As I have grown to see more of the world, I see "enchantment" as something different. It is no longer a term meant only for things imagined; it is real. Enchantment, to me now, is the magnification of natural beauty.
Yesterday I went for a lengthy trek with a good friend of mine along a historic trail in the North Bend area. Even with the bleakness of winter, this area was enchanting. The sunset hours were especially beautiful; the subdued light set a wonderful glowing tone around the trees.
I also realized at the end of the day that I only used my 70-300mm lens the entire day. It started with some macro work and I just kept the thing on the whole time. Kinda neat. The other cool thing is that, with the exception of the first pic, I took them all hand-held.
Tiny Bubbles
While stopping to admire the view from poopoo point, the lighting on this little bush caught Del's eye and he suggested I try to capture it. Good idea! It turned out to be rather tricky and I ended up using manual focus. So, I feel kinda cool being able to use manual focus ;) brings me back to when I was the photographer for my middle school yearbook and I used an old school pentax camera. I took the first pic in the 130mm range, and the bottom one at 70mm. It is odd, I didn't take any at 300m. hmmm.
Ragnar
We stopped at Ragnar, a railroad graveyard and old quarry. This sign seemed interesting to me, so I spent a while trying different shots. Based on the bullet holes in the sign there were others who found this sign as an interesting target, too. I did some processing... set the picture style to monotone, applied a filter (green, I think. maybe yellow) and then a sepia tone. I thought that the sepia style worked well for the era. (plus, I am on a sepia kick these days...)
The pic below is an example for my future reference of the limitations when composing landscapes with the 70-300mm. I had my lens set at 70mm and this is all I could capture. I wanted to get the "Station One Mile" and "Ragnar" signs in the same shot and had to take quite a few steps back to get this shot. Still not quite what I had in mind.
Waterfall
Despite a lack of recent hiking adventures, we were still feeling pretty good at the five-mile mark. Feet were fine; backpacks were great; plenty of water; plenty of daylight. We ended up taking a side trip down to Twin Falls. I had fun just taking random pictures in 300mm.... just because I can.
The pic below was taken at 119mm, though, and then croped in. I converted it to monochrome, added a red filter and used a purple tone (purple is my other favorite tone these days). I like this one because it is different than the normal "pretty" waterfall pic. I set my ISO to 400 to be able get a faster shutter speed (1/160th of a second) in order to capture the choppiness of the water. I can see an image of a face in this pic... can you see it? The rocks are the face and the water is like hair.
Thanks for checking out my pictures! Wishing you all a happy February!
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