the lights and triangulating relative to several at the same time. Each light had a distinctive flash pattern combining time and color so a ship could tell which light it was. They saved a lot of lives. It's both wonderful that some are being saved but sad when one is allowed to fall apart. The US Coast Guard mans most that are still working but the original Fresnel lenses have, for the most part, been removed as they are often broken and in poor repair and there are no shops anymore that can supply glass segments. I'll have more on this in later posts as I work through my collection of light houses from this trip.

Anyway, this is Cape Blanco Light. Beautiful isn't it. The weather was difficult but that's when I get the best pictures. I always try to show more than just the light. I think it's important to show the context for the light's function. I want people to see the hazards too so they can understand why the light exists.

Cape Blanco Light - 35mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-|NC 4.0

Crater Lake Moss

Update on the Trip

It's been just over a month since my eye blew out so it seems appropriate to fill in the empty spaces left with the postponement. Eye is good but still has some floating debris that will, over time, disappear. It's well enough I can drive and read so that's a huge improvement. No residual pain or distortions which could impact my ability to take my pictures (whewwww ... what a relief). So that part is good.

Just went through my yearly re-certification here in Crimea which was a stressful event. You are required to fill out a form that basically gives up all your secrets ... or at least it feels that way. How many trips out of the country did you take? Where did you go? How long were you gone? Who did you talk to (a few thousand in my case during the 3 months). How much money did you make and what were the sources? It's pretty intense. Even the wife was more than a bit nervous about this but the guy we worked with (same guy we used last year to get the permanent residency papers) was very quick. We waited for him for about an hour and then it was over in 7 minutes. So I'm good for another year in this wonderful place. And I'm now cleared to leave once again. So, I'll be making plans this weekend for the trip home. Expect I'll be out of here during the month of March and will return around June 1. Need to make all the flight arrangements and get balls rolling for everything else. About time!

Crater Lake Moss...

They get a lot of rain at Crater Lake. Guess it's because it's really the first major mountain range the weather hits once it leaves the coast. We had rain several days I was there last spring along with some snow. And it's mighty damp. So, one shouldn't be surprised to see lots of moss and other wet weather stuff growing on the trees. We're not too far south of the Colombia River Gorge and it gets lots of rain and has trees covered in this stuff. Oregon is a wet place...

I was stuck at the visitor's center during a very heavy rain storm and, being the resourceful type, I started casting around for some interesting scenery to photograph. Across the road from the center the cliffs rise very quickly and are prone to develop fog and mist. I fitted the 70-200 on my camera and started shooting. Got some nice mist shots and then found these cedars all covered in the brightest green moss and lichen. They literally glowed even without the bright sun. And the cliffs weren't too shabby either. This is a 3 image set, run through Photomatix and then finished (including a severe crop from landscape to portrait orientation) in Lightroom.

Crater Lake Moss - 200mm(1.6 crop),f/11,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Vidae Falls at Crater Lake

The TPP and our Doom

This isn't nominally a political blog but sometimes events happen that are politically driven and impact me (and you) in such a way that a protest must be lodged. I'm talking about TPP, the "Trade Pact" between the US and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. The text of this mess was released yesterday and it's a disaster. This clown (or should I say crook) Obama has produced an agreement that will, pretty much, destroy us all. It's all about corporations and their power. He's basically given them everything they want and more. Forget laws and the rights of the citizen to any protections. If a state legislature passes a law that a corporation objects to, they can take the dispute not to the courts but to a private arbitration board comprised of ... wait for the drum roll ... corporate lawyers. Who do you think these people represent? Do you think for even a second that their allegiance lies with the citizen and the state? Of course not. They make their living serving the needs and desires of corporations so they will always decide in the favor of their bread and butter. So any protections that threaten the profits of our corporate masters can and will be shot down. Forget environmental protections, forget worker's rights, forget any consumer protections ... they are all subject to this special, private court. Sovereignty is gone. For all your conspiracy types, this is your feared one world government coming in through the back door. Any country that signs on to this agreement will be compelled to do whatever the corporations want. Even simple municipal regulations can be thrown out and there's no recourse to correct even the most egregious outcomes. Corporations will have tremendous power to influence how government works. Is this really what you want? This is the moment when you need to get up off you ass and scream "ENOUGH". Write that worthless congressman and tell him that he'll be seeking employment somewhere else if he votes for this piece of crap. We need to make it very plain to these corrupt morons that we will not accept this sellout without a fight.

Vidae Falls at Crater Lake

I didn't know there was a waterfall at Crater Lake. It's not all that big or impressive but it's there. Take the rim road to the east (before you get to the Visitor's Center) and you'll see the signs for the waterfall. I like to use my 10 stop ND filter whenever there's moving water as you get such a creamy, almost misty effect. However, this technique tends to eliminate any structure in the water and that's not always a good thing. So, I've developed a technique where I combine a long exposure with a very short exposure (one that freezes the individual drips). I bring both images into layers in Photoshop and then use a simple adjustment of the opacity on the top layer to bleed through just enough of the underlying image to get both the creamy and stark together. I also did some contrast adjustments around the edges so I made the moss and rocks stand out and some Lightroom adjustments to bring out the colors. A nice image overall. You should try it if you have the filters.

Vidae Falls - 70 mm(1.6 crop), f/18, 50 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Crater Lake Storm

Contrails and other human detritus

I tend to be a landscape photographer ... that means I'm a photographer of natural formations. Natural implies an absence of man and his artifacts and his lame attempts to tame the unruliness of that world. Anyone who's visited a national park or any wilderness area knows that it's almost impossible to erase the human influence. There's always garbage and scars and destruction no matter how far from 'civilization' you run. Surprisingly (or maybe not), the most visible impact is in the sky. I'm always having to deal with jet contrails ... the white lines left by the hot exhaust from jet engines at altitude. This is a major problem in the California parks due to the high traffic flowing into LA. Imagine how jarring that is ... a magnificent image marred by one or more basically straight lines drawn across the sky. And, they are surprisingly hard to remove. It's not like you can just erase them. Of course, both Photoshop and Lightroom have tools for removing unwanted features from an image but they can only do so much. Contrails, being large and obtrusive, often don't lend themselves to this type of surgery so one has to be creative. But it's extremely hard to deal with and getting worse. In Yosemite it's almost impossible to find shots that don't have some type of human artifact in them.

Crater Lake Storm

I was in Crater Lake for 4 days. Three of them brought rain and bad weather. I started feeling a bit waterlogged and then the snow came. But the old saying goes ... when life gives you lemons make lemonade ... and that's what I did. I'd watch the weather from my campsite and, if the sky started to clear, I'd drive the 7 miles to the crater's rim and hopefully find interesting and challenging views. Sometimes I'd not even get to the rim before the fog closed in and forced me to retreat. It's not a good idea to drive the twisting and somewhat dangerous roads leading to the crater when you can't see the road. But several evenings I was lucky and the sky gave me just enough clearance to let the late afternoon sun break through. Those were dramatic images.

Crater Lake Storm- 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

This image was very challenging. Not because of the weather but because of the jet contrails. The open area to the west was almost obliterated by contrails. There must have been a dozen or more. I'm not sure where those planes were going but flying in and around Crater Lake seemed to be on everyone's agenda. I was also forced to redo the entire process several times as there was an added problem with popcorn size noise coming out of Photomatix. I think it has problems with nearly saturated pixels and deciding how to show them in the final image. Whatever it decides, it doesn't work too well. So, to get around the issue I was forced to use Noiseware on the images going into Photomatix and on the HDR images coming out. This seems to knock the noise out but does some serious damage to the sharpness. I like my images sharp and it bothers me that I have to sacrifice even a bit because of this noise amplification coming out of Photomatix. I've sent them emails asking for help but they are silent so far. Fortunately, because Noiseware is so good at obliterating noise I was able to use very aggressive sharpening in Lightroom which brought back at least some of the definition. But I'm still looking for a solution to this problem.

Anyway, once I had the panorama I went to work with Lightroom's content aware fill to see how much of the contrail mess I could fix. It took a while and a lot of retries but I think I did a pretty good job overall. There's a bit of fluff left over but it looks natural enough that I just left it. Hopefully it doesn't do too much damage to the final image. I'll let you be the judge.

Crater Lake Sunrise

Crater Lake Sunrise ... finally

You may have realized I'm not a morning person. Sleep is too precious to me. So, when I wake early, which I do most days, I look not for a reason to get up but for a reason to return to sleep. And, unfortunately, most morning I find an excuse. It's usually the lack of stars which tells me there's thick cloud cover and a sunrise trip isn't worth the effort. Fortunately, this morning there were lots of stars at 4 when I looked out my truck's window and a nice scattering of clouds. So I crawled out of my warm sleeping bag and made the 7 mile trip to the crater. The sun was still well below the horizon but that wasn't going to last much longer. I literally ran up the hill to the spot I'd already chosen for my sunrise shot and I got the camera ready. It was worth the effort ... don't you think?

Crater Lake Sunrise - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Crater Lake - day 2

I'm cursed I think ... or very lucky

Bad weather seems to follow me. On this trip I've seen more snow, wind, rain and cold than I'd every anticipated. And it continues here in Crater Lake. It started raining last night and rained and rained ... and the fog which I had so desperately tried to get away came back in massive quantities. All day the crater was shrouded in fog and I sat in my truck and chewed my finger nails and cursed the weather god once again. When will I get some luck? Well ... it's said that a photographer's best friend is bad weather. That's when you get the most dramatic skies and the most awesome sunsets. So, keep on coming bad weather.

Crater Lake Sunset ... day 2

After a day of rain I noticed, as I huddled in my little truck, that the sky was clearing. With high hopes, I drove the 7 miles to the crater edge and this is what awaited me. I hurriedly set up my camera and started snapping. Lots of frames later I had my image. Used the same processing as I always do with HDR panos and now I present you with Crater Lake at it's best.

Crater Lake Sunset - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Crater Lake Sunset

The San Fran Bust

I have to report that San Francisco was a huge bust. I was so concerned about my truck and breakins that I was distracted from doing what I wanted to do. There has been an epidemic of car robberies lately and I couldn't find anywhere to park my truck and feel safe. Even at the Cliff House, a very famous restaurant on the beach, it was made very clear to me that I shouldn't leave anything of value in my truck or it would most certainly be stolen. Well, I have computers, generators and camera gear in there and I wasn't really comfortable leaving any of that stuff for very long. So, after 2 very frustrating days, I just drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and kept heading north. Maybe next cycle I'll be able to figure out a way of leaving the truck in a safe place and simply using the very good public transportation. But, this time, I have nothing worth showing. Sorry.

Crater Lake Sunset

I drifted along the California coastline, trying to get some good stuff. It was very frustrating to spend hours sitting in a spot with beautiful rock formations and crashing waves only to be frustrated as, around 3 in the afternoon, the fog would start drifting in and, by sunset, I couldn't see the rocks, the surf or the sunset. It's not too interesting photographing fog. So, after several days of this I turned the truck away from the coast and headed north toward Crater Lake. I didn't really escape the bad weather all together as it rained for 2 days while I was there but I was able to get some really nice images. I'll not bore you with the details ... just let you drink in the absolute beauty of this special place.

Crater Lake Sunset - 16mm(1.6 crop),f.18,HDR,ISO 100, license CC BY-NC 4.0