Posts Tagged Buckhorn wilderness
March 21, 2011 – Olympic National Park
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on March 21, 2011
Olympic National Park
Monday, March 21, 2011
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=554
Not too long ago, I realized that I hadn’t yet posted this picture to the blog. That was simultaneously surprising and exciting, because I love this picture, so I was saving it for a good day. But right as I was about to post it, I realized that the reason I hadn’t posted it yet was because I DID already post the horizontal version of the same view. It was awhile ago, and ordinarily nobody would have ever known the difference. Except that, somewhat recently, I added a “similar posts” widget to the bottom of the page, and it’s almost guaranteed that that post (as well as another one that I took at the same time) will appear. Oh well, it’s still cool, it’s just less unique now. But, I figured I’d go ahead and still post it, because hey, why not?
This month is going to officially go down as the month with the smallest number of posts since I started the blog, which is sad. How can I say that with such confidence, even though there’s still more than a week left in the month? Well, see, it just so happens that I’m going on vacation early tomorrow morning, and where I’m going I certainly won’t be thinking about any of you. But before you get all excited thinking this might be the perfect time to stop by and help yourself to some of my more valuable possessions, keep in mind that the parents will be in town, and I warned them about you. Sorry, perhaps next time?
So, enjoy this picture, because it’s the last you’ll be hearing from me for a little while!
Oh, forgot to mention, this is a view of Mt. Constance (and some other assorted peaks) in Olympic National Park. I wasn’t actually inside the park when I took the picture though, I was in the Buckhorn Wilderness, which is north of the park.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, Quantaray 70-300mm lens. 1/320s, f/8.0, ISO 300. Focal length: 70mm.
Subscribe to the Picture of the Day via: Popularity: 14%
April 19, 2010 – Upper Silver Lake
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State on April 19, 2010
Upper Silver Lake, Buckhorn Wilderness
Monday, April 19, 2010
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=562
So, reflections are kind of fun. If you’ve got a piece of still water handy nearby, you can usually make just about any picture a little bit more interesting by reflecting something in it. Now, it doesn’t always make things more interesting an interesting way, if that makes any sense, but it never hurts to try. Long-time readers of the Picture of the Day may realize that I’ve posted shots in the past of just about this same spot, where I feel like I made better use of the reflection. But this one is still kind of nice I think.
This was taken at Upper Silver Lake, in the Buckhorn Wilderness. That’s on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State if you don’t have a map handy. There’s a national park on the peninsula, Olympic National Park, that encompasses a lot of the mountains and a decent-sized chunk of the coastline, but this wasn’t inside the boundary. There’s a couple ways in to the lake, one of which follows the Mt. Townsend trail almost all the way up. That’s the way we got there. The other trail is I think a little bit easier (in that there’s less up, then down, then up), but I wasn’t in charge of picking the trail, so what do I know. This was taken a little while after sunrise, when the surrounding peaks were nicely lit up, but the sun hadn’t made its way down to the lake yet.
Anybody have any requests for the rest of the week?
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, 18-55mm kit lens. 1/125s, f/4.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 28mm.
Popularity: 13%
October 2, 2009 – Upper Silver Lake
Posted by Dave in - Best of Dave's POTD -, Picture of the Day, Washington State on October 2, 2009
Upper Silver Lake - Buckhorn Wilderness
Friday, October 2, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=540
Hey everyone, welcome back. Today’s picture is another one of my all-time favorites. It’s proven to be really hard to decide to use one of my all-time favorites for a Picture of the Day post. I mean, on the one hand, they’re my favorite pictures, the ones I’m most proud of, so of course I want to show them off to everyone. But, once I use it, it’s done, it’s used. And I can never use it again. (Well, fine, it’s my own blog, I can reuse one if I darn well please. But that’s cheeseball.) So, I don’t want to use all of the great ones early on, then have nothing left but mediocre shots until eventually I run out completely. So there’s definitely a (small) pile of personal favorites that I’ve been holding back, waiting for.. who knows what. And everytime I think about using one, I manage to talk myself out of it.
So, today I decided to go ahead and toss one out. Lucky you! Feel free to send me cookies to say thanks, I wouldn’t complain.
This is Upper Silver Lake, in the Buckhorn Wilderness on the Olympic Peninsula, and yes, you’ve seen at least one other picture of this lake already. And yes, you’ve already seen SEVERAL other pictures that I took on the same hike. (As recently as… yesterday, in fact.) For whatever reason, that trip was probably the best trip I’ve ever taken, in terms of the sheer number of high-quality images that came out of it, particularly when you compare that to how long we were out. (Just two days.) Pretty wild. Here’s another one that I posted awhile ago, that was taken just a couple hours after this one, but is also in the “all-time-favorites” pile: http://picture-of-the-day.com/?p=139 . In fact, that picture was taken just over the saddle on the ridgeline that you can see in this picture. (Just past that little snow patch.) Needless to say, it’s a really beautiful area.
Any requests for next week? Mountains? Flowers? Bugs? Snow? Beaches? Anything?
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, 18-55 mm kit lens. 1/250s, f/6.3, ISO 400. Focal length: 18mm.
Popularity: 6%
October 1, 2009 – Butterfly
Posted by Dave in Animals, Flowers, Macro, Picture of the Day on October 1, 2009
Butterfly
Thursday, October 1, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=586
Awhile back, I posted another picture of this same butterfly (that was one of the very earliest posts to the picture of the day I think), and I mentioned how I thought it was so cool that their eyes look like polka-dot beach balls. And then after I finished with the big huge writeup, I went back and looked at the photo again and realized that I had chosen one where you couldn’t even SEE the eyes. And then I felt dumb. And then I got some dinner at Chipotle and forgot all about the whole thing.
Long story short, I’ve been meaning to toss up a picture where you could actually see what I was talking about for quite awhile, I just never really got around to it until now. So, here ya go – polka-dot beachballs. Weird, right?
Butterflies are both sort of easy and sort of hard to get pictures of. They’re easy in that they’re not small. You can get a picture of a butterfly with basically whatever camera you’ve got handy. But they’re hard because they move around a lot, and they don’t hang out anywhere for long. Kind of like bees, but even more maddening. And they’re very skittish. Bees don’t really seem to mind you if you let them take care of business, but butterflies seem to get spooked. I’m looking for another sentence I can put here to sort of round things out, both to finish off the paragraph in a good way, and to wrap up today’s entry. But I got nothin’.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, Quantaray 70-300mm lens. 1/400s, f/5.6, ISO 400. Focal length: 300mm.
Popularity: 7%
September 25, 2009 – Olympic National Park
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on September 25, 2009
Olympic National Park
Friday, September 25, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=559
Today’s picture is another one that I took on a particular backpacking trip in August of 2007. I’ve posted at least a couple other pictures from that trip already, and you may or may not be able to figure out which ones those are. Actually, it’s not very hard, but I doubt you care that much.
When I took this picture, I was standing in the Buckhorn Wilderness on the Olympic Peninsula (in Washington State). But, everything (well, most of it anyway) you can SEE in the picture is inside Olympic National Park. Mt. Constance is in there, as is Warrior Peak. And some other stuff. I go back and forth about whether I like this picture a whole bunch, or think it’s somewhere between boring (there’s not much going on in it) or simply bad (the bottom is under-exposed and the rest is just… empty sky.) Today, I’m on the “I like it a whole bunch” side of things. Sometimes, I just like it simple. Maybe next Friday I’ll go even further and just post a picture that’s the same uniform color of blue or something. That would be awesome.
For those of you who like to keep track of this kind of stuff, this is another picture that I took with my point-and-shoot. When you’re taking pictures near twilight like this one, point and shoots (well, any camera, really) will usually try to make all of the “stuff” (the non-sky, basically) exposed properly, which means a couple things: one, since it’s usually pretty dark by then, you’ll need a really long/slow shutter speed, meaning your image will probably be blurry, and two, the sky will probably be overexposed, since it’s so much brighter than everything else. To get around that, a nice trick is to just point the camera at the sky, hold the shutter button halfway to lock in the exposure and focus, then frame your picture and push the shutter button the rest of the way. Up to a point, underexposing things can really bring out the colors. To put it another way, exposing things “properly” or overexposing them is the best way to wash out all the color. Which sucks. Don’t do that. (Fact: I set the exposure compensation to -1/3 stop on every camera I’ve ever owned. Just by default.)
Have a great weekend if I don’t see you. (And let’s be honest, for most of you, seeing me would actually be kind of creepy.)
Notes: Fujifilm FinePix F30 (Point and shoot). 1/450s, f/4.5, ISO 100.
Popularity: 8%
July 30, 2009 – Olympic National Park
Posted by Dave in - Best of Dave's POTD -, Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on July 30, 2009
Mt. Constance and Warrior Peak, Olympic National Park
Thursday, July 30, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=555
First of all, I need to once again say WELCOME to all of the new fans of Dave’s Picture of the Day. This was my 2nd day of running Facebook ads, and we now stand at ** 195 ** !!! Welcome, everyone!
Today’s pictures is one of my all-time favorites, and I was saving it for the day when I finally passed 100 fans. So, turns out that’s today. You’re looking at Mt. Constance and Warrior Peak, on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I’m fairly sure that all of the mountains you’re looking at are inside the boundary of Olympic National Park, but the point where I was standing isn’t – it’s in the Buckhorn Wilderness, just north of the park.
Many of you already know that I like to use little knobbly trees like that in my foregrounds – they add a lot of character, and they play nicely against the craggy, rocky background that you see in alpine environments. This one was the only tree that was anywhere near us at the time – clearly not an environment that was tree-friendly, so the fact that it was growing there at all was pretty remarkable.
This photo also does a good job of illustrating a situation where you want to deviate from the normal exposure settings suggested by your camera. If you’re using any mode other than full-manual (I use aperture-priority, but I won’t go into that here), your camera will do it’s best to expose the picture “correctly”. (Meaning, it will adjust the aperture, shutter speed, and sometimes ISO (depending on the camera) to try to allow the correct amount of light to reach the sensor (or film), such that it’s exposed properly. Too little light, and the picture will be dark, and some sections may even be completely black. To much light, and all the color will drain out (particularly from the sky), and everything will be too bright. Now, of course, the concept of what’s “correct” is entirely subjective. You can make some blanket statements, like you probably want to limit the amount of the picture that’s totally black or totally white (because that means you’re losing data), but other than that, it’s totally based on preference. (In general, in my opinion every camera I’ve ever used tends to overexpose by just a bit, so the first thing I do when I pick up a camera is to adjust the exposure down by 1/3rd of a stop, but that’s just me.)
Now, that’s all fine and dandy if you’re taking pictures in the middle of the afternoon, but if you’re taking a picture like this one, when it’s clear that it’s just before twilight, having the picture turn out kind of dark is actually desirable, because *that’s what it actually looked like*. So, to more accurately recreate the feeling of the moment in the image, it was necessary to step back the exposure almost a full 2 stops. (You can do this via the manual mode of most point-and-shoots, but even if you can’t, you can simulate it by pointing the camera at a bright point – the sky – and holding the shutter button down halfway to “lock” the exposure settings.) This also had the added benefit of bringing out the nice blues and purples in the sky, since if the camera had been able to use the exposure that it wanted, the sky would have turned out completely white. (Although you’d then be able to see more of the detail in the nearby mountains too.)
For tomorrow, I decided to let the person who was the 100th fan to sign up (Heather Wotton) to pick one. She picked one that’s really similar to another one I already posted, but I suppose that’s excusable, given that she just signed up. 
So, see you all then!
Map: http://bit.ly/bJlJv
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, Quantaray 70-300 mm lens. 1/400s, f/8.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 70mm.
Popularity: 8%
June 8, 2009 – Upper Silver Lake
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on June 8, 2009
Upper Silver Lake, Buckhorn Wilderness
June 8, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=561
This was taken at Upper Silver Lake, in the Buckhorn Wilderness on the Olympic Peninsula. (Just outside Olympic National Park.) This is absolutely not the last time you’ll see a picture from the vicinity of Upper Silver Lake, because I got a lot of great pics on that trip.
This was taken in the very early morning, after we had camped out near the lake. I had just woken up a little while earlier, and was taking a casual stroll around the lake. Most of the area was in the shade, since the lake is surrounded on all sides by huge ridges, but the sun was making its way down a couple of the surrounding peaks. There were two problems with it though (photographically speaking): first, the scene was too big to fit in the camera frame. I couldn’t seem to get both the lake and the peaks in there at the same time. Second (and this is something anyone who takes pictures runs across ALL the time), is that the human eye is REALLY good at handling large variations in brightness. As in, when you look at a scene where half of it is in shadow, and the rest is bright and sunlit, you say “Wow, that part is bright, and that part is in shade”. The camera, on the other hand, has to pick one or the other to expose right, and you’re basically out of luck on the other one. As in, you can either expose the stuff in the shade, and everything else will be over exposed, or you can expose the bright stuff, and everything in the shade will be basically black. One common way around it is to use a split neutral density filter, which is basically a piece of glass you put in front of your lens that is half clear, half shaded, so you darken the bright bits, and bring them closer together. But, I didn’t have one handy, oh well.
So, I decided to just play around with the reflection. (I’ve noticed that I use reflections a lot.. hmm..) Since the water doesn’t reflect all of the light, it naturally darkened it enough so that it worked, and it also solved the problem of getting everything in the frame. (Since I was able to use the otherwise wasted space of the water to pack in more content.) Excellent, nice work Dave, high-fives all around.
Map: http://tinyurl.com/mnb7vu
I used the terrain map this time instead of satellite, because the lake was still covered in snow when the satellite photo was taken.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, 18-55 mm kit lens. 1/100s, f/5.6, ISO 800. Focal length: 18mm.
Popularity: 7%