Today’s adventure included a trip to the Clark Creek Grist Mill in Clark County, southwestern Washington state….not too far from Mount St. Helens. This is the only functioning grist mill that exists in the northwest United States. It was built in 1876 and restored in 1980. You can now visit the mill and even purchase some fresh milled flour. And then there’s this amazing view.
The area was touched by fog today. And oh how I love fog!
I remember having a conversation with someone just a month ago or so…telling them that the Pacific Northwest is covered with rain forests, which they didn’t believe. Unfortunately, I have found more and more people who also did not know this.
When most people hear about rain forests, they automatically think of some foreign tropical paradise where parrots are flying around, poison dart frogs hope across the forest floor, and there are monkeys jumping tree to tree. And yes, that is a tropical rain forest. But the main stretch of temperate rain forest lies here in the Pacific Northwest…ranging from northern California all the way to southern Alaska. There are other smaller patches of temperate rain forests found throughout the world as well, but none as large as this one.
Rain forests are obviously characterized by precipitation (in the form of rain or snow). They are also characterized by the plants and wildlife that occur in them, depending on where in the world they occur, much how wetlands are characterized. Here in the PNW, large conifer trees such as Douglas Fir dominate the landscape. Lichen and mosses cover the forest floors and live as epiphytes on trees. Epiphytes are plants that grow on other plants (but not as parasites).
Whenever I go somewhere new, I try to immerse myself in the surroundings. I have a small obsession with identifying what every plant and animal is when I go hiking as well as their natural history. Here I was, moving to new territory where I didn’t know much at all about the history of the area, the species that exist here, or even what to really expect as far as weather. This left me feeling both terrified and excited.
Yesterday I visited Silver Falls State Park, about an hour south of Portland. I was in awe. There were a few remaining leaves hanging on the deciduous trees and the hiking trail was lined with brightly fallen leaves. And it was raining so the colors were even more vibrant. I was excited to find a rough-skinned newt on the trail! It was the first salamander I had seen in many years. And to find one on my first day of hiking in Oregon was surely a sign of good things to come. I quickly grabbed the little guy and moved him to a safe spot off of the trail.
Admittedly, forests were never my favorite ecosystems; I’ve always liked rocky coastlines, deserts, and wetlands the most. Granted, I thought that forests were beautiful and interesting as much as the next person, but they were never a favorite until seeing them in the Pacific Northwest. Reading about the natural history of the species has really helped me appreciate the forests here and how special they really are. In the last couple of months, I have become a bit obsessed with trees…particularly the Douglas Firs and Redwoods. Surely this is the same way that many loggers have felt when they wanted to chop them all down decades ago…or even today. I recently learned that Pacific Northwest forests that have been logged in recent times will not fully recover and develop to full stand growth until 2500 to 2800. Way past our lifetime. We will never see the recovery of those trees. Nor will our children…or our children’s children. Heck, the human race is even lucky if they see these tree stands again to the point where they are today.
I have also been learning a bit about lichens and fungi…organisms that have always intrigued me, but I knew little about. I also recently learned that many species of lichen grow at extremely slow rates…at the speed of growing to be dime-sized over the span of 10 years or something crazy like that! The largest organism in the world by area occurs in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon and happens to be a fungus: honey mushrooms (Armillaria ostoyae ). I am determined to find it one day.
Oh yeah….the photos. So it rained when I was out hiking yesterday and I wasn’t prepared to be out so long nor expect the rain to start until later. Fortunately, it wasn’t too cold yesterday. But the rain didn’t bother me. In fact, it was a bit delightful. Silver Falls was particularly beautiful, with a trail that passed at least 8 huge waterfalls…one of which you walk behind and hear the loud roar of water rushing over the rock above you. I got a few photos, but they really don’t do the justice of how beautiful the forests are here.
I haven’t updated in a while. The website isn’t functioning properly and clunky to post things. A new fresh site will be up and coming.
The last couple of months have been quite a whirlwind. After my last post, I went to Pennsylvania to visit family and friends for a couple of weeks. A highlight of the trip was getting to see high school friends that I haven’t seen since graduation. I also visited Philadelphia and saw many friends there. And my parents and I visited our cabin in the mountains. The following photos were taken in that area.
Some more photos from my light painting adventure in July…
I’ve received a few emails asking how this was done, directions how to do it, etc etc. The technique is called “light painting” and dates back several decades to some name-worthy pioneers of photography. It is done by essentially doing just that: painting with light.
A light source (such as a flash, flashlight, glow sticks, etc.) is used as your “tool” to paint. The various colors are created by using colored gels over the light source.
Each image was created in one long, single exposure. These were not done in Photoshop, but in my camera. Color correction and slight touch-ups on detail are the only post-processing techniques that I used for these. (I do minimal post-processing work on all of my photos and prefer to get them correct in the camera.)
I had done light painting in the past, but not to this extent. These photos had me pulling my hair out of frustration. I don’t recall ever being as frustrated with photography as I was while doing these and I can assure you that it wasn’t easy. In fact, it was some of the most difficult photography I’ve ever done. Nevertheless, I stuck with it and now I am hooked! Expect more in the future!
Perhaps most of you know that I was hanging out in LA for a while…jumping around temporary places (three in six months). LA is not for me. I couldn’t connect to the wavelength of the city itself, the people, the artistic community, and definitely not the pricetag associated with what I can only describe as “a headache”. I knew that I wanted to leave LA, but I didn’t want to go back to the east coast. I’ve always wondered if I would like living in Portland, Oregon. So I decided that there’s no time like the present to find out. And no more temporary places. This is the real deal and I am getting my own place.
So I left LA last week. I visited Redwoods National Park and the state parks associated with the redwoods along the 101. I had never been to that area and it was beautiful, magical, and tranquil. I went on a few hikes, but Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State park was my favorite. Apparently they filmed the famous ewok scene and scenes from Jurassic park there. But all fame aside, the place is just amazing. I am posting photos from that particular area in this post.
I stopped in Eugene to visit a good friend there. I then drove to Portland and arrived on Saturday and met up with friends whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. By 3am, I was on my way to the ER. The second time in two weeks. The trip to the ER led to a visit to a new doctor and then an emergency surgery to remove my 6th kidney stone. The stone had been hanging out for over a year, but decided to move a lot during my last 2 weeks in California. Stupid kidney stone! Some welcome to Portland! They say that you should research the hospitals, schools, and neighborhoods in the place where you are moving. I guess I got a third of that down now.
Although this was an unfortunate situation, I can’t say enough good things about healthcare in Portland. The doctor and hospital experiences that I’ve had here so far have been the best ever. They are willing to listen to you, seem genuinely concerned and want to help, and even the smallest things are not overlooked. They were willing to bend over backwards to help me. I have never received this kind of healthcare anywhere in the US.
Unfortunately, I had to cancel my trip home to Pennsylvania, but will be rescheduling after I know what’s going on. When I come back to Portland, I will begin the hunt for my own new home! I am very excited about moving to Portland. I have faith that this city holds everything that I have been wanting in a place to call my own home. I even have a photo studio lined up with a few friends. So when it’s raining outside, I’ll just sit under my warm studio lights and pretend that I’m on a tropical beach.
Anyway, more photos to come, but here are photos from Fern Canyon for now.
I went to the Mojave Desert this weekend to do some night photography. Here are some of the resulting photos.
I decided to break down and rent two lenses for a month. One of those lenses is the lovely Zeiss Makro-Planar 100mm f/2.0! I’ve been lusting over this lens for what seems like forever. It’s a pretty expensive lens if purchased, in the neighborhood of US$1800 I think. I decided to rent it to see if I would like it enough to consider it as a future purchase. After all, if you’re going to spend $1800, what’s another $250 in rental costs to try it out for a month!? But really, this rental was just for the fun of it more than anything else.
My initial thoughts on the build of the lens are that it’s sturdy and simple. It comes with a metal lens hood that is really nice, but seems as though it could fall off easily when attached to the front of the lens (snaps in place, but not securely enough). I don’t use lens hoods when shooting macro so I didn’t use it. It also doesn’t have the option for Auto or Manual focus, which is just great: exactly the way a true macro lens should be because you focus by moving your body to and from the subject and then use the fine adjustment on the lens to get the image sharp. Kind of like a microscope.
I took the lens out for a test run this afternoon, shooting everything at f/2.0. After taking each shot, I was just in awe as I reviewed the shots on my camera’s LCD. Simply amazing. I could tell without even looking at the shots at full size on my LCD that I was getting some tack sharp shots and the color saturation that I was able to achieve was out of this world! In fact, some of the shots were so saturated that I had to tone it down a notch.
When I got home and reviewed the photos, my initial thoughts were true disgust and disappointment. The first dozen frames were just drowning in chromatic aberration (purple fringing). I had never seen such bad CA except with poor quality lenses. However, it seems to have dissipated and went completely away after that first dozen. Kind of strange. Almost like the camera adapted to the lens and the optics were just how they should be.
Anyway, my review of this lens is AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME! It is everything that I would expect from a Zeiss lens and more. The images at f/2.0 are so incredibly sharp that it blows the sharpness of every lens that I own out of the water. My own macro lens is the highly sought after first generation Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro. Tamron still makes this lens, but I don’t know if they are as sharp as these originals.
The drawbacks of this lens:
This was written after only using the lens for a couple of hours and these are my initial thoughts. This Zeiss lens is a TRUE macro lens and great for the avid macro photographer. If you use autofocus, forget this lens…it doesn’t even have it. I can’t say how this lens would be for portraits, but given that it seems to take forever to turn the focus barrel, I can definitely see that would be an annoyance for portrait work.
Anyway, here are some shots from the lens. More to come in the future!
Canyon de Chelly National Monument has been on my list of places to visit for over a decade. When I drove across the country in February, I finally had the chance to visit this wonderful place that is located entirely on Navajo Tribal Trust Land. And what a better way to see it than with snow on the ground!
If you looks closely at the second image, you will see a set of cliff dwellings that lie within the crevice in the middle of the cliff (center). A different set of dwellings can be seen in image 4.
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