20 Aug 14. The NWCCC makes a bi-annual trek to the end of the Mt Baker Scenic Highway, literally, and books a local church run lodge for a Friday afternoon - Sunday noon weekend of food, socializing, and photography, the emphasis on photography. The main attraction is Picture Lake with Mt Shuksan and the red huckleberry hillside reflecting off its surface. That's the goal, and one I've yet to achieve although I've been on three of the weekend outings and more solo trips than that. On two of the three outings we've had two days of rain and one day of great weather, and on the other it was two days of fog and one day of great weather. All three trips offered great opportunities photographically IF you were willing to get out of the lodge and work with the elements. Most of the participants on these trips were not so willing but I have yet to be stopped by the weather and gotten some truly wonderful images. I've shared a couple dozen, perhaps even more, over the last 8 years. There is a trip scheduled for mid October this year, about 3 weeks later than in previous years, which hopefully will provide for the red hillsides that we've not experienced in sessions past. But even if we don't get the red I'd love to see, there will still be much to photograph. Today's submission is from the very first visit, and was taken on a day with a totally bland flat gray sky, so I've put in a sky to make it somewhat more attractive. Normally, if one were attempting to sneak in a new sky, one would also have to add in that sky's reflection on the surface of the water, but in this case the reflection was coming from a different angle and is properly represented as is. One other change I made to the original was to remove a fair amount of blue from the rock in the mountain. It was in such deep shade that it looked very odd with respect to the colors in the rest of the scene. The graininess seen in the mountain area is due to there being just a dusting of snow on most of its surface, the snowfall having occurred overnight and was the first snowfall of the season. Less than two weeks later the area was closed for the season due to the snow. This area generally opens in early July and closes by the end of October. Two years ago it didn't open at all due to the snowfall. Average annual snowfall at this site is 640+ inches, highest resort snowfall in the world, with a record of 1140 inches (95 feet) falling during the 1998-99 season. Lots of great adventuring available for those of you who enjoying screaming down a mountain on a couple slats of wood. Nikon D300; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/400 sec @ f /6.3.

06 Nov 12. A few weeks back I shared an image quite similar to this one taken from the trail to Bagley Lakes. In that image I had done a bit of manipulation, you may recall, to enhance the sky which was rather bland at the time the photo were taken. This one is pretty much as it came out of the camera, save for a small bit of micro contrast enhancement. The main trail in the photo, the one in the center leads in a partial "circle"taking you in a loop above the grouping of small lakes. It is a relatively easy trail, nicely maintained, sufficiently wide for walking two abreast if you aren't carrying a lot of gear, and probably doesn't change more than 100 feet in altitude once you reach it from the main area parking lot. The trail to the lakes in the smaller one on the right, and it has perhaps a 300 foot change in altitude once you enter it from the parking lot. There is a steep drop from the parking lot over a potentially dangerous rock face to get to either trail. The small trail to the right of the big one in the center of the image, immediately to the left of the group of string of tall, skinny evergreens, is the path to the Bagley Lakes Trail, a portion of which can be seen on the other side of that line of trees. The colors in this image are very close to what we were enjoying that afternoon as we walked a small portion of that trail, our desire for capturing as much of what we saw as possible curtailing the total amount of real estate we traversed. D300s; Aperture Priority; 18 - 200; ISO 200; 1/125 sec @ f /11 on a tripod.

22 Oct 12. With the fog dissipating on Sunday morning we initially made our way to Artist's Point (it closed this week for the year) for some pre-breakfast shots and then did a bit of work around Picture Lake until approx 1100, then made our way to the Bagley Lakes region and prepared to walk that trail for the remainder of our time there. We managed to make our way along perhaps 5% of the trail, being constantly derailed by one photographic opportunity after the other, even retracing some of our steps to re-work the same area under differing light conditions. Today's submission will give you a small idea of what it was we were experiencing and it may help to explain why we didn't make much progress on our planned hike along the trail. At the time I took this particular image they sky wasn't as interesting as I would have liked it to have been, so I've taken the option of replacing a rather mundane sky with the one you see. That of course meant that I had to do a little alteration to the water and the snow banks as well, because the grayish tone they displayed represented correctly the grayish nature of the sky, and as I elected to substitute a blue sky, the water and snow fields needed to reflect light of a similar temperature. Otherwise, this is how it looked as we spent about 4 hours walking along the area in the vicinity of the darker area near 4 o'clock of the small lake. D300s; Aperture Priority; 18 - 200; ISO 200; 1/125 sec @ f /16 on a tripod.