Archive for category Washington State
September 13, 2011 – Snoqualmie Pass
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State, Winter/Snow on September 13, 2011
Snoqualmie Pass
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Wow. I’ve been pretty terrible about updating this site lately. Only one post in all of August, and we’re halfway through September and I’m just getting around to making my first post. Sigh. And the bad news is, things probably aren’t going to change anytime soon. So, I hope you like this picture, is what I’m saying. Like, *really* like it. Hmm.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, 18-55mm kit lens. 1/1600s, f/7.1, ISO 100. Focal length: 55mm.
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July 22, 2011 – Monte Cristo Peaks
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State, Winter/Snow on July 22, 2011
Monte Cristo Peaks, seen from Spada Lake
Friday, July 22, 2011
Just a quick post today to round out your Friday (or start off your Monday, if that’s when you’re seeing it.) This view was from the shore of Spada Lake, which is just a bit north of Highway 2 in the Startup/Gold Bar area. I wasn’t sure which peaks those were at the time, but I have since looked at a map. I’m fairly sure they are big peaks right next to the former-town of Monte Cristo (yes, the one along the Mountain Loop.) That is to say, Foggy Peak, Monte Cristo Peak, Kyes Peak, and Columbia Peak. I was kind of surprised to see that on the map, as I guess I just hadn’t really thought that closely about where exactly I was at the time. So, there you go. Have a great weekend!
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Unknown lens (but probably the Quantaray 70-300.) 1/1000s, f/11.0, ISO 200. Focal length: 70mm.
Popularity: 24%
July 20, 2011 – Chair Peak from International Bowl
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State, Winter/Snow on July 20, 2011
Chair Peak from International Bowl, Alpental Ski Area
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
I know, I know, another winter picture. Hey, it’s what I had handy. This is a view from in-bounds at Alpental (a ski area near Seattle), looking into the backcounty. That’s chair peak, and I was standing in International Bowl when I took the shot. I know I’ve said this before, but this is, more often than not, the kind of weather we get at our ski resorts. Lots of great snow, just not a whole lot of blue sky. Sometimes you’re skiing in the fog, sometimes the fog lifts a bit, but it’s generally pretty grey.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens. 1/200s, f/13.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 50mm.
Popularity: 28%
July 15, 2011 – Dawn in Central Washington
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State on July 15, 2011
Pre-dawn haze, central Washington
Friday, July 15, 2011
Today’s picture goes back to that big long drive I took a little while ago in search of northern lights. As you may remember, I never did find any, but I still had a nice drive. And I took a couple reasonable interesting pictures. Such as this one. I found this shot while driving through some ranch lands in sort of the central part of Washington state, somewhat close (45 mins away?) to the Grand Coulee Dam. Nice views, stuff that you normally don’t see, especially if you’re the kind of person that a) lives in the city and b) rarely gets up before 9am. So, it was a nice experience for me.
I think I mentioned this before, but I was pretty shocked at how early I started seeing the sky light up. In fact, when I finally got out of the canyon I was using to cut northeast on my drive, and I saw just a little bit of glow on the horizon, I briefly mistook it for the northern lights I was looking for. At the time, it was just past 3 am. This picture in particular was I believe taken just after 4 am. I mean, sure, I’m pretty far north, and we get a lot of daylight around this time of year. But still, 4 am?! Wacky. Anyway, there it is.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 55-250mm IS lens. 1/2s, f/8.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 131mm.
Popularity: 21%
July 8, 2011 – Larches at Heather Pass
Posted by Dave in Fall Color, Picture of the Day, Washington State on July 8, 2011
Larches at Heather Pass
Friday, July 8, 2011
Well, three posts in one week. Not my worst ever performance, so I’ll take it. This is a view from just below Heather Pass in North Cascades National Park. And, those are larches. I’ve talked about them a bunch of times, but for review: they are pine trees that change color in the fall. They are awesome. I have run out of interesting things to say.
I’m not going to post anything Monday, I’m warning you ahead of time, so plan accordingly.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. 1/400s, f/5.6, ISO 400. Focal length: 11mm.
Popularity: 36%
July 5, 2011 – Columbia River Valley
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State on July 5, 2011
Columbia River Basin
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=2340
Hello, welcome back! (That was directed at me more than anyone else.) Those of you in the US probably already know why I didn’t post anything yesterday. (It was a holiday – Independence day!) Those of you *outside* the US probably also had a strong suspicion that you knew why I didn’t post anything yesterday (because I am lazy), but you were wrong! Actually, no, you were right, but that was only the secondary reason.
Regardless, I didn’t post anything. But today I did. It’s not a new picture or anything (yeah, I don’t take those anymore), it’s from last summer. Well, last spring. Whatever. Last year. This was taken on the east side of the mountains here in Washington state. For those of you unfamiliar with the topology of Washington state, it’s … kind of weird. The western part of the state (where I live, in Seattle), is extremely lush and green. We get rain *all* *the* *time*. Seattle has the reputation that it does for a reason. But, nearby to our east are the Cascade mountains. The effect of the mountains on the weather is kind of like squeezing a sponge. Basically, if you drive just a couple hours east of Seattle, over the mountains, you get to a desert. Yeah, it’s weird. But it’s the way it is.
So, that’s where this was taken. Before the Columbia River forms the border between Washington and Oregon, it heads basically straight south for awhile through the heart of Washington State. And Highway 97 runs along it for awhile. And that’s where I took this picture. So this is not the “Columbia River Gorge” that you hear a lot about, which is also pretty. But it *is* a gorge-like area formed by the Columbia River. So, there you go.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. 1/160s, f/9.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 11mm.
Popularity: 25%
June 30, 2011 – Mt. Rainier from Crystal Mountain
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State, Winter/Snow on June 30, 2011
Mt. Rainier from Crystal Mountain
Thursday, June 30, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=2542
Hey again everybody. I apologize that the last two mountain-y pictures I’ve posted have both been wintertime shots. That wasn’t really the intention, it’s just kind of the way things worked out. But, I figured this one was appropriate because I just used it (earlier today!) to enter some cheeseball photo contest that Crystal Mountain (the ski resort) is having. Normally I make it a policy not to enter photo contests. Officially, my reasoning is that photos themselves (and the “quality” thereof) is entirely subjective, and thus the judging of photos to choose the “best one” is completely absurd. That there can be no such thing as a “best” photo, and so to pretend that you are judging photos as such is kind of insulting. Unofficially though, the real reason is because I know I wouldn’t win, and then I know that would make me feel bad. I generally prefer to not feel bad, so I save myself the trouble and I don’t enter, convincing myself that the *real* reason I didn’t enter was the one stated above.
So.. why did I enter this one, then? Not really sure, I guess I was just in a photo contest entering mood. And that’s a total lie. The reason I entered this one is because they were showing some of the other photos that had been entered so far, and they all basically sucked. I mean, like, photos-taken-with-cell-phones sucked. So I basically qualified my reasoning from above, by adding the clause “once the photos meet a certain, fairly low quality bar”. As in, “Once the photos meet a certain, fairly low quality bar, there can be no such thing as a ‘best’ photo”. I still don’t think I’ll win, because I figure the chances are pretty low that mine will be the only “real” (ie non cell-phone) photo entered, and it’ll probably be fairly arbitrary which one is picked as the winner (meaning, “somebody else will enter a picture that’s actually really effing cool”), but hey, we’ll see what happens. The rules were somewhat strict, in that it had to be a picture of Mt. Rainier taken from somewhere on Crystal mountain. But, since you can basically only see Rainier from the ridgeline at the top of the resort, most of the photos entered looked… basically the same. This one’s just a little bit different from the standard view (an example of which can be seen here, which was almost the one I submitted), so I’m hoping that counts for something. I had some *really* different shots, zooming way in so you could just see some of the trees you can see in this shot against the glacier in the background, but it wasn’t readily identifiable as Mt. Rainier, so I figured that might be a bit of a stretch. So, I settled on this one, and then moved on with my life. Which is also a lie, because clearly I’ve been talking about this stupid little photo contest for two paragraphs here on my entirely unrelated blog, so obviously it’s been on my mind most of the day, which is absurd. But, there it is.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 55-250mm IS lens. 1/200s, f/14, ISO 100. Focal length: 65mm.
Popularity: 27%
June 23, 2011 – Stars over Grand Coulee
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State on June 23, 2011
Stars over Grand Coulee
Thursday, June 23, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=2541
Well, how’s that for irony? I finally got around to uploading those pics I was talking about, and then I never got around to posting one. Whoops. Oh well, here you go, one day later than intended. And, as you can clearly tell, this is not a photo of the northern lights.
That’s because I didn’t see any northern lights.
Also, this is facing south-ish.
I was out looking for the northern lights, but I don’t think they were quite visible at my latitude. The forecast said they should be, but I was pretty close to the forecasted limit, so I don’t blame them too much. I know what you’re thinking though – why would I expect to see the northern lights from inside a big canyon? Yeah, yeah, I know.
The problem was, first I needed to find clear skies. And that turned out to be a lot more difficult than it should have been. The clearing that was forecasted (by a different set of forecast people) didn’t work out either, so I had to head about 3-4 hours east of Seattle before I could even see stars. I was at that point heading northeast from I-90, through Grand Coulee. That’s where I was when I took this. No northern lights, but a nice view of the sky. So I stopped to take a few pics.
Depending on how bright you have your monitor set, you can pretty clearly see the milky way here, and I believe some “city” lights (from the “city” of Soap Lake) down there at the bottom. This was a 45 second exposure, which I discovered was about as long as I long as I could go before the natural movement of the stars started showing up in undesirable ways. (Right, right, it’s not the stars that are moving, rather it’s the Earth that’s spinning. Shut up. The stars were moving relative to my point of view.) That was surprising to me. I mean, of course I know that you get a lot of movement in long exposures, but I figured I’d have to go an order of magnitude longer (like, say, 10 minutes or more) in order to actually see movement in the resulting image. But no, anything over a minute showed just enough blur to be annoying. I mean, sure, you can make cool pictures that have big long star trails. But in order for those to not suck, you have to have them be long enough to not just be mistaken for camera shake or for your focus being off. Plus, the effect was exacerbated since I was looking south. (Since the further away you get from the north star, the more movement you get.)
But anyway, here’s today’s picture. That’s all. Move along.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. 45s, f/3.2, ISO 800. Focal length: 11mm.
Popularity: 24%
June 16, 2011 – Diablo Lake
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on June 16, 2011
Diablo Lake, North Cascades National Park
Thursday, June 16, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=2111
This is Diablo Lake (I’ve also heard it called Emerald Lake) in North Cascades National Park. It’s not a natural lake strictly speaking, as it is the size it is because it’s dammed (which you can just barely see on the far right edge of the frame), to generate power for the city of Seattle. Whether or not it was a (much smaller/shallower) lake before it was dammed is not something I know. Actually, it’s dammed on both ends, as the next lake up the chain, Ross Lake, which is a long, narrow lake that extends just over the Canadian border, is also created via dam, and spills into Diablo.
And yes, it really is that color. The water is primarily glacial meltwater, and as such it’s filled with all sorts of silt and mineralage, which is what makes it look all milky like that. We get a fair bit of that here in the PNW (like the White River which comes out of Mt. Rainier National Park – it’s only a little tiny river, but the water looks like diluted milk, kinda weird.)
So, have a great rest of the day and all that.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens. 1/200s, f/8.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 11mm.
Popularity: 33%
June 9, 2011 – Headlee Pass
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State on June 9, 2011
Headlee Pass
Thursday, June 9, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1950
So in the past, I’d go through literally every picture that came off my camera. I’d look at every single one, throw away the real duds, and then go through again and do a little bit of post-processing on all of them that were even a little tiny bit good. Then I’d throw them into a big pile (the Rate Dave’s Photos thing), which I then go through to grab pics to post here. But over the last few years I’ve gotten amazingly far behind. In fact, I’m only halfway through the last day that I’ve gotten to, and it was so long ago that I was still using my old camera and my crappy Tamron 28-300mm VC lens. Thus, I’ve had a huge influx of images of marginal quality that I have to wade through when picking out a picture each day. Some of them are more marginal than others, but this is one of them.
This was taken near Headlee Pass, which is on the Sunrise Mine Trail, off the Mountain Loop Highway about halfway between Stevens and Snoqualmie passes in Washington state. It’s a great hike, blah blah blah, I’ve said all this before. Lake Elan was behind me when I took this picture, if that helps you get your bearings. I mean, it won’t, but it sounds good, and I felt like I needed a little bit more text to round out this post. See? It got me a couple extra sentences, not bad.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, Tamron 28-300mm VC lens. 1/50s, f/11.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 92mm.
Popularity: 22%
May 31, 2011 – Cascade Pass
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on May 31, 2011
Cascade Pass, North Cascades National Park
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1290
Man, when I fail, I fail hard. Remember back in the day when I was all talkin’ up a big game about how I was going to put up a post every (week) day of the week? And remember how I was all high on myself when I made it all the way up to Wednesday and was shooting 3 for 3? Yeah, well, not only did I miss Thursday and Friday, I failed to put up any posts **for the entire next week**. Eesh, that’s the last time I try to hold myself to any kind of goal.
So, anyway, we’re back, at least for today. To celebrate, here’s a shot taken near Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park. No, this wasn’t taken this weekend. Life got in the way this weekend, and I didn’t make it out anywhere to take any pictures, which is the same story for the rest of this year. At some point in the past, I posted another shot that looks really similar to this one, but no, it’s not the same picture, and in fact it wasn’t even taken the same day. I took one of them on the way up and over the pass, and I took the other the next day, as we went up and over the pass again on the way home. And no, I don’t remember offhand which one this was. Not really important, I don’t think. I wasn’t trying to take the same picture twice either, it just so happened that both times I was standing there, I noticed that it was a nice setup for a shot. And, it just so happened that the light was pretty similar on both days, so the resulting images came out pretty similar. Kind of an interesting experiment, really. Shows that, at least within a 24 hour period, my photographic instincts are pretty consistent, that given the same inputs, I’ll probably produce the same results. I’d be curious to see if the same held true over a longer period, like a month, 6 months, a year, whatever. But, we’ll never know. So don’t hold your breath. Probably a safe bet to not hold your breath about when the next post will appear here either, we’ll see.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300mm lens. 1/250s, f/14.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 35mm.
Popularity: 23%
May 17, 2011 – Crystal Mountain Ski Resort
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State, Winter/Snow on May 17, 2011
Crystal Mountain Ski Resort
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1307
Wait, didn’t I just post another picture yesterday?? Heck yes I did. That’s right, I’m shooting 2-for-2 this week boys and girls. I don’t actually remember the last time I managed to get 5 posts in during one week, but so far this week’s looking promising. We’ll see how the rest of the week goes.
This is Crystal Mountain. You can still ski there. I mean, it won’t look like this right now, but there will at least be some white stuff on the ground. Perhaps I’ll even get to see it for myself this weekend? Hmm, that might be a bit optimistic, we’ll see. But whatever happens, we’ll always have this picture to look at together. That’s right. Me and you.
Whoa, too personal, I’ve got to take a step back, I’m feeling a bit flushed.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens. 1/125s, f/25.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 24mm.
Popularity: 26%