White Crane Photography

What lies ahead has been occupying a lot of my thoughts lately. Between the seemingly futile attempt to sell my condo in order to escape from a defective and corrupt HOA, find a new job in this economy, and find a way to market my photography, there’s a lot to think about.

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the future. So instead I’ve been dwelling on the certain things. One of those certain things is an upcoming trip to Africa.

This trip involves a lot of training and preparation, since it’s an adventure vacation. I’m going with Enticing Adventures as the group’s photographer, but we’re all going to be doing pretty much the same trip.

Obviously, I’ve been thinking about what camera gear to bring, as well as what clothing to bring — plus what sleeping bag to carry. And of course, how to carry it; I’ll have to carry the camera gear in order to use it on the trip, so that’s going to be on my back rather than on a porter’s.

The other major concern has been, naturally, physical. We’ll be hiking to the summit of Kilimanjaro via the Rongai route, which is going to be a tough trip any way you slice it. We’ll be going from 6397 feet to 19,340 feet, so altitude and cold will be significant issues in addition to the physical demands of the hike itself.

After the Kilimanjaro trek, we’ll be heading out to the Serengeti and to the Ngorogoro Crater to see Africa’s great creatures in person.

After the Africa trip things are far less certain naturally; there’s potentially a Sierra Club national leader training trip if I get accepted into the program. Additionally I’d like to start offering photography tours and workshops, and for that I’d also like to get myself into a wilderness first aid class.

And then there’s Crawler, which has been ongoing for far too long… and I’ve gotten behind on the hero rig.

Sigh… so much to do, so little time…

The images here are from a training hike to Lake Serene. The falls were running so high that the mist prevented me from shooting there, so I didn’t get any pictures of Bridal Veil Falls, unfortunately. During the second training trip, we didn’t get a break from the rain, so no one really had any motivation to visit the falls that day.

This is an old negative that I recently scanned.

Over the weekend, I went on a Sierra Club outing to find and learn about bald eagles. The Skagit Valley is a favorite wintering ground for them, they feast on the salmon, both the young and the recently deceased adults.

I have visited the Skagit Valley looking for eagles in previous years, and found very few of them. This year we found at least 20 of them. Most were too far away to get decent shots of them, but a few cooperated. Since I’m a landscape photographer and not a wildlife photographer, I don’t have particularly long lenses for my digital SLR. Instead, my long Nikon mount lens is a manual-focus 200mm f4.5, which is plenty sharp enough to use with a Nikon 2x teleconverter, but rather slow at f/8. It’s definitely better suited to use with a film SLR that has a split-image rangefinder and microprisms on its focusing screen.

A little bit up-river from the 100 mile car park, where some Skagit eagle watchers had set up a viewing area with spotting scopes, I ran into a fellow member of the LargeFormatPhotography.info forum who let me use his 1000mm Nikon mirror lens. Of course, it’s also slow, at f/11, and manual focus, so to get a sharp image I had to use live view and magnify the image like a loupe. This backlit eagle is the best shot I was able to get all day, and it still isn’t quite entirely clear; there’s still a small branch across its face.

Whether it’s male or female I’m not sure; the only way that I know to tell the males apart from the females is that the females are bigger, but without them standing next to each other it’s hard to compare sizes, particularly from across the Skagit River. It’s definitely an adult, at least five years old, since their heads and tails don’t turn white until they’re 5 years old.