The Goat Rocks Wilderness lies between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams in Washington. It’s a small range with a lot of orange rock, a wonderful anomaly in the Pacific Northwest, where black and gray volcanic rock predominates. It also has some dramatic broad, U-shaped, glacial valleys, far-flung flowerscapes, and mountain goats.

This is an HDR photo, taken early on an absolutely still morning after a night of merciless wind, steps away from my tent. I’m so pleased with the way the orange reflections in the water complement the bluish, shaded rocks.

I shot this for a poster used for a literary event held every fall in Corvallis, called The Magic Barrel, with help from my friend Jim Bolker, who helped steady the kayak so the typewriter wouldn’t tumble into the drink. The Magic Barrel features a number of local poets, novelists and nonfiction writers reading their work, with the proceeds from the evening going to the local food share for hunger relief. I should also add here, for the purposes of complete transparency, that I am a board member of the Magic Barrel, in charge of photography and web design.

I designed this shot to blend the literary theme of the event with the outdoorsy culture of the town. And that’s what brought Jim and I to the shores of the Willamette River at sunset, far off in the wilderness about a block from downtown Corvallis, to try to balance the typewriter on the rounded shell of the kayak. I thought the coffee cup was a nice touch. We got the ducks through the local actors union, but they were impossible to work with, squabbling constantly about bread breaks and the union pay scale.

Dark clouds and dim light all weekend, and then, for about a half hour, the clouds opened up in one quarter of the sky, just enough to let in one blazing shaft of light. For a photographer in love with landscape, moments like these redeem whole days of dreary searching for drama, of settling for closeups of moldering leaves. The challenge then, at times when the land ignites like this, is to pay attention to the task at hand — the making of images — instead of simply going down on your knees with gratitude and praise.

“I know not whether it is because San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, with a great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for many persons the whole place has a kind of suffusion of rosiness. Asked what may be the leading color in the Venetian concert, we should inveterately say Pink, and yet without remembering after all that this elegant hue occurs very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in. There is indeed a great deal of very evident brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in color, but always burnt out, as it were, always exquisitely mild.”

Italian Hours, Henry James

“The true harvest of my life is intangible — a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.”

–Henry David Thoreau