Gene Pardee from the Olympia Camera club shooting a Fresnel Lens

After we moved to Olympia a couple years ago I joined both a meetup.com photography group and the Olympia Camera Club.  Over the last couple years I have gotten less active with the meetup.com group but more active with the camera club.  One of the things that I find attractive about the camera club is the regularly scheduled photo field trips, one of which was this past weekend where we visited 3 different Puget Sound lighthouses.  This image is from the Point Robinson light on Vashon Island and is of club member Gene Pardee shooting into the fresnel lens.

When I go on these sort of shoots, whether it is a field trip or just a photo walk, I am usually far less interested in actually making great images as I am with exploring somewhere I might not have been to before with a group of people that are seeing things differently than I do.  The social aspect of a day like this is really what makes it fun, IMO.

This is my favorite image from the entire day.  Granted, I have always been a sucker for images of photographers making images, but for me this image does a lot more to show that this trip was a club event, with other club members, having a good time and making some images along the way.  There are a number of technical problems with this image, there are reflections from the glass, I was outside shooting into the light, but it is those little imperfections that actually makes this my favorite image from the day.

Ok, I guess I could have just made this blog post 1 sentence long and said “embrace the imperfections.”

A cloudy sunset near Olympia, WA

I called this image “Turbulent Sky” but if I am going to be completely honest, the skies weren’t really all that turbulent, I is one of those classic “it looks worse than it is” and it was actually a quite gorgeous sunset.

I captured this sunset image the other night while driving home after giving a 2 hour presentation / demo of Lightroom to a local photography meet up group.  I didn’t spend a lot of time with it, just pulled over at a wide spot of the road and fired off a few frames.

I hope you enjoy it.  Please click on the image to see a larger version.  Also, I have now enabled e-commerce functionality on all of my galleries and you can now order fine art prints directly from this site.  Please visit my Fine Art Prints page for more information.

The Cedar Creek Grist Mill in Washington State

After the photo walk in Centralia last weekend, that I shared this image from, my friend Gary Well and I drove down to the Cedar Creek Grist Mill in southwest Washington.  I had never been there before but had seem some images of the place that really had me wanting to visit.

I had a number of things working against me on the trip, the biggest being that I walked out of my house without a tripod, long story, and when we were there the sun was very harsh and casting terrible shadows.  Gary was nice enough through to lend me his tripod for a few shots, and I made this one with my 10 stop Lee Big Stopper filter.  My hope was to get the leaves to move a bit during a 30 second exposure to give a bit of a “dreamy” look.

When all was said and done, I didn’t get the shot I wanted out of camera, but thanks to the use of some creative filters in post, I was able to give it the more soft feel that I wanted for it.

I do plan on going back to the mill at night, I think that this would be an awesome subject for some light painting.