Videos!!

New to Blogger is the ability to publish videos! Here's my first video post of Upper Yosemite Falls during the wet spring of 2006. You might be in for a long wait if you don't have some form of high speed Internet.

Enjoy!

My latest pictures

When I arrived on my latest assignment last weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mount Shasta had a new dusting of fresh snow, in the middle of August! So much for "global warming", eh? Shasta always astounds me with its beauty and the mountain teased me with a peek of its peak. I wished I could enhance the forest below the clouds, so you could really appreciate how immense this strato-volcano is.

This next one is a very similar picture except that I cropped it out of a bigger picture that I didn't quite compose right. The polarizing filter made the sky nice and blue.

Now we get to a picture I took just a half hour ago. What do you think this is a picture of? Yeah, there's not much to go on, there but, it's an interesting and puzzling picture.

Here's a little bit wider shot that might help a little bit more. Not enough, still? OK, there's plenty of agriculture in Butte Valley, California and they cover their fields with plastic, maybe to reduce water losses in their volcanic ash-laden soils they have near Mount Shasta.

I took this little sidetrip on the way back to the motel from Klamath Falls. Since I have been playing with Photoshop and substituting different skies into other pictures, I took this opportunity to grab some excellent sunset shots. While the oranges are intense and saturated, ya gotta love that deep black of the mountains, too. I sure wished I had my Fuji and its powerful zoom for these shots. Alas, I had to use the work camera. I'm happy with what I came away with, though.

Edit: The above picture is dedicated to my friend and co-worker Jesse. His light shown brightly while he was here and we will never see his quick and easy smile again.

Rest easy, bud!

Feather Falls-Long Walk-Worthwhile

Last Sunday, a friend from work and I set out to see Feather Falls, up the hill from Oroville, California. When we got to the trailhead towards the end of the morning, we found that the falls was a bit of a walk. Nearly 4 miles of a walk. ONEWAY! We decided that since we were there, we might as well do the hike and see the falls. We didn't have much in the way of supplies but, a few beers and a few sodas should see us through. (Famous last words!). Just the hike in is marvelous, with a wide trail, copious amounts of poison oak and a mostly downhill walk to the falls. The "biodiversity" of this forest is tremendous. Uncommon trees like the huckleberry oak and the California nutmeg have each carved out their niche amongst the Douglas firs, ponderosa pines and incense cedar. This picture below is a fine example of a large old bigleaf maple. The sunlight shining through the green maple leaves forced me to stop and capture its beauty.

Below is a view of the full falls. My friend was worried that there might not be any water in the falls. The walk in was certainly worth it, as Feather Falls truly is an awesome sight.

This split in the falls makes for a very nice combination of granite, plants and water. As you can tell from looking at the picture above, I took advantage of my powerful zoom to get up this close to this small part of the big falls.

I'm still struggling with the exposure settings of my camera. I'm finding that more and more, I'm going to have to use the less automatic modes, and maybe even use totally manual settings on scenes that give me trouble (like waterfalls). I have played around with the shutter speed to freeze the action, in some pictures. I've also incorporated a polarizing filter, which helped me to get an enhanced rainbow in some of the pictures of the lower part of the falls. This one below barely has the rainbow visible.

With the polarizing filter rotated, the rainbow becomes enhanced.

It was a long haul getting out of there but, our work in the Forest Service had us in better shape than most of the other people out there. Before returning to the motel, we stopped at a local casino for a nice buffet meal for ten bucks. Can't beat that for a day off work.