Road Trip, Part Two

My Favorites…

Sometimes I get lucky and the camera grabs exactly what I am looking at, just the way I want it.  The color is right, the lighting is perfect, and the camera doesn’t try to improve it.  This is a smart camera after all…  I’m not sure that I have a goal in mind when I take out the camera (iPhone or iPad).  I often see something that takes hold of me, and I must capture it.  Often it doesn’t work…  And I am so glad that I am not wasting film.

The picture above is from Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, just after an early snowfall.  Sometimes the moment is perfect. Hurricane Ridge allows us to look out over and into the deep wilderness of the National Forest.  I was looking the other way…

But later, further down the road, we stopped for this view of the deepest darkest, velvety green of a wilderness.

The next two views are from another favorite place, Lake Crescent, also in the Olympic National Forest.   Grey days!  The light is silver, the shadows deep.  The shapes of things stand out.  There are fewer distractions when color is muted.

Another thing I like to experiment with is taking pictures up close or from odd angles so that I lose the identifying details and the image moves towards abstract.  I don’t know where my love of abstract art really comes from.  It just feels so natural to me to look at things that way, to imagine, to suggest what goes beyond what is there in reality.

It intrigues me to go in close and see something isolated from its surroundings, changing the context of the view, focusing on just that one thing.

 

How to capture a sense of place is always a challenge.  In the Hoh Rain Forest water defines the place.  Wet is its gloriously natural state.  Though it isn’t always that way.  I’ve been in the rain forest during drought and it feels strange and frightening, anxious and stressed.  This trip the rains came down, sometimes gently, sometimes determined.

And finally, atmospherics…that’s the way I think of it, partly a sense of place, recording a moment captured—all those sky and weather shots I love to go for.

Sunset, Kalaloch Beach, Washington.

Jim stood out in the rain and wind to catch his shot of the Cape Disappointment Light House.  I did not…

As always, Baker Bay, Cape Disappointment, seemed ever different, ever new, and at the same time eternal.

Good trip, and good to be back home.  Cheers everyone!