Washington state & Mount St. Helens area

wxwax · September 19, 2004

Made a working trip there last week, took the camera along. Never did get a nice, clear shot of St. Helens, but made decent use of the camera. As always, I was terribly disappointed when I first looked at the shots, then came to like a few of them.

First day was in Seattle. I used the evening to walk along the tourist trap waterfront. Darn birds kept hopping away from me. I finally got lucky.

The next day I eventually ended up at a really nice B&B on the road that leads to Mount St. Helens. I highly recommend the Blue Heron Inn, very nice indeed. Early the next morning, the fog was in over the lake.

Lots of deer in the surrounding woods. And a spider or two outside the building.

Nearby was a lake with a private boating area. This was two days after Labor Day, and the crowd had cleared out.

Barely visible in the right background is St. Helens. As I said, I never did get a clear shot of it, the clouds wouldn't permit it. But as you'll see later, we made up for it in an unusual way.

wxwax · September 19, 2004

Part of our week took us onto the hills that were shredded by the lateral blast of the St. Helens eruption. 24 years laters, and there's still very little life on the windswept upper slopes. The USGS folks estimate that the blast, filled with searingly hot gas, ash and rock shrapnel, hit the nearby hills at about 600mph. They left nothing alive. The US Forest Service did a land swap with Weyerhauser, and is leaving untouched the land in the blast zone and in the river valley. So you can still see trees laying as they did when they were felled by the blast on May 18th, 1980.

gotta · September 19, 2004

Nice pictures Sid. I really like the last one. Living in Eastern Washington, I watched as the ash plume came over the Cascades. I'll never forget the weeks that followed.

If you ever find youself up this way again, venture over to the east side of the state. Some of the most unique geology in the states and a truly beautiful area.

Regards, Eric

tmlphoto · September 19, 2004

Sid, I really like the last one as well. I'm also a big fan of the contrasty b&w stuff.

GREAPER · September 20, 2004

The last one is really nice, great depth and an interesting sky.

DJ-S1 · September 20, 2004

An adirondack chair, your beverage of choice, and this view... not too shabby! (sorry, just daydreaming here at work) Thanks Sid!

PerezDesignGroup · September 20, 2004

Sid, these are extremely beautiful and artistic shots.

I love them all but I must say the BW is sinful. It looks almost like an alien landscape. Absolutely brilliant stuff! Did you use a red filter on that BW, btw?

DJ-S1: That's a great shot as well. Love the smoothness and colors!

DJ-S1 · September 20, 2004

PerezDesignGroup wrote:

DJ-S1: That's a great shot as well. Love the smoothness and colors!

That's Sid's from above, I forgot to put the quotes around it! Sorry if I confused anyone.

hutchman · September 21, 2004

Waxy,

Next time you're in the neighborhood, let me know. I will buy the beer!

Hutch

wxwax · September 24, 2004

hutchman wrote:

Waxy,

Next time you're in the neighborhood, let me know. I will buy the beer!

Hutch

Wow, sorry man, I never thought to check if anyone from dgrin was in the area. Sorry about that, I would definitely have looked you up!

More pics to come. A couple might even be decent.

wxwax · September 24, 2004

PerezDesignGroup wrote:

Sid, these are extremely beautiful and artistic shots. I love them all but I must say the BW is sinful. It looks almost like an alien landscape. Absolutely brilliant stuff! Did you use a red filter on that BW, btw?

PDG, thank you very much. I did not use a red filter. I had just bought one, but wasn't used to using it, and didn't want to risk it. I just played with contrast in Photochop, and the sliders in Channel Mixer. You can get Ansel Adams type range by moving the Red to about 160, the Green to about 140 and the Blue almost all the way to the left - then fiddle a bit. Great fun.

wxwax · October 10, 2004

lynnma · October 10, 2004

You got some beautiful shots there wx.. I love the last one of the barren mountain, I love the bird one too... black and white work is excellent. Thanks for sharing, I don't see as much of your stuff as I used to

wxwax · October 10, 2004

lynnma wrote:

You got some beautiful shots there wx.. I love the last one of the barren mountain, I love the bird one too... black and white work is excellent. Thanks for sharing, I don't see as much of your stuff as I used to

Thanks Lynn. Hurricane season plus a road trip made for a very busy September. Hence no Challenges and less of a presence here. I'm slowly getting back into a routine.

ian408 · October 10, 2004

Sid,

Very cool stuff you've got. I especially liked the landscape of the blast
zone. A reminder of the past and indicator of the future.

Ian

wxwax · October 10, 2004

ian408 wrote:

Sid,

Very cool stuff you've got. I especially liked the landscape of the blast
zone. A reminder of the past and indicator of the future.

Ian

Thanks Ian. I have more interesting shots, in particular of the logs still covering part of Spirit Lake 24 years after the blast. But I'm being lazy about processing them! Actually, it's not that I'm lazy. It's a psychological block: I think the shots have the potential to be quite good, but I don't think I'm good enough with Photoshop to make them as good as they can be. The processing is particularly tricky because I shot a number of them from a helicopter and deliberately underexposed them in order to preserve the highlights and also have a fast shutter speed. Now I'm puzzling over how best to light them and saturate them.

ian408 · October 10, 2004

wxwax wrote:

Thanks Ian. I have more interesting shots, in particular of the logs still covering part of Spirit Lake 24 years after the blast. But I'm being lazy about processing them! Actually, it's not that I'm lazy. It's a psychological block: I think the shots have the potential to be quite good, but I don't think I'm good enough with Photoshop to make them as good as they can be. The processing is particularly tricky because I shot a number of them from a helicopter and deliberately underexposed them in order to preserve the highlights and also have a fast shutter speed. Now I'm puzzling over how best to light them and saturate them.

Wow! The view from a helicopter provides a unique perspective.

I am going through that similar block as well. For me, it's spurts. But I know
it's ok to put things away for a time and come back to them.

Ian

Sam · October 10, 2004

[/QUOTE]
This is great!

Sam

wxwax · October 11, 2004

A couple more.

This is shot on the valley floor below Mount St. Helens, where the landslide and then the lahar transformed the landscape. 24 years later, the ground is still soft and spongy, and life is only slowly returning. Mostly small plants and tiny saplings. This guy is our pilot. St. Helens is behind him, in the clouds.

Next is a cross post. I put it in the Photoshop shenanigans as well, it's a composite of 8 RAW exposures. Still needs work, I think I'll lighten the trees in the lower right corner.

This is Spirit Lake. Mount St. Helens is again fog shrouded in the background. We're directly facing the part of St. Helens that came roaring down in a massive landslide. The slide reportedly pushed Spirit lake up the sides of the surrounding ridges. When the water came back down it brought with it thousands of trees. The water also came back down to a new, higher lakebed, a lakebed raised substantially by the landslide. Fascinating stuff. 24 years later, fully one-third of the lake is still covered by the dead trees.

wxwax · October 24, 2004

The fry cook at Safeco Park, home of the Seattle Mariners.

pathfinder · October 24, 2004

You know I like your B&W work and these are also great, but no one mentioned your spiderweb, and I think it deserves special mention also. What lens did you shoot it with please, inquiring minds want to know...

wxwax · October 25, 2004

pathfinder wrote:

You know I like your B&W work and these are also great, but no one mentioned your spiderweb, and I think it deserves special mention also. What lens did you shoot it with please, inquiring minds want to know...

Thanks, 'finder. I shot it with the 24-70 2.8L. I didn't have a macro lens, nor the 70-200 with me, so I did the best I could. I tried to get a narrow depth of field. It was hard to not overexpose the spider.

wxwax · October 30, 2004

This is inside the crater of Mount St. Helens. It's one of the walls, so we're looking out and the magma bulge is sorta behind us. Think of this as one of the three walls of the crater, the fourth one being nonexistent because the 1980 eruption blew off a side of the mountain.

wxwax · October 30, 2004

This is flying up the blow-out side of the mountain and into the crater. There's a waterfall issuing from the bottom, exposed side of the crater. That's runoff from the melting snow and ice of a new glacier that's forming inside the crater.

When the first steam puffs came out of St. Helens this fall, vulcanologists at first believed that it was the seasonal rain and snow reaching down and hitting the magma that's always there, below the surface. Turns out they were wrong. But they're wrong a lot - not a criticism of them, it's just the state of the science right now. Geologic time scales aren't very compatible with human life spans, so it will take a lot of human lifetimes to appreciably measure all of the possible volcanic scenarios.

ginger_55 · October 30, 2004

Those are fantastic, Sid. I think you have gone waaaaay beyond "us". You and Andy and whoever.

Really great shots! Was it work related, should I already know that?

ginger (nice work, either way the word is used,

)

ian408 · October 30, 2004

Pretty interesting stuff there!

Ian

wxwax · October 30, 2004

ginger_55 wrote:

Those are fantastic, Sid. I think you have gone waaaaay beyond "us". You and Andy and whoever.

Really great shots! Was it work related, should I already know that?

ginger (nice work, either way the word is used, )

Thanks Ginger, I appreciate it. I've been dragging my feet about processing my St Helens images, because I fret that my PS skills aren't good enough to get the most out of the shots.

Yes, this was work related. We were in a chopper and I was sticking the camera out of a porthole and more or less shooting blind. I tried to underexpose the images to preserve the highlights. Which puts even more pressure on my meager Photoshopping skills.

ginger_55 · October 30, 2004

The mini landscape....
I will go even further and say that I love/but shudder your very small landscape: the spiderweb with spider.

I considered looking for one myself for the current challenge, I certainly do consider them, IMHO, lancscapes.

That was before I had landscapes I had only dreamed of shooting. Still don't know where they came from. Just there, I guess, and I showed up.

As you did in the chopper. I shot blind while in blinding rain, a while back, still love those shots, had to chuckle when I actually saw what I shot, the horizon was straighter than if I were trying.

I make different versions of things, keeping the orig of course, if I am unsure, but I know what you mean, you don't want that "let down, scary feeling" right out, though you can almost always pull it out in the end (unless you are like I have been and really screwed up by no tripod, wrong ISO (blown), etc).

I love the color in the crater shot, the variation, light to dark, love it. Then your tribute to the old masters (they never got the helicopter, did they?), the blk and white, I looked at it in every place. The whites are not blown, the darks have detail. Right on!

I use channel master and black in selective coloring, I have tried the ansel forumula that I think you mentioned. My darks have not pleased me yet. Must be in my "negative".

You nailed it................blind. Now that is photography.

g (some people name their spiders)

Washington state & Mount St. Helens area

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