OK I know what you’re thinking, what happened to the Image a week?  Well work has been pretty busy (got a new job) and I’ve got a lot on at the moment and unfortunately getting out with the camera took a back seat.

But this week I got the opportunity to visit Northwest Trek which was a fantastic trip.

I went with some of the guys from work (Eric, Chris and Adam), all of use aspiring photographers .  Northwest Trek is basically a safari park at the base of Mount Rainier that contains animals that are indigenous to the Pacific North West, so loads of Elk, Moose, Bison and Bear’s (I’m sure you get the idea).

Now some of the animals are herbivores so pose no danger to us, so those are all running free in a huge park area.  Other animals (black and brown bears, coyote’s and cougars etc., obviously can be pretty dangerous so they are in enclosures.

To see the safe ones, we had to be at the park by 9am and we are driven around on a large bus with no windows that stops for you to take pictures.  The driver of the bus was excellent, she took us all over the park and would pull over when ever we asked and turn off the engine so there was not vibration.  We would all then hang out of the windows to take pictures and then we’d move off again.  This part of the tour lasted nearly 3 hours.

Then we got to walk around the park looking at the carnivores in their enclosures.  The park is really beautiful and the enclosures are pretty large and naturally look like the normal habitat of the animals (that said it’s still a cage so is a little sad).

Anyway, I got LOADs of pictures and am posting some of my favorites here.

While viewing the park I also shot a couple of landscape shots so you can see what the park looks like.

Ironically my favorite thing to shoot was a squirrel that was just sitting in a tree (it wasn’t an exhibit at all).  But he had no fear and just sat there posing, so I got him too.

Hope you like the images.

I was due a trip out with the camera so I discussed some locations with some of the guys at work. Originally we thought a trip to Mt Rainier for a sunset picture and maybe some star night shots would be cool.  I did some investigation and it sounded like the flowers on the mountain were in bloom and the night skies were clear and you could even shoot the Milky Way over the top of Rainier – all was looking great.  Then we heard that the mosquitos were out in force, someone said you need to go in long pants with shirt sleeves as they are vicious early evening.  We were also told to take mosquito spray as sleeves wouldn’t stop them!  Once I told people about this, numbers of interested parties started to drop.

Taking this into consideration along with the time it takes to get home off the mountain in the dark (probably around 4 hours) we figured we wouldn’t get home until very early morning.  Numbers went down again.

In the end it was just Adam and I – and to be completely truthful, neither of us fancied facing the mosquitos or the scary long drive home.  But we still wanted to go!  In the end we opted for a waterfall trip to the same location.  We could leave mid morning, get there early afternoon, shoot some waterfalls and be home before the sunset.  I tried to get others engaged but nobody wanted to come.

So Saturday morning at 11am I picked up Adam and off we went.  The journey there was very long – took about 3:30 hours which is way too long, coming home we did it in 2:30 hours which was much better.  Why so long getting there? Well you can blame my satellite navigation for that – it got us totally lost, but coming home I remembered a faster route and that saved us an hour.

When we got there it was around 72 degrees and packed with people, so parking was a pain, but we found some GREAT waterfalls and got LOTS of shots.  For most of the afternoon the sun was pretty strong and exposures were tough, so we shot lots of bracketed pictures, always with our neutral density filters fitted to the camera.  These gave us nice long exposures and gave the images that ribbony look as the water went over the fall.   This meant that all pictures had to be taken on tripods as the typical exposure was well over a second.

It was quite funny to see all these other people there with expensive cameras and lenses taking pictures.  None of them had tripods and you could see the frustration in their faces, and sometimes their jealousy when we set up next to them.

I think I used the same lens the whole time, I had my ultra wide 10-24mm lens with a 6 stop neutral density filter on the camera all day.  We shot at f/16 or smaller and had our cameras on the tripod being triggered by a cable release or timer.

When I got home I manually blended bracketed pictures together to get the image I wanted, that way I removed heavily shadowed areas and brought back blown out highlights.  I could of used HDR software for this but I usually find the produced images look really “HDRy” (if that’s a word), and I wanted very natural, realistic pics.  You can view the shots below and tell me if you think I achieved that goal.

Anyway I took LOTs of pictures, and ended up with a nice dozen or so I really liked.  Here are my favorites.

Every Saturday through Summer Redmond hosts a car show for classic and exotic cars.  I say every Saturday, if it’s raining they cancel, but in July and August it’s pretty much guaranteed to be on.

I’ve gone down there a few times to take pictures and after a while it gets hard to shoot a car in a new or interesting way.  What made today more challenging was that it was overcast, with no blue sky at all – still lovely and warm but no direct sunlight.  So getting low and shooting up (which is the view I usually like to do) captured a nice car with a really boring sky.  Also a problem was the number of people there.  I got to the shot at 8:30 but it was still packed and there’s nothing worse that a nice car with loads of people standing round it.

So today I tried something a little different.  Sure I took a couple of “complete” car shots but most of the pictures I captured were close ups of parts of cars.  This was actually a lot of fun – although people watching thought I was nuts!

Hope you like the Images.

I’ve been on vacation to Hawaii a few times now, it’s one of the real benefits of living in the Pacific North West as the islands are only about a 5 hour flight away.  If you’ve never been you probably have a romantic view of what it’s like.  Maybe you’ve see Hawaii five 0 (the new series or if you’re old like me the old one with Jack Lord).  Perhaps you even remember Magnum PI with Tom Selleck (as a kid I loved that show – talk about a man crush!)  Either way let me tell you this, Hawaii is everything you ever dreamed… only better!

It truly is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, the beaches are just stunning, the scenery is amazing and totally exotic and if you want to relax, it’s the only place on earth to go.  At least that’s what I thought!

We’ve been to Maui a couple of times, Kauai once, and this year we went to Oahu.

People at work who haven’t been to Hawaii asked me how the islands differed.  The easiest way I could come up with to explain the difference was as follows.  Kauai is a small village with a couple of shops, if you like big malls or crowded places Kauai is not the place for you, but if you want total piece and quiet, it’s heaven.  Maui is a small town, nice shops, good restaurants (all your favorites) a little touristy with lots to see.  On Maui you can lie on a beach in the morning and shop in Tiffany’s in the afternoon (been there done that).  Then we get to Oahu.  For me this was a big city to Maui’s town or Kauai’s village.  Oahu has it all going on, mad busy beaches, big cities, HUGE shopping complexes, a massive navel base and traffic like Seattle in rush hour.

If you like the beauty of Hawaii but need the hustle and bustle of home Oahu is for you – it’s just not for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really pleased we went but I want to go to Hawaii to relax, not sit in traffic for 90 minutes after going to one of the biggest open air malls I’ve ever been to get back to my hotel.  While there we stayed in Aulani the Disney Hotel and complex in Hawaii.  This is a place where you need to take a LOAD of money as it was the most expensive hotel I’ve ever stayed in.  Now I like Disney as while it’s pricy you get value for money, but the food in Aulani was just terrible but still SUPER expensive and as they have you as a captive audience on the west coast, you kind of have to eat there!

Anyway, Oahu it was this year.  Issues aside we had a wonderful vacation, the pools and facilities in the hotel were really nice and the kids had a blast.  While there I took a few pictures 🙂 and really enjoyed visiting Peal Harbor and walking on the Missouri (that’s history for you right there!)

Will I go back to Hawaii again? No question a huge YES.  Oahu though? Probably not.

Here’s a selection of some of my favorite pictures.

For the last two years I’ve visited Las Vegas for the Photoshop World photography conference in September. While the conference is great fun and you learn a load I thought this year I’d try something different. So for a change I decided to go on a Photography Workshop. I looked online for a workshop I liked the sound of and found a local Photographer (based out of Seattle) who ran a number of workshops all over the county.

Justin Resnick (here’s a link to his site) is a landscape photographer who travels all over the world. He has workshops all over mainland USA and others in Hawaii, New Zealand and Iceland. As some of the overseas workshops are pretty expensive I wanted to make sure I learnt something from Justin first and liked his training/teaching style. So for my first workshop I opted for “Palouse”.

Where the heck is Palouse I hear you say?

Well Palouse is an agricultural region in western Washington. It’s right on the Washington, Idaho border spanning down to the top of Oregon, and the best bit is I can drive there from Seattle in around 4 hours. The thing that makes Palouse interesting is the land formation. Imagine miles and miles of undulating hills, all different shades of green! It’s really something amazing to see.

So I booked a place on the workshop and off I went.

The workshop lasted four days and was pretty intense. We would get up at 4am go out and shoot sunrises, come back to the hotel for 6am, have breakfast and go to sleep for a few hours, head out at midday and shoot until sunset. Try doing that for four days.

During the workshop I shot around 3,500 images and I’ll still be processing the shots in August. This blog post just includes a few of the early processed ones I really liked.

So what was the workshop like? Well there were only 5 students in total so we all got lots of time with Justin. Justin was just fantastic. He’s an amazing photographer and spent the whole time making sure our experience was great. All he cared about was did we get the shots we wanted, did we have any questions, where did we want to go to today?

At each location he would tell us what to look for, where best to set up and what the best composition was. I really learnt a load and will definitely attend one of his workshops again.

One of the highlights of the trip was our visit to Palouse Falls for a sunset shot. This is a huge waterfall in the middle of nowhere. In fact it’s now the official waterfall of Washington state. When we arrived Justin explained how we had to set up right on the cliff face. This was pretty scary but definitely gave us the best view and some amazing shots.

Anyway I LOVED the workshop, and will try and get on another one next year. Hope you like the images.