I hate these photo locations where you almost have to wait in line to get your shot. Christine Falls is perhaps one of the emost photographed waterfalls in the Pacific Northwest, due in part to the beautiful stone bridge above it, and the fact that it’s in a national park. But I thought it was worth my while to bump shoulders with other photographers for this shot. I focused strictly on the falls themselves, cropping out the bridge.

Using HDR technique created the little spotlights of falling water in the lower right corner, and enriched the brown of the rock in that corner, too. I like the way the reddish-brown rocks complement the blue-green water in the plunge pool.

Waking in the pre-dawn dark after a night of sleeping on Mary’s Peak, the highest mountain in the Coast Range, I followed a trail to a clearing, where I set up my tripod, attached the camera to it, then sat down and waited for the scene to reveal itself. The mountain on the horizon is Mt. Jefferson. The Willamette River, though you can’t see it in the photo, runs right to left through the middle distance, to meet the Columbia at Portland. The silvery clouds come from the Pacific. Perfect silence, except for the little voice in my head saying, “I want coffee. A latte. With big heaps of foam….”

And then the sky turned marmalade.

Click.

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.

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