Getting back to the Olympic Peninsula for a few more:
This is one of the best known falls in the area. I was kind of disappointed with the light after hiking up here... even though the forest cover was quite heavy, the blue sky and bright sun were enough to spoil the colors for me at the time we were here.. ideally, it would be a more typical rainy, wet and foggy day which would create the proper atmosphere and color.. but you have to deal with it when you only have one chance. So, in this case, a monochrome approach to the scene still shows off the falls and the textures of the forest while eliminating the harsh mid-day colors. If you check the expanded view carefully, you can just make out a guy standing on the bridge, for a sense of scale. The water splits into 3 streams as you can see, then flows down through the gorge under the bridge. Amazing that they are flowing this fast, even in the "dry" season.
Although you hardly see it anymore, scenery like this in beautiful, rich black and white (by Paul Caponigro) were exactly what got me interested in photography in the first place, more than 35 years ago....
Today's Sky Watch is another interpretation of the scene in my previous post. A good example, I think, of how extremely different the same thing can look from different points of view (not just in photography, I might add:) This one was shot from exactly the same spot and at the same time, but this time directly into the sun and with a short telephoto lens to bring the clouds and ridge closer together. Shooting at the sun (with my hand extended as a shade) caught these beautiful, fiery highlights on the fast moving wisps of cloud rushing across the scene just below the ridge.
Visit the SkyWatch home page each weekend for more great skies from all over the world.
An interesting part of living at 6000' elevation is that the weather sometimes approaches from BELOW, rather than above, as you might normally expect. San Jacinto is a nearly 11,000' mountain island, surrounded by desert on the east and rolling, semi-arid hill country to the west. Especially as we get into winter, that can create some spectacular effects. Driving home from town the other day, I noticed this perfect sea of clouds extending as far as the eye could see, from just below where we live... all the way out to the ocean, 100 miles to the west. As soon as I got home, I grabbed a camera and ran up the street to my favorite sunset lookout spot... an outcropping of granite boulders on the side of a ridge just near our house.
I'll have a completely different, and I think more dramatic, interpretation of the scene next.
