White Crane Photography

This is another image from my trip to Oregon, specifically from Bandon Beach, at the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge.

It was a cloudy evening, so the sunset wasn’t particularly intense. The cloudy sky cast a blue color over the scene softly and evenly, making the exposures pretty easy, though a bit on the long side (seconds, at this point).

To get the leading line, I walked around and watched the patterns that the waves made after the broke. The receding water flowed around rocks and other hard objects in the sand, forming graceful curves like the ones in the foreground here. Since the light was so soft and even, I didn’t need to worry about burning out parts of the image, so I was able to pull in some detail in the sea stacks without needing to use things like HDR. This image didn’t require much editing — mainly dust spotting (I suppose I should clean my sensor).

A lot of people were out taking advantage of the beautiful weather and the deep snow at Mount Baker. The parking lots were full, and yet the lift lines were surprisingly short.

There were people on showshoes, skis, and snowboards everywhere, and even some tents behind a snow wall.

The weather was beautiful, with a clear blue sky and mild temperatures — at least, until the sun started setting. Also as the sun set, the color and light on the mountains was a sight to behold.

In this image, photographed from Kulshan Ridge near Artist Point, is Mount Shuksan, with the Shuksan Arm extending to the right. I used a Nikon 105mm f/2.5 manual focus lens on my D300 (shot wide open, at 1/800th of a second), and captured 14 images, panning handheld. I stitched the image in Photoshop CS4.

As the sun neared the horizon, the soft light revealed the texture and detail of the surf crashing into the coast. In the foreground are the sea stacks of Crescent Beach, and in the distance is the famous Haystack Rock.

I timed the shot so that the breaking waves would make a smooth leading line connecting the series of sea stacks.

This is one of the sunrise images from the Beach in Bandon.

This has been quite a year already. It’s had its share of ups and downs… more ups, but a pretty major down that I’m still getting over, and finally a new beginning. White Crane Photography is now officially an LLC, my print portfolio is just about ready, and my new site is live at last.

Finally, I have a new web site, with a much nicer gallery than before, though without the handy e-commerce that SmugMug provided, plus a new blog engine that’s both nicer than Blogger, but more importantly, no longer separate from my site like my Blogger blog was.

This image is from my first trip to the Oregon coast. Down in Bandon, we found that the beach had a large collection of sea stacks with a wide variety of sizes and shapes, making for a promising opportunity. So we made a point of being there for both sunset and sunrise, and the results were worth it.

In this image, captured after the sun had dropped below the horizon, illustrates the value of staying past sunset. This sunset wasn’t at all dramatic, the clouds were too dense to give us one of the really beautiful sunsets that we often see over the Pacific, but we had some very soft light with relatively low contrast. I spend some time studying the way that the water surged and flowed around the massive boulders on the beach so that I could find a spot that would provide a nice leading line in the foreground with a long exposure to draw the eye into the image here.

It seems as if I didn’t get any Enchantments passes in the lottery, which means that I’ll have to play the odds to get in… or go in October and brave the cold and weather, but with the possibility of golden larches.

Last February, a friend and I headed up to Mount Rainier bright early in the hopes of watching (and of course photographing) the sunrise. Our plans didn’t quite pan out, though; we learned that the gates on the Road to Paradise, just beyond Longmire, didn’t open until after sunrise. So, we headed back to the Kautz Creek trailhead, and walked out to the creek overlook for this view of Mount Rainier, and had the good fortune of having some nice clouds in the sky.

Now that the new year, and the new decade are beginning, what’s in store for yours?

Here are some of my goals:

• Return to the Enchantments
• Visit the Necklace Valley
• Backpack to Cutthroat Pass
• Get certified to lead backcountry outings with the Sierra Club
• Get certified in wilderness first aid
• Return to Point of the Arches
• Backpack the Glacier Peak Wilderness
• Get a portfolio printed and produced
• Write a photography book
• Visit Camp Muir

For the curious, the picture above is from Black Canyon, outside of Ellensburg, on the eastern slopes of the Cascades. All I had time for before a cloud obscured the sun was that shot with my point and shoot, but at least I got a shot!

So what’s on your docket for 2010?