I was sitting at work this week and someone told me about this very easy to find waterfall that was up on Stevens Pass.

Now I’ve played the “I’m going looking for a waterfall game” before (read some of my earlier blogs.  And your see that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  Usually you spend a few hours stomping through heavily wooded areas that are covered in overgrown sharp stuff that hurts your legs.  If you are lucky you eventually find “the waterfall” (well actually if you keep looking you find a waterfall, it might not be the one you are looking for) and usually (for me) it’s a disappointment.

So the idea of “easily” finding one of these bad boys got me all excited.

Stevens Pass is one of the mountain passes through the Cascade range in Western Washington.  The pass is about 90 minutes from my house so I figured I’d go out and see what I could find.

As is usually the case it took a little while, but it was all driving.  In fact when I finally found the waterfall, I nearly drove past it as it was pretty small.  But find it I did and walked about 2 feet from the car to get this shot.

This picture was taken on the tripod with a ten stop neutral density filter on my wide angle lens.  This stops light entering the camera so the camera has to keep the shutter open for a long time to get an accurate exposure.  Long shutters make flowing water look like ribbons and produces shots like the one below.  As the shutter was open for around 30 seconds, the camera has to remain on a tripod so there is no camera shake – which results in a blurry picture.

The only downside of long exposures – especially when you are shooting a scene like this, is that any wind makes tree branches move and they look blurry in the picture.  Luckily for me this waterfall was totally sheltered from the wind and it wasn’t a problem.

I literally drove for 90 minutes.  Got out of the car, took this picture and headed home 🙂

On the way home I passed this truck in Sultan and couldn’t resist shooting that too.  The whole trip took just over three hours and I got two nice pics.

So I’m driving home from Cannon Beach and we go past this barn in a field full of dandelions.   The sky was blue and it looked really pretty.  So I pulled over, grabbed the camera and took a shot.  To do this I had to walk into the field and get down super low.  Now you wouldn’t think that this would be a problem but the owners drove up as I was doing this and gave me a nasty stare!  I kind of waved nicely with a big smile and carried on.

After taking the one picture I walked back the car and drove home (which was around 3 miles away – I pass this barn every day).

The following day on the way to work I drove past the barn and saw that the owners had mowed the entire field.  It looked terrible!  I guess they either didn’t want people on their property, or they hate dandelions 🙂

Either way I got my picture.

Earlier this year the family had a long weekend break in Cannon Beach Oregon.  If you haven’t been there or know the name, this is a really pretty town on the Oregon coast that is perhaps best known for the landmark, Haystack Rock.  Haystack Rock is this huge (235 feet high) natural rock that’s right on the shore line.  During low tide you can get to the rock and a number of small rock pools around it’s base.  The area is actually protected as a marine sanctuary and there’s always someone there to make sure people aren’t “doing naughty stuff” (not sure what that is but if you look at the rock funny they tell you off – in my experience anyway :))

The beach itself is just huge, it’s this beautify sandy wide area and it’s great for kids and dogs to run wild.  The water on the Oregon coast is pretty cold so you don’t often see people swimming, but you do encounter lots of vacationers taking walks, making sand castles, flying kites and having picnics.

Something that’s pretty unusually about the town (and beach) is that they are amazingly dog friendly.  Most hotels let you take your dog and some shops and even restaurants allow pets on their premises.  It’s also ok to let the dob off the leach on the beach (which too these days is a little unusual).

If the coastline looks kind’a familiar, you should also know that The Goonies (1985), Twilight (2008), and Point Break were all filmed in this area too.

Anyway we drove down there (takes about four and a half hours from home), took Roxie (our dog) and had a great time.  We stayed at the Hallmark Resort which is a very large hotel right on the beach that overlooks Haystack Rock.  In fact the first image below was taken from my hotel room balcony.

I think we stayed for four days, took lots of walks on the beach, ate fish and chips and generally relaxed.  Lisa and Abi rented beach bikes and cycled up and down the beach for an hour (James played on his computer while I read a book).

I took lots of pics while there, some of the town, some of the family and am uploading a sample here.

If you want to relax, I can really recommend the town, the people are very welcoming and the scenery is beautiful.  We will definitely go back again.

Today was a lovely day and ended with a nice evening with clear sky’s and not too cold. So I thought I’d pop out for a sunset or “blue” hour picture (just after the sun has gone down).

As I didn’t want to go too far I thought I’d go over to Kirkland as I haven’t been there in a while so I left home around 6:30 and drove to Lake Washington.

The sun was low in the sky but the water was pretty rough as there was a wind blowing. So I popped the camera on a tripod and put on a neutral density filter. This just restricts the amount of light coming into the camera so makes the shutter have to stay open longer. The result of which is that the water looks nice and smooth. But doing this you have exposure times of over 20 seconds so that tripod was really necessary.

I walked around the water’s edge taking loads of pictures looking for that great composition.  Once the sun had gone down over the horizon I found this little pier that’s right next to the place you put your boat in the lake.  Luckily for me everyone had gone home by this time so I had the area to myself.  Also the lights had just gone one and they cast a subtle glow on the pier.

I took a couple of shots and the images looked nice but they needed a little something else.  In truth the sun was really going so the sky wasn’t that interesting.  So I popped on a magenta filter too that gave the sky a nice purple hue.

Here’s the finished result.

This week I brought a new lens and after trying it out thought I’d post a “lens review”.  I’ve never really done this before as most of my readers are really here to see family pictures or the odd landscape shot.  Most aren’t really interested in the gear I own or how I use it.  But I thought what the heck, how hard can it be to write a review!

Well it appears the answer is VERY HARD.

As I started to type I figured there were somethings I needed to explain first and before I realized it I’d written a huge posting and hadn’t even got to the bit about the lens!  So I figured I’m not ready just yet for a full lens review, I should probable start with a few postings about general photography then I can refer to those when I tell you how wonderful my new lens is – and why.

So this means (I guess) I’m going to write up an “Intro to Photography” section in my blog.  For some I’m sure this will not be of interest, but I’m often asked how to do stuff and what to buy etc., so this new section (when I get round to it) will be more to answer those kind of questions.

So dropping the review here, let me tell you about this picture.

The new lens is a portrait lens and enables me to take pictures with a very narrow depth of field.  This means that I can photography a subject (Abi in this case) and only Abi is in focus.  Everything behind her (or in front) is softly out of focus.  In the image below you can see the garden behind Abi is all blurry this is called bokeh and a good lens can make this look natural and pleasing to the eye.

So why do this?  Well the idea is the viewer isn’t distracted by background objects and can enjoy the subject you wanted them to look at.  You’d think this was pretty simple, but the depth of field (amount of the subject in focus) can be tricky to manage.  It’s easy to make the depth too small or too big.

This was my first attempt with this lens and if you are super observant, you will note that Abi’s left eye (the one nearest the camera) is nicely sharp and in focus, but her right eye is slightly out of focus and a little blurry.  That said the image is sharp enough to post and with more practice I should get better at controlling the lens.

Abi kindly let me shoot her in the garden and went through numerous funny poses (most with goofy faces) until we got this one.

Needless to say I’m very happy with the lens and can’t wait to shoot some more portrait’s to really put it though it’s paces.

Hope you like the pic – thanks Abi for playing along.