23 Feb 16. I did not send out an image yesterday; too much stuff got in the way. As I mentioned on Friday, this is a shot of part of the natural breakwater on Ediz Hook where we visited the Cast Guard station in Port Angeles. I thought the stack of driftwood that has been assembled into something that looks either like a carriage, a portion of a fortress, or some other thing, depending on your perspective, might make for an interesting image. I had been shooting the clouds just prior, especially the ribbon-like one just above the clear sky portion, and we were driving back toward town when we noticed the driftwood structure. As we drove past I said that would have made a nice photo and Jan strongly agreed, so we turned around and I played with it for a couple of minutes, trying for the best composition of structure, clouds, and water. I chose this one from the group as I thought it had the best composition although I suppose I should have removed the freighter. If you pay a visit to Port Angeles, do take the drive out on Ediz Hook and enjoy the scenery. The image was leveled to make up for my lousy holding of the camera, the center of the structure was lightened a bit to allow for seeing inside, and the clouds were given a wee bit of accentuation. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/160 sec @ f /11.
24 Feb 16. A few weeks back I shared with you three shots taken of Mt Baker on the trip when Maggie tried walking on water. This is another from that same trip but taken near the end of the day and looking north of Mt Baker. I'm not sure of the name of this body of water but have heard it called Lower Baker Lake. The main Baker Lake is formed by a dam and this is below that location and resides behind a small earthen dam. The so called spillway for this earthen dam is to the right of the vertical stick and at times during our visits there has been a fairly fast flow exiting into the lake. You can get a small idea of the temps by looking at the amount of remaining surface ice. The sky was bouncing a lot of blue light off the snow so I had to adjust the color of it to make it look correct. Of course it looked white to our eyes but the camera wasn't gonna be fooled and recorded it as sky blue. Walking distance to the left of this shot is a large campground with lots of activities available for kids. A nice place to visit any time of the year. I had to use a few adjustment layers to get the snow the color of white I wanted, as well as adjusting the sky color to make everything look balanced, but that was about all I did. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 8.
