Tag Archives: WWE

Mount Rainier

Narada Falls

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Narada Falls
Do you see the tiny rainbow?
Trees through the mist thrown up by the falls.
Paradise River rushing toward the falls.

Usually we go to the mountain a bit later in the year, after most of the snow melt, so we’ve never seen Narada Falls so vigorous. This year the snow melt was accelerated by the record breaking hot weather in our area. The water really was everywhere, even in the air! It was hard to photograph the falls this year without getting my lens covered with water.

For Jez’s Water, water everywhere.

Puget Sound

High tide at sunset

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It’s been crazy hot here. But the water is cold, and wading at sunset makes you feel like the world isn’t so bad…

Puget Sound shoreline at high tide...and golden hour.
The sun setting over the Kitsap Peninsula, viewed from Vashon Island in Puget Sound.
Silhouetted of geese on waves refelcting the gold of the setting sun.

I played with using some of the effects available in the GIMP and the G’mic plug in for it (I think you can use G’mic as a plug-in for other programs as well).

The Water pixels filter is found in the Filters menu: Filters>Artistic>Water pixels
The simple noise canvas filter is in the Artistic set of filters.
This uses the "dream smoothing filter found in the Atristic set of G'mic filters.

For Jez’s Water, water everywhere and the Lens Artists Challenge: one photo two ways.

Flowers

Between showers

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Yellow rose cover in raindrops, sidelit by the westering sun.
Yellow rose at golden hour.

A chance ray of sunlight lit this rose, making it pop from the surroundings.

Chiaroscuro

I continue my exploration of chiaroscuro.

This is a Renaissance painting using chiaroscuro:

Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600
Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600

Directional light

I took these photos yesterday between rain showers. One typical feature of chiaroscuro is the light coming from a specific direction. In this case the sky was a mix of dark clouds and blue, when the sun hit a break in the clouds it came between some nearby trees.

Detail in the bright areas

Another feature is that the brightly lit subjects have a lot of detail. Since I wanted detail in the highlights I chose what some would consider an under exposure (I used the P mode and set the exposure compensation to -0.3) and made sure the depth of field was great enough to get the whole flower. The settings were F 4.0, 1/320s and ISO 100 the focal length was 8.8 mm (24 mm 35 mm equivalent).

High contrast between the lit subject and the dark surroundings (a.k.a., tenebrism)

I used Raw Therapee to darken the shadows without loosing detail in the highlights.

Moving the photo into the GIMP, I made a duplicate layer of the image, switched the duplicate to multiply blend mode, adjusted its opacity then used a tone curve on the resulting image to fine tune the contrast.

For Jez’s Water, Water Everywhere and Cee’s Flower of the Day.

Puget Sound

The creek is full

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Every year the winter rains and high tides reform the tide flats near Shinglemill creek. Today was a low enough tide to walk the beach, without rain, but the creek is still full and running fast and deep. My little dogs were intimidated and couldn’t get across, but they kept trying.

Little Asta.
Ginger got stuck on an island.

For Jez Braithwaite’s Water, Water Everywhere challenge.