Impressionist Photography

A quick change of mind means several hours updating websites.  Oi!  I'm now Impressionist Photography, and that means the blog is actually over here.  Click and enjoy!

Hummingbirds

Along about spring, we started getting hummingbirds at our porch window.  They would zip up, hover, look straight in the window, change orientation, look some more, emanate seriously exasperated vibes and then zip away.  Over and over.  Clearly we were being instructed to REMEDY THIS LACK OF FOOD SITUATION.

We are obedient people.  We went and got a lovely ruby red glass feeder.  I now watch about a dozen different hummingbirds come and go from our feeder all day.  When I have the sliding glass door open, I'll hear them before I see them, a flurry of wings that beat against my hearing, an almost supersonic series of 'meeps!'  They hover and sip sugar water, fearless and bright eyed.  One female has gotten comfortable enough that she'll perch on the edge of the feeder flower, sipping nectar and resting for 5 minutes at a time. When the light is just right, I can see her yarn-needle thin tongue flickering into the glass feeder, and then again as she holds her head up in the sun between sips.

Tamron 70-200 2.8  ISO200  1/500th  f/2.8

ISO200 1/640th f/2.8

More gorgeous children

A few more photos from the newborn I posted about previously.  The mother asked me to pull up a few more from a specific part of the shoot, and I'm sure glad she did.  These photos had some serious exposure problems, which is why I didn't edit them on the first round, but they were good pictures.  They captured lovely moments with gentle, graceful movement and light.  They were just too dark, since they were heavily back-lit (I took about 10 pictures and then had everyone change position to solve that problem).

Well I love learning new things about editing!  Treating these photos I ended up with this amazing, silvery, almost translucent effect, which is stunning on a wee, delicate little baby.  These have ended up being some of my favorite photos of the session :)

Last week was my oldest son's first swim meet - yay, swimming photos!  I was giving the awful fluorescent flood lighting a piece of my mind, when I saw this gorgeous toddler with her mom & older brother.  I asked mom if I could take her daughter's photo - and instantly my photographic day was better!  Because of this shot - holy moly, what lovely lovely shot.

Three weeks old & adorable

Yay! I have portfolio permission to post these awesome 3 week old baby photos I had the privilege to take last week. SO DARNED CUTE, YOU GUYS. We ended up shooting for two hours - I couldn't believe it! I had no idea we'd gone that long, and the baby just continued to be adorable, even in the last 5 minutes when she'd had ENOUGH and it was time for nursing & sleeping :D The parents were really lovely people & I had a blast :)

I have 2 lenses - so they both got use :P  That Tamron 70-200 2.8 is just an amazing portrait lens, I enjoy using it muchly :)  The DA15mm Ltd. can do no wrong - it does require high ISO for that f/4, but the K-x can take it :)  These photos definitely meet the, "good photos are made, not taken," description.  Goodness, we just had dreadful lighting!  There was a sunny day before, and a sunny day after, but on this day it was a heavy gray over cast, and this house had very little natural light.  Thank goodness I've been extracting good exposure from under-lit Seattle photographs for a while now :D

I can't wait to take photos of more babies!!!

70-200 - 70mm 3.2 ISO800  Some touch-up to minimize the newborn flaky & pimply :D  Slightly desaturated, soft lens and tinted a faint rosy pink.  Quite a bit of reflector effects to extract even exposure from the completely overcast gray day lighting from only one window.

DA15 - f/5.6 ISO1600  Touch-up on baby's face.  Tinted a faint caramel, some film grain added to make the ISO1600 grain softer & more random.  Quite a bit of reflector effects to extract even exposure from the completely overcast gray day lighting from only one window.

70-200 - f/5.6 70mm ISO3200  Chocolate B&W minimal film grain to soften the ISO3200  Quite a bit of reflector effects to extract even exposure from the completely overcast gray day lighting from only one window.

Fall events!

Ah yes, with fall also comes events! Today was the annual 'raise money for the school' event at my youngest's school. Unfortunately, tracking down parents for permissions is going to take time, but I got a couple of lovely non-people shots :)

It was an outing for the Tamron 70-200 2.8 and damn, that lens is nnnnnnnnnice! Towards the end of the day, my batteries were really low, so I switched to manual focus to maximize their life. It was the first time I've tried to shoot moving objects with this lens on manual for an extended period of time, and I'm really impressed. My percentage of keeper shots was only barely lower than with auto-focus. Super easy lens to use, and the heft of it means you can keep it stable even while tracking.

70mm f/3.2 green filter, high structure, tinted chocolate


170mm f/3.2 green filter, high structure

Phew! Back to fall, lovely lovely fall :)

Phew!  A bit of a photography break there while we got the school year under way :)  Now we're back into some kind of routine, lets get back to it, shall we?  I still have oodles of Montana photos to edit, as well as some wedding photos for the lovely bride - so clearly in order to get my eye back in, I had to go out this evening and shoot some nice autumn color, right?  :D  And SPIDERS!!  Spiders are sooo fun to photograph...and so delicate to get right :)

Let me tell ya, just the urge to pick up the camera, put the 70-200 Tamron on it, throw that huge lens over my shoulder and go put things in the frame feels SO GOOD.  About the only thing that gets anywhere near the feeling of picking up the cello bow.....  About time the normalcy of the school year got started again :)

The sun backlit everything as it set this evening.  We have just a few branches of red in the trees out in the park, an effect I always love.


I slightly desaturated most of this one with a high-structure BW layer at about 80% opacity & then erased over the bright leaves in the middle that were really lit up.  Really like how it turned out.


One perfect veiny leaf :)




A bright branch seen through some lower branches - would have worked better at a higher F-stop I think, but it's an interesting effect.




The Tamron 70-200 2.8 has a 1:2 (or is that 2:1?) macro. Not really a macro, but you can get pretty good spiders without having to...eeep....get too close :)


In the mornings there are dozens of spider webs down at shoulder level, but by evening those have all come down & mostly whats left is webs above about 10 feet.  That means I can photograph them against the sky!


The spider and the pink rose.  This just called out for a desaturated tint job.  Something about the flower I think.


All the broken places and dessicated buggies made putting this in BW necessary.  Texture, texture, I love it!  I think there's a blue filter on this one, as well as increased structure.  The blue brought out Mr. Spider's patterning & darkened the background so the web really pops out.

Montana 2010 day 6

Montana, day 6

Ghosty buildings from Silver Lake, an old mining town





We spent about an hour in Phillipsburg getting stocked up on photos of historic buildings and SUGAR.








The ghost towns and mining area will stand out clearly in my mind for a long time.  Just...really perfect.  I could totally see retiring there - you know, in that hypothetical retirement thing :P  The climate, the chi, the calm and peace could bring me there, and the aridity!  Oh I love the dry!


We had Italian sodas and some candy from the local candy store.  With samples of orange creme fudge that were, like, my whole childhood in one slab of candy.  OMG GOOD.  There was a woman selling beautiful beaded jewelry.  Turns out she and her husband retired here from Seattle 10 years ago and live up at about 6000 feet.  I fell in love with a couple of her pieces and got a pair of earrings - a long string of yellow --> amber crystals that hang straight down.  Love 'em.  Jewelry acquired on trips is some of my favorite.


We wanted to see a second ghost town, Granite, but it was a really rugged road and I didn't think the little Santa Fe SUV we're driving was quite up to the task [I wrote this before knowing what the roads would be like in East Glacier - yike!].

Montana is every bit as stunning as I've heard and I'm loving driving through it, even backtracking through narrow mountain roads :P  The Montanans are a friendly, engaging lot, willing to make small talk at the drop of a hat.  A convivial fellow in the camp next door asked us all about where we're from and praised our decision to bring Seattle money to Montana.  He and wife are here celebrating their 55th anniversary :D

We woke up this morning in a camp site without water, on a creek, with hardly any people for miles - we're going to sleep at a luxurious state park on a lake, with showers, plumbing, docks, firewood dispenser and courtesy bear-proof storage bins.  Very funny.  Apparently there was a bear in the campground last week - rolled the bear-proof garbage bins around trying to get into them and freaked everyone out 0.o  But when it couldn't get any nummies , it left.  Nice that the bear proofing works!  Bear gets no snacks, bear goes on his way.

State Park campground at Placid Lake tonight.  Oh man, it's like a hotel compared to the last campground - we all have primitive campground snobbery now.  Running water?  Light?  Who needs this stuff?  :D

Made a very nummy dinner  - corned beef, rice and veggies with taco seasoning.  Everything tastes better while camping!  We all enjoyed sitting on the little dock, watching the sunset and moon rise as I took photos.  A really sweet evening, despite the mosquitoes.

Montana 2010, days 5 and 6

Montana Day 5

(I'm a'gonna switch to 'journal present tense' here)

We're in Montana, not far out of Grantsville at Black Bear Campground.  It's really primitive, quiet and still, but for a creek nearby and the occasional sound of others' campfires.  No saying Ha! or waving from this batch, which could be simply because we rolled in after dark.  The previous campsites were all quite convivial however.

We came across Lolo Pass today.  Driving along the Lolo Trail means following the Lochsa river as it winds and bends through the Bitterroots (the Lewis & Clark route was actually up along the ridgeline).  Some of the windiest roads I've ever been on - takes tons of concentration to drive.  At the visitor's center at the top of the pass, there were books, maps, really good informative plaques and best of all, an audiobook of Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson & the Opening of the American West.   I first heard Undaunted Courage while driving home evenings during my grad degree.  I was driving from Seattle to Olympia back in 1995, and NPR was broadcasting the book - I was rivited by it.  I knew the whole family would love it.  They do :)  We actually totally missed our turn off at Grantsville becaues we were all listening so intently!  I hoped that the book could our expand chance following of the Lewis & Clark trail into something bigger.  I'm thrilled it has :)

We spent the day in Missoula, getting produce, pancake fixin's, showers, laundry eating lunch & other odds.  It's hard to believe this little hamlet of 60,000 is one of the biggest cities in Montana!  Halfway between a college town and a frontier town and very small.  I like it :)
Burritos & tacos at a Taco Del Mar-type of place:


Day 6

Black Bear Campground woke us up with lots of unknown bird calls and sharp sun through the silnylon tent.




Really dry, but this camp has no plumbed water.  We'll drink what we've got, eat some fruit and get on our way.  It was actually cold last night.  Cold enough for me to mummy up in the bag despite the claustrophobia.  When I went to the outhouse at dawn, I looked in on the boys and they were mummied up the same way :)  Left me really stiff when I woke up.

Today, Mike has picked out a couple of ghost towns for us to visit - awesome!

To get to the ghost towns, we took a short-cut across a low pass on the windiest gravel road I've ever seen.  I was white knuckled the whole time - no guard rails :D  But we did get to see this waterfall, oh my!


When we rejoined the main highway, we went by this formation:




We headed up to see the ghost towns, which are all up on the roof top of the world it feels like.  We were at 7000 feet looking at the very strange juxtaposition of a 150 yo silver mining town and a 50yo memorial chapel - St. Timothy's.  Amazing, stunning, gorgeous country.

St. Timothy's Chapel


The view when you turn around


The interior, see the lake view on the right out the windows


Next post:  Phillipsburg with orange creme fudge and jewelry and historic buildings!

Montana day 4

Montana, day 4

Time to head for the National Park system, ASAP and leave the state parks behind.  The state parks tend to be full of partiers, the national parks full of campers and hikers.

Before we left, we took a family photo at Potholes State Park.  Dakota is being 'Calvin' from Calvin & Hobbes - "Can't you look good for 1/500th of a second??":



So on we drove, across dry dry eastern Washington and a brief bit of Idaho.


I took a lot of photos through the windows - I just couldn't help it!  There were so many cool moments, like this sky-blue barn:


I totally should have stopped the car and gotten out, but we never would have made any progress if I'd taken every photo I wanted to take properly :)  Along about Idaho, we noticed we were seeing a lot of signs like this one:


Oh hello!  This trip is EDUCATIONAL!  We're following the Lewis & Clark trail.  We hadn't realized this when we planned the trip, so it was a surprise and a pleasure to keep coming across plaques with information on the journey.

Evening came, and we stopped at a campground...only to find it full up.  Uh-oh.  We're looking for a camp site on a Friday night in August in a part of the country where school starts in less than 2 weeks.  We're sooo not going to ever find anything!

Three hours and four different camp grounds later, we landed at the Wilderness Gateway on the Lochsa River on the Lolo trail, well up into the Bitterroot Mountains.  We set up in the dark and collapsed, promising we wouldn't change camp sites till Monday, when there would be some more options!  We woke up to a gorgeous, quiet, gentle sunrise shining through the arid pines.  I could hear the river not too far away.  There were bird calls I'd never heard, and squirrel scoldings that sound the same the world over :)  This campsite was simply wonderful.  The other campers were quiet and pleasant, the camp sites were thickly wooded and therefore completely private, the sun was hot and the water was cool.  We napped on our cots in the afternoon (which turned out not to fit in the new tent - drat, foam mats!), walked on the river boulders, crab scuttled in the cool flowing Lochsa and ate light, tasty meals of all the dehydrated food I did up in the past couple of months.  It was beautiful and relaxing and green and warm.  Very few bugs (yay arid high altitude climate!), mostly extremely inoffensive carpender ants and hovering bees who liked to hang out at eye level and just check you out. 

Now it started to feel like a vacation!  This is one of my favorite shots of both boys together...ever, I think!


Hopping from boulder to boulder in the fast river fascinated the boys.


A place to just sit, watch the water and feel the sun & breeze on your skin.


Perfect.




The boys & I in the river.  Too shallow to swim, it was perfect to scuttle around in like crabs, going from slippery under water rock to slippery under water rock.


The second day there, Mike decided there must be HIKING!  So we packed some water, left camp, and headed back out onto the road.  About half an hour from the campsite, there was a trail head to 'Warm Springs.'  Sounds like hiking to us!  It was about a mile in, and that worked well.

Warm Springs trail head started with one of these really cool suspension bridges we'd been seeing from the road. I love bridges!