My Trip To The Pacific Northwest; A memoir

My trip along the Pacific Northwest has been very enjoyable, but also nerve-wracking. However, I think that extreme Northwestern Oregon is a wonder, both manmade and natural. I visited Olympic National Park, Mt. Rainier, Seattle, and Portland. The Olympic peninsula was great, I felt great physically in the Olympic forests and mountains. Happens that we went in late July to these places, and the weather was sunny most of the time. I wanted to get as many photos as I could, but at the same time, I try to ensure that each of my photos are the best possible quality, and try to make them as creative as possible. The sun made photographing difficult at times, especially as sunlight reflected from a waterfall which was set against some cliffs, which cast very dark shadows. I set out to capture plenty of HDR photos and to blend multiple various exposures of the same scene together, but some time along the way, during the trip I lost my mini flexible tripod. Handholding the camera steadily, trying to get each exposure to be aligned identically, my software’s image alignment was not up to the task, as it produced blurry results. Another of the things that I set out to do was to get some exceptionally long exposures, of at least 30 seconds or so, during the daytime. Some of the most beautiful areas that I got to visit (Mt. Rainier included) were visited during noon, so even though I had an NDX400 (10 stop) coupled with a Polarizer, it was still Late July and the slowest aperture I can set on my camera is f/11, so the exposure was limited to about eight seconds, and if I would like to get the maximum sharpness out of my lens, I’d have to keep it at f/7.1 or quicker, meaning that the effective shutter speed was practically limited to some degree, down to about 5 seconds. The useful feature on my camera is that I can essentially combine a 10 second timer with an image burst of 5 images. This helps, because I can create five exposures each lasting five seconds, to create an effective exposure of 25 seconds using post processing, albeit in Photoshop Elements I have yet to figure out how to do this efficiently. When I visited Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington, it was about 10am or maybe even earlier, which happened to be a great time, as the weather was partly cloudy with deep blue skies, and a lot of the clouds would partially obscure the mountains. After some minor image enhancements, on some of my polarized images, I set the levels in post processing to simulate a red filter, before converting the photos into black and white, after which the skies turned totally jet black, although the vegetation was a little darker than what it would have been had the images been taken using an Infrared camera or filter. I think that it would be really neat to create a time lapse out of some super long exposures one day, to show flowing clouds appearing to move past a scene. Long exposure photography can be extremely challenging in dark conditions; I had to take multiple differing exposures with my ND filter to get the correct exposure, with highlights and shadows showing the maximum amount of detail, and even more exposures to later be able to perfectly combine into an exposure fused image. Washington and Oregon seem much warmer than it usually is back in my home state of Michigan. Most of the time, the sky was hazy and there was a lot of haze at ground level which obscured the mountain ranges. The disadvantage of this is that detail can be lost, at least when you want to get a great photo of a distant landscape. However, if you also want to include a much closer foreground, then the haze can actually add depth to a photo. I have yet to use my remote shutter release, which can also serve as an intervalometer; if I used it before, I could’ve gotten far longer exposures of about 100 seconds, which would more effectively smear clouds moving across the landscapes. Nonetheless, the short exposures looked just about equally impressive, and I actually can't decided if a long exposure would be better, or a shorter one. Most, if not all, of the HDR images that I created could be an astonishing basis or inspiration for paintings. Let's no look at the results, some of the best photos, from my trip...