24 Mar 14. Those of you who have been reading these mailings since 2007 may recall that I've written about vising Sequim many times, especially since we've visited the area more than 20 times since we moved back to the PNW. What I haven't written about prior is that the Sequim city signs feature a large bull elk and that there are cautions about them and even flashing lights to indicate their supposed presence crossing the main highway. In all our visits to and through Sequim we have never seen as much as the droppings from a elk, let along a single elk. Until yesterday when out of the corner of my eye while driving along highway 101 I saw the telltale markings of an elk and slowed down to a stop to see what was likely the entire herd! I couldn't believe my eyes, but there they were, calmly grazing across the road and over a slight embankment. So I went stalking the herd while Jan and Maggie waited patiently in the SUV. I shot as I walked and as I got quite close a group of 6 cows separated from the rest of the herd by perhaps 70 yards locked onto me as if to say, if we had weapons there would be a red dot on your chest. They kept their eyes on me until a car began moving into their field of view at which point 4 of them turned their heads to the left, in perfect synchrony, to watch the vehicle. When it passed, they all turned their attention back to me and when I had gotten "too" close, smartly moved on to join the rest of the herd. This shot was taken moments after they turned to look at the vehicle. I've cropped out one animal on the left of which there was just part of her head, added some detail enhancement to illustrate the shagginess of their coats, and increased the saturation a small amount over that which the camera recorded. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/200 sec @ f /10.
25 Mar 14. Today's B&W image will be the first of three of the same scene, Wednesday's being a full color version, and Thursday's a creative expression of the same thing. Let's see how they stack up. Having pegged the fun meter fussing with tax preparation for days on end, I threw in the towel late Saturday morning and decided I just had to get away for a while, so while Jan tossed some staples into the ice chest, and some treats in a bag for Maggie, I gathered up the camera gear and we headed off for the coast. By the time we had reached Olympic National Park the rain had found us and followed us to the edge of the continent, where we stopped just short of falling off, and back again. We decided on the way that spending a night or two roughing it in motel rooms would be fun, but the combination of no room in the inns and foul weather found us returning back home the same night. On the way to the coast we stopped whenever possible alongside Crescent Lake to shoot the myriad of little streams gushing over the rocks and spilling their water hoping to imitate their much bigger water fall relatives. I decided it would be fun to shoot each and every one of them but the rain and rapidly dimming light limited my effort to about six. My approach this time was to shoot at several different shutter speeds capturing each in a variety of poses. For this set I'm going with the "cottony" look. After dodging and burning the original to get a better balance between the highlights and shadows, the shadow areas being very dark due to a deep forest setting, and the ferns in the front suffering a bit of blowout from the flash, I converted the resulting image to the B&W I'm sharing today. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 400; 1/5 sec @ f /14 with full flash on a tripod.
