Posts Tagged Olympic National Park
March 10, 2010 – Shi Shi Beach
Posted by Dave in - Best of Dave's POTD -, Picture of the Day, Tropical/Beaches, Washington State on March 10, 2010
Shi Shi Beach, Olympic National Park
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
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It’s been quite awhile since I put up a shot from Shi Shi Beach, so we’re all about due, right? Yeah, I think so. So here we go. Shi Shi Beach, Olympic National Park. You’ve all heard the story before. If not, go searching through the archives, there’s about a hundred pictures from here that I’ve posted already, and they’re all just incredibly awesome.
You may have noticed over there on the right that I added a “most popular posts” widget. It’s not based totally on post views, it uses other metrics too, like number of comments and incoming links and stuff. You can change all the values for how strongly it weights each thing, and I think I need to tweak it some. But, definitely check it out, and then go through and click on your favorite posts a bunch of times so they end up at the top of the list. Remember, hold down shift and hit refresh. Woooo!
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm lens. 1/125s, f/8.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 46mm.
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January 13, 2010 – Shi Shi Beach Trail
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State on January 13, 2010
Shi Shi Beach Trail
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
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God, another Shi Shi Beach picture. Seriously, right? Whatever. This one was specifically requested, although maybe not in so many words. (Somebody told me how much they like it, and expressed surprise that I hadn’t posted it here yet, so that’s as good as a request in my book.)
I think I’ve covered this ground several times already, but the trail (pronounced shy-shy, not shee-shee, by the way), is mostly located on the Makah reservation, at the far northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s not until the very end of the trail, when you actually get spit out onto the beach itself, that it leaves reservation land and enters Olympic National Park. It’s pretty remote out there, it takes a good 4 or 5 hours to get out there from Seattle. Distance-wise it’s not very far (only 118 miles as the crow files, 155 miles by road), but the last couple of hours is on *very* windy roads along the coast, so it’s tough to get above 25 mph on that whole stretch. The drive itself is fine, it’s not ugly, but it won’t blow your mind either, but once you get off on the roads onto a trail like this, it’s *fantastic*, especially once you’re actually on the Pacific coast. (the road goes along the northern coast of the peninsula, not along the actual “ocean”.) Anyway, I’m rambling. Look at the pretty picture. Ooooh, aaaaah.
This is going to be the last post until next Tuesday, because as I mentioned yesterday, I’m minutes away from getting on a train to Montana! Wooooo! So, be sure to enjoy your time not spent skiing in Whitefish while I’m away!
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 10-22mm lens. 1/400s, f/4.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 11mm.
Popularity: 14%
January 8, 2010 – Shi Shi Beach
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Tropical/Beaches, Washington State on January 8, 2010
Shi Shi Beach
Friday, January 8, 2010
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1003
Whoops, I missed yesterday. Sorry about that. By the time I realized I hadn’t posted anything yet, it was already pushing 6pm, so at that point I felt I might as well wait until today. To make up for it, I’m posting this one much earlier than usual. I’m pretending, as I write this, that there are massive hordes of people out there whose sole bit of excitement each day comes from me picking a random-and-probably-mediocre 640×427 jpeg and putting it against a white background for their perusal. Shhh, don’t disturb me, I’m enjoying this fantasy. I’m sure there are a couple, maybe even that aren’t my mom, but maybe not. (Hahaha who am I kidding, my mom doesn’t understand technology well enough to find my page.)
This is of course Shi Shi Beach. A. Gain. It’s apparently the only beach I’ve ever been to, judging from how many pictures of it I have, compared to everything else in the entire world. I mean, really, how many pictures can you really take in a 2 or 3 hour period? Quite a few, it turns out. It’s times like last night, when I spent a couple hours going through a whole pile of pictures from a couple of hikes last summer that were all just garbage because of bad lighting and haze, that I really appreciate hikes like this one, where for whatever reasons conditions are just perfect, and every click of the shutter is gold. Can’t explain why, sometimes things just work out. Like today. I get to have lunch at Chipotle today. The stars are just aligning in my favor. Delicious.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 10-22 mm lens. 1/160s, f/8.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 20mm.
Popularity: 17%
December 29, 2009 – Sunset over Puget Sound
Posted by Dave in Mountains, Picture of the Day, Washington State on December 29, 2009
Sunset over Puget Sound
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1127
Hey everyone, welcome back from the holiday weekend! Hope you all had a great Christmas if you celebrate that sort of thing, otherwise I hope you had a really great Friday. We had some gorgeous weather here over the weekend, which meant that I was able to get 2 or 3 post-worthy shots. They’re still on the camera, but you’ll see them someday I’m sure. This one’s actually from this last summer though. This is a view of the sunset (duh) over the Olympic mountains and Puget Sound, seen from downtown Seattle. Always beautiful, if the sun and the mountains are actually out.
Today’s picture gives me a chance to talk about one of my biggest pet peeves again: pictures that aren’t quite straight. It’s something that is really easy to take for granted, but is actually really hard to get just right. For a lot of pictures it really doesn’t matter (like yesterday’s picture of a rose) but anytime you have a shot that includes something that you would normally expect to be either straight up and down (like a tree or a building) or straight across (like the horizon), it kills me when it’s obviously tilted. And it doesn’t even need to be tilted by much. Even a degree or two can destroy a picture, especially if it’s something that stretches across the whole frame. This is particularly a problem for me, because for whatever reason my trigger hand seems to be a bit lazy, and it doesn’t want to hold the right side of the camera as high as the left. So it’s always something I have to explicitly ask myself before I hit the shutter: “am I holding it level this time?” In this particular picture I believe I just about nailed it (it’s oh so slightly off, but it’ll do), but there’s actually another variable going on here that can make it even more of a pain in the butt than usual.
In the cases I mentioned before (trees, buildings, the horizon), it’s generally pretty obvious what the “true” orientation needs to be. But what about the case of a lake with a far distant shore? (Or, like in this picture, a sound.) It usually looks right if the far shore goes straight across, but what if the shore is actually curving away from you? Then in reality it should tilt upwards a bit, but in a lot of cases, that will actually make it *look* wrong, even though it actually isn’t. Frustrating, right? I know, it kills me!
I’ll go ahead and finish this post with the standard caveat to the “is it straight?” issue: you can straighten pictures after the fact with software. But I have always claimed, and I still insist, that doing so subtly degrades the picture. Why? Because of math. The image off the camera is a grid of colored pixels. In order to rotate the image, you’re re-mapping those pixels to different locations. Here’s the kicker though: the new locations don’t exactly line up with pixel locations in the image. Meaning, the center of a particular pixel will be moved to a point that’s a little ways between the original pixel location and the location of the pixel next to it. Meaning the new pixel value will need to be calculated as a weighted average of several pixels. Meaning, you’re going to lose at least a little bit of sharpness, as adjacent pixels that once had a certain amount of contrast from each other will now be blended together. Make sense? It’s not a huge issue, and if it’s a question of either straightening an image or not having it at all, definitely go with the straightening. But if you have a choice between a straightened one and one that was naturally straight, I’d go with the natural one every time.
Want a different way of looking at the issue? Okay, here you go. Imagine a sheet of graph paper. Let’s say you want to draw a horizontal line on that paper by filling in squares. Easy enough, right? You just fill in a row of squares. Same with a vertical line. A 45-degree diagonal line kind of works. But any other slope of a line, and you get into averaging. Meaning, you start doing things like filling in two squares next to each other, then you move diagonally for one square, then diagonally again, etc. If you look at it from far away, it looks like a line of the correct slope, but up close it’s clearly kind of a hackjob. So when you straighten an image, you’re doing the same thing. You’re taking lines that were originally at one slope, and tilting them along a grid. So the result will average out to look decent, especially from far away, but you will have lost some detail in the averaging. Long story short, it’s a better idea to just try to take the image straight the first time.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm VC lens. 1/320s, f/9.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 154mm.
Popularity: 14%
December 21, 2009 – Strange Vine
Posted by Dave in Macro, Picture of the Day, Washington State on December 21, 2009
Strange Vine
Monday, December 21, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1033
Welcome back everyone! As you can tell by the very fact that I did indeed post something today, my traffic looks to be improved. Still not sure what happened at the end of the last week, but it sure seemed like most of you decided to go outside and play instead of sitting inside reading my stuff like you should. But since I did kind of already mentally check out for the holidays, I’ve decided to compromise, and use this week and next week (I’ll probably only post 2 or 3 times next week) to post some pictures from the backlog that are either not really that great, or just.. kind of weird.
This one definitely falls into the weird category. I saw this vine thing on a hike one day (I’m not going to say which one, due to my aforementioned hesitation at admitting to yet another picture from the Shi Shi Beach trail – although to be fair, it’s been a month since I posted one. Well, posted one that I actually identified as being from that hike anyway.) I thought it was really cool how those two strands danced and curled around each other, but the resulting pictures were still a bit weird. As in, I felt like when I looked at the picture I started by noticing the cool, playful pattern, but then right at that moment where you’d say “Oh, cool, that’s a [whatever]! Awesome!” I instead found myself saying “Oh, cool, that’s a …. umm… uhh.. what the hell is that?”. So it felt like it had a great build up, but then a crappy, poorly thought out, meaningless ending. But this and the other couple of pictures I got of this.. thing.. are both somewhat interesting photos in my opinion, so it fit perfectly with this week’s theme. (Oh, we’re doing weekly themes now, are we?)
So, there it is. Be sure to check back tomorrow to see what crappy and/or weird picture I decide to use to take up the dead-space between now and the end of the year!
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm lens with Hoya Macro Kit. 1/250s, f/5.0, ISO 800. Focal length: 50mm.
Popularity: 16%
December 17, 2009 – Insect and Flower
Posted by Dave in Macro, Picture of the Day, Washington State on December 17, 2009
Insect and Flower
Thursday, December 17, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=986
See? A bug and a flower, just like I said. Man, I’m really good at predicting stuff. It’s almost like my today self somehow sent a message back through time to my yesterday self saying exactly which picture would be posted. Almost eerie, really.
Those of you who were with me earlier this year, you know that this summer I went on a mini-odyssey of sorts, exploring several different cheapskate methods of macro photography. The extreme case was of course the reverse-mount adapter that I used to get that picture of the fly a few days ago. That one, while extremely powerful, is also extremely difficult to use. Today’s solution, while it won’t get you nearly as close, is in a lot of ways more pleasant to use. It’s a Macro Kit, which consists of a set of these magnifying-lens type filters that you attach to the front of your lens. They magnify a bit and allow you to focus more closely than you would be able to otherwise. So they get you closer than you would be able to otherwise, but with a whole new set of limitations. (Your depth of field is very small as you would expect, although not as drastic as with the reverse-mount. Also, the area outside of the in-focus range gets blurry in a weird way. I guess I’d describe it by saying it gets “foggy” rather than “blurry”. And, the longer your focal length (distance from the front of your lens to your sensor) the foggier it gets, to the point where, if you’re using a superzoom lens, and your lens is way extended, the whole frame will be foggy, even the stuff that’s in focus. It’s weird, really.)
As with any accessory though, they are well worth playing around with, despite their limitations, especially given their really low price (20-30 bucks.) Again, you’ll definitely get better results with a true macro lens, but you’ll also be paying a heck of a lot more than most of us can afford to spend on such a niche-use lens. So, if macro seems fun (it totally is), go buy one, using that link above, so that I get a kickback from Amazon. We all win! Woooo!
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 28-300 mm lens with Hoya Macro Kit. 1/200s, f/5.6, ISO 200. Focal length: 168mm.
Popularity: 14%
November 19, 2009 – Olympic National Park
Posted by Dave in - Best of Dave's POTD -, Picture of the Day, Washington State on November 19, 2009
Olympic National Park
Thursday, November 19, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1026
I used the caption (and title) “Olympic National Park” today because, quite frankly, the thought of labeling YET ANOTHER picture as “Shi Shi Beach Trail” was a bit embarrassing. I mean, it’s just sort of the way these things go: you take your camera with you every time you go anywhere, and sure, you get a couple nice shots each time. But then there are just a couple times when everything just comes together, and you get a huge number of top-tier (okay, fine, top- and middle-tier) pics. Maybe it’s because the planets are aligned just right, maybe it’s because your mood is aligned just right, maybe it’s because you made sure to eat enough fiber the day before, whatever. The point is, this particular trip out to the Washington coast was one of those times. The time I hiked out to Silver Lakes was another (and another).
As long as I’m doing the whole stream-of-consciousness thing, I’ll also go ahead and point out that, based on the color of the light, it looks like it was overcast when this picture was taken. In fact, my memory also suggests the same thing. Which just goes to show that you can get pictures you’re happy with even if the sun’s not out. So don’t ever let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t go out hiking just because it’s cloudy, okay?
.. Wait.. one sec… Oh.. I’m being told that in fact I am usually the one saying that. I see. Well, in that case, don’t let me in particular tell you that. Just get out there and take a few shots. Worst case, they’ll suck. But what are you complaining about, you’re not still shooting film (right?) so there’s no harm done. Happy Thursday!
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 10-22 mm lens. 1/200s, f/4.5, ISO 200. Focal length: 18mm.
Popularity: 18%
October 28, 2009 – Shi Shi Beach
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Tropical/Beaches, Washington State on October 28, 2009
Shi Shi Beach
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1016
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Hello message. Interesting comment about picture. Second interesting comment about picture. Snarky comment. Slightly self-deprecating joke.
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Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 10-22mm lens. 1/125s, f5.6, ISO 200. Focal length: 10mm.
Popularity: 18%
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: 12%
September 23, 2009 – Shi Shi Beach Trail
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Washington State on September 23, 2009
Shi Shi Beach Trail, Olympic National Park
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=994
Hey everyone. I’ve got to keep this short today. This is a view along the Shi Shi Beach trail (pronounced “Shy-Shy”) in Olympic National Park. Well, actually, only the very last bit of the trail, when you actually get to the beach, is inside the National Park boundary, the rest is on the Makah Reservation.
It’s pretty. But it’s a pain in the ass to get to. But still, go there. It’s worth it. That’s all.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 10-22 mm lens. 1/125s, f/4.0, ISO 200. Focal length: 10mm.
Popularity: 10%
August 24, 2009 – Shi Shi Beach
Posted by Dave in Picture of the Day, Tropical/Beaches, Washington State on August 24, 2009
Shi Shi Beach, Olympic National Park
Monday, August 24, 2009
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=980
Oh wide-angle lens, where have you been my whole life???
It’s come to my attention several times over the past month or two that I’m perhaps limiting myself a bit by not having a wide angle lens. That I may be missing out on the opportunity to get some great shots without one. In fact, not only do I not have a wide angle lens, the lens I use almost exclusively is a 28-300, so I start even further in than a “regular” lens would. (And by that I mean an 18-55 mm kit lens.) So, when I saw Eric’s pics from Banff, Glacier, Waterton, and Yoho national parks (linked to them on Friday), and I asked him what lens he used for some of the shots, and he told me he used a Canon wide-angle (10-22), that was the last straw.
Okay, I should take a step back. I’m throwing a lot of numbers out there, which probably don’t mean much to most people. In fact, the numbers, taken out of context, truly don’t mean anything at all. An 18-55 mm lens on one camera can be entirely different from an 18-55 mm lens on another. Basically, those numbers are representing how much zoom you’ve got. As in, when you’re fully zoomed out, you’re at the 18mm end of the lens, and when you’re zoomed in, you’re at the 55 mm lens. The bigger the number, the further zoomed in you are. Keeping up with me so far? Good.
So, these numbers that I’m using are all for a reduced-size sensor like those found in just about any entry-level digital SLR (which is what I have.) If you have a “full-frame sensor” in your camera (meaning a sensor that’s the size of a 35mm negative) an 18mm lens will be quite a bit different (zoomed out more) than on my camera. So that’s what I mean when I say it’s all relative. If you know what 18mm and 55 mm mean on your camera, then you can at least visualize what 300mm or 10mm would look like. But if you don’t have that baseline context, they’re just numbers.
So, to give you a little bit of context, 18mm on a standard entry level SLR (which is what the kit lenses, at least for Canon, start with – they’re 18-55 mm lenses, right?), when zoomed all the way out, looks basically like what you get from a point-and-shoot that’s all the way zoomed out. Point and shoots usually talk about their zoom in terms of “3x” or “4x”, which is a completely different measure entirely, but as you would expect, 4x means it zooms in more than 3x. But, the key takeaway here is that 18mm is kind of a “normal” amount of zoom, then you move from there. So, the lens I use a lot, being a 28-300, would be like having your point and shoot be permanently zoomed in a little bit with no way of zooming it back out. But then it has the capability of zooming WAY in from there. It’s really flexible, as long as you’re not taking pictures of stuff right in front of you. (Except for macro stuff, but let’s not go into that here.) So I’ve realized that even stepping back to 18mm would allow me to get some shots that I haven’t been able to in awhile. Or, if I’m willing to shell out some cash, I can get a lens that specializes in getting even wider, like Eric’s 10-22mm.
Using a wide-angle lens is just something you have to experience. It’s impossible to describe the feeling accurately using words alone. I never believed it until this weekend when I used one for the first time. I was shocked. I was blown away. I couldn’t believe that it had taken me this long to try using one. And now I’m hooked. I’m fully, hopelessly, obsessively hooked. I can never go back to my life before Friday. Ever again. It was that powerful of an experience. When I put the viewfinder up to my eye, it’s like I can physically feel something reaching out from my gut and pulling everything in to the frame. It’s weird. And wonderful.
So, what happened on Friday? Well, I had this trip planned to Neah Bay for the weekend, and I knew I wanted to try out a wide angle lens. I went to my favorite camera shop (Glazer’s, in Seattle), and asked them about 4 lenses I was looking at. They unanimously recommended one in particular (I won’t tell you which one until I can get my hands on one, because they’re very rare and very backordered, so I don’t want to manufacture competition with myself), but unfortunately they were sold out. BUT, they DID have a Canon 10-22 in their rental shop, so that would solve my immediate need. (It costs 20 bucks to rent a lens for a weekend, not a bad deal!) So I rented the lens, and took it with me. And the rest was history.
Now that I’ve had to return that lens to the shop, I feel like a piece of my heart was wrenched out of my chest. And the only way to fill it is to buy one of my own. I’m digging online right now, we’ll see what I can find.
Anyway, on to the picture. This is Shi Shi Beach. It’s just inside the boundary of Olympic National Park, at the extreme northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The closest town is Neah Bay, which is on the Makah reservation. The reservation itself encompasses Cape Flattery, which is the most northwesterly point in the continental US, and Shi Shi Beach is a few miles south from there. The trailhead is on reservation land, but enters the national park just before you get to the beach. the weather out there is crazy – it was sunny all day except for the hour or so I was on the beach. Then as I climbed back up to the ridge, the sun came out again. Ugh. Oh well, the pictures turned out fine.
So, go ahead and enjoy it. But it won’t be the last picture you’ll see from this hike, and it *certainly* won’t be the last picture you’ll see from a wide-angle lens.
Map: http://bit.ly/BMaNL
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Canon 10-22 mm lens. 1/200s, f/7.1, ISO 100. Focal length: 17mm.
Popularity: 16%
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: 14%