This beautiful Olympia wedding was one of my favorites of the year to photograph, but I realize I may be biased: the bride is one of my old college friends and I can’t help playing favorites! Highlights from Chris and Tanya’s wonderful day below:
If ever there were a classic photographer pilgrimage destination in the northwestern US, the Palouse is it. The undulating multi-colored hills make for one of the most picturesque landscapes imaginable and a perpetual landscape photographer favorite. Particularly in the spring, the hills light up like magic at sunrise and sunset, drawing shutterbugs from around the world. One of the best and most classic views is from Steptoe Butte State Park near Colfax, Washington, an easy hour’s drive if you’re coming from the Idaho side in Moscow. As you drive round and round the narrow looping road that leads up to the summit of the butte, you start to see the incredible panoramic views of the farmland below stretched out like patchwork…and you might even get some stellar wildflowers on the butte itself. Bring a sturdy tripod, though – it is windy up there! Take a look at some of my favorites from my expedition over Memorial Day this year:
With a drop of nearly 200 feet, Washington’s Palouse Falls is a monster of a waterfall. Just thinking about how someone went over the falls in a kayak in 2009 makes my stomach flip! Photos can’t quite capture the scale of the cliffs and power of the water (or the terror of standing at the unfenced edge closest to the falls to get some of these photos), but hopefully they’re enough to inspire you to check out the state park for yourself. Next time you find yourself in eastern Washington, it’s definitely worth the detour!
Too many HDR-toned photos? Impossible! That’s why we’re up to the fourth installment in the series (you can catch up on parts I, II, and III if you’re behind), with more on the way. Enjoy, and as always, be sure to click on the photos for larger versions to appreciate all the details.
A car raises a small dust cloud on a dirt road in small-town Picabo, Idaho
Have you ever been disappointed with your photographs of tricky areas such as canyons and cloudy vistas because only a few sections of the images were properly exposed? The sky looks fine but the ground is completely in shadow; the ground looks fine but the sky is a blown-out swatch of white. There’s a way around that, and that way is called HDR, or high dynamic range images.
The idea is that if you take several different shots of the same landscape (preferably with your camera on a tripod for consistent images) at several different exposures and merge them all, proper software will pick the best exposure for each area of the photos, creating a stunning, perfectly-balanced image: no details lacking. Of course, not everyone wants to take several different exposures of everything they photograph, and there’s a way around that: if the lighting wasn’t too tricky to begin with, Photoshop has tools to “tone” single images HDR-style, producing comparable stunning results.
But why the long explanation? Well, I was itching for a new photo collection series, and when I fine-tuned my HDR-processing settings to a point where I knew I could make a bunch of older images really pop, I had my new series ready to go. And since these images have a fairly different look than the usual photos, I thought I’d explain why. Enjoy, be sure to click on the images to view larger versions, and (all together now) keep an eye out for future installments, because we’re nowhere close to done!
Winter in Stanley, Idaho
