Indian Heaven Backpacking!

After a sleepless night of shooting the eclipse- Bethany, my sister, my brother, and our friend Isaac from South Dakota went on a quick 1 night, 2 day backpacking trip to the beautiful Indian Heaven Wilderness in Washington. It was only about a 30 minute drive to the trailhead, but the problem was that we never found the trailhead that we planned on hiking! So after an hour of driving around, we basically just drove up a random dirt road in the middle of nowhere and found a trail called Placid Lake. So we hiked that one and it was great. We only saw 4 people the whole time, and they said it was good we didn't find the trail we planned on hiking because there was people everywhere!

Here are some photos from the trip!

A cool looking mushroom-

A cool little toad on my finger, these little guys were everywhere!

My wonderful siblings Lindsey and Colin cooking up some yummy pancakes-

Bob's pancake mix, chocolate chips, and the best freshly picked huckleberry's you've ever tasted!The finished product. Fresh Huckleberry's and my parents home-canned blueberry jam on top... Sooooo good!
We all swam in the lake... a bit cold, but very refreshing! Of course my sister Lindsey was the first in, she's a stinkin' polar bear when it comes to cold water.

After the campfire everyone was dozing off in their sleeping bags and I was gonna do the same, but I was feeling lame for lugging my tripod up there (adding a few pounds to my bag) and not using it.... So out of guilt I stayed up a bit longer, stoked up the fire, and set up the tripod to get this shot. Glad I did!

I woke up in the morning to this site out my tent. So I unzipped the door, aimed the camera up and got this... all while still in bed. Now thats my kind of shooting!

To make things even crazier, we got home that afternoon and there wasn't any wind on the Columbia which is super rare, so we took the boat out and went wakeboarding until dark. Then that night there was a lightning storm, which is totally rare too! And I've never been one to turn down the opportunity to shoot lightning no matter how sleep deprived I am, so I was up until sunrise (6:30AM) shooting the lighting... I'll put those photos up soon!

Here's a shot that my brother took of me wakeboarding-

It's official: Sleep is way overrated

It's 8:30AM and I just got back from an adventure that I left for at 2:30AM. I wanted to take photos of the lunar eclipse and had a certain shot in mind that I wanted, but as always I ended up shooting it totally different than I planned to.
The eclipse itself was pretty cool, and it lasted a long time, but for photography you need super specialized gear to shoot details of the moon, so this is the best I could get of the moon itself. Not too good. But good enough for the blog. :)


I'm actually not that into shooting details of things in the sky because it seems like it's all been done, and there isn't any new ways to do it because it's so technical and straightforward. And there are people who do astrophotography for a living, so they have tons of these photos already that are way better than anything I could do... so anyway, with all that said I guess I prefer to have the moon small in the frame and go wide angle, so I can get a different looking image.
This first image was a 20 minute exposure, f/2.8, at ISO 100. The lunar moon is the red streak above the lone tree. And the streaking lights is when I drove my motorcycle through the photo. The top blue light is my headlamp, and the bottom is the headlight/tailight on my bike. :)


This image is a 30 minute exposure and it was towards the end of the eclipse, so the moon turned from dark red to bright blue during the exposure, so it got pretty overexposed, but the trees look cool.

And here is just a snapshot of my 2 cameras, my bike, and my camera bag. It was quite a bit to haul around all night on my back! And yes, it was pretty freaky to be out in the middle of the wilderness all by myself, with nobody and nothing around. It was way too quiet and my mind just started wandering about what could be in the trees all around me!

Lunar eclipse tonight!

Tonight there is a lunar eclipse that will last 1.5 hours! Supposedly that is the longest one in 7 years! Sleep is overrated, so go out and watch it! Click here to see the times it will happen if your located in America...

Hopefully I'll have some cool photos to share if I can get out there. I'm hoping to cruise my new dirt bike out in the woods to get some cool photos.

Here is an eclipse that I shot on June 4th, 2005 (thanks metadata) in Boulder, Colorado.

where have i been!?

out in the woods playing around on my new toy! more photos and a video coming soon!

sweet.ride.

Spotted in Morro Bay, CA. I wish the owner was around so I could take his portrait. I envision him looking something like this guy.

View of Mt. Adams from our garage

A couple weeks ago we had quite an amazing sunset but I was super busy so I didn't get a chance to go out somewhere and shoot it. But I did climb up on top of our garage to get a good view and snap this photo of Mt. Adams in Washington. Mt. Adams is actually like 150 miles away but in this photo the air was so clear and I was using a 200mm lens so it looks much closer.

I just bought a new 24" LCD flat screen monitor too, so it looks really cool full screen. I'm really into cool wallpaper photos and this one looks great. Here is a snapshot if you care to see it! :)


And yes, that is a DELL monitor!!! I am a diehard fan of all things Apple but after much research, a lot of people say that Dell and Apple monitors are made in the same place with the same parts (not sure if it's true!?), but they just have different outside looks. Of course the Apple looks much cooler... but I think I can live with my not-so-polished looking Dell monitor for now, especially because it was half the price of an Apple. So far it's getting along very well with my G5.

Pismo Beach

I'm in Pismo Beach right now with my buddy Peter and I'm assisting him with a super sweet photo shoot he's doing. I don't want to say too much about the shoot before it goes to press but it's cool because it involves Lamborghini cars and lots of driving on the amazing Central California Coastline. I haven't gotten to drive one yet... but maybe tomorrow!?

Tonight were staying at a sweet place called the Dolphin Bay Hotel which is super nice... the rooms (more like penthouse suites) go for about $1,100 a night! Pretty nice considering we were in a $50/night place yesterday which was a total dive... but interesting nontheless, haha.

Anyway here are a couple snaps.

This is a garage full of Lamborghini's. There was a ton more behind and to the sides of me, and still this was only a fraction of them.


And the man himself Peter Dawson walking out of the mini mart at Rocky Point with a yummy Ben and Jerry's ice cream bar.


More later!

Meteor shower tonight!

If you are lucky enough to have clear skies tonight, go outside and watch the Perseid Meteor Shower! There is supposed to be 1-2 visible shooting stars per minute. I'm gonna try and camp out somewhere but I've got tons of work to do and a flight out of PDX at 8AM tomorrow morning so I'm not sure if I'll be able to camp.

Anyway the photo above I took a few years ago on an awesome backpacking trip with my friends and Taylor and Natalie. I actually set the camera up on a little frozen over lake to get the right angle, and then let the shutter expose for about an hour. The light you see on the rocks is from the campfire that was warming us! Good times.

Thanks George

Thank you George Foreman and Meineke Muffler for providing a great yellow wall for my photos of the groomsmen at a wedding yesterday. It worked out great.

Windows XP meets prancing man

I still haven't had time to put together the Hawaii slideshow yet so for now it's just coming at you in bits and pieces.
Taylor and I were cruising down to the southernmost point in the US (more photos from there coming soon) and we stopped when the view above presented itself. I was sitting there just leisurely taking photos trying to copy the super famous Windows XP photo (Apparently Microsoft licensed that photo for $200,000!) and Taylor was taking some similar ones nearby.
I said to him "Taylor, it's a nice shot but you know somethings missing. That something is you. Hop over that fence and prance through that field, would ya?" Of course he agreed and so I got this shot. Much better!


And here are a couple more from the same stop.

my lucky shot of a sea turtle

My last day in Kona, Taylor and I kayaked out in the ocean before my afternoon flight out. One of my hopes for the trip was to photograph those awesome sea turtles that seem to be everywhere in Hawaii. Unfortunately during the whole trip I only saw a few, and when I tried to photograph them it seemed they always got away before I could get a good shot.

Right after I took the photo above we spotted a turtle swimming near the surface so we paddled up to it and I acted quickly and just stuck my camera underwater about a foot (in the housing of course) and started snapping away. I was pretty sure that it wasn't going to work out either technically or compositionally since it was really rushed and I didn't even get close to "composing the shot". But one of the 4 frames I squeezed off was this one, and I like it. Lucky!

Tis the season to get married!

Sorry about the sporadic posts recently! Bethany and I have been keeping busy with lots of wedding photography. We've photographed 3 weddings in the past 3 weeks, which felt pretty busy... but it's going to be nothing compared to whats coming up this week- 3 weddings in 1 week! Were shooting weddings on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday this week then one the Friday after that. But then we have 3 weeks off until our next one so that will be some nice to catch up.
I used to blog about each wedding but I've kinda stopped doing that and have been posting slideshows on our slideshows page instead. So if you feel like watching some fun wedding slideshows, check it out HERE!
All this shooting takes up some serious disk space! A few months ago I bought a few 400 gig hard drives and they're full already. Tomorrow Bethany and I are running errands and meeting clients in Portland and I'm going to the uber-geeks heaven Fry's Electronics to pick up another terabyte or so. That will put us somewhere around 5 terabytes (5,000 gigabytes) of photos. Crazy!

Here are a few images from the past 3 weddings that are some of my favorite (in no particular order). Bethany most likely took the super sweet ones! :)