Just eat of Olympia on I-5 is the Billy Frank Jr Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Excellent for bird watching and nature photography. The twin barns are iconic. The area was a dairy farm in the early years.
I hiked there for years until the dikes were breached to improve salmon habitat by increasing the wetlands.
I took this image before stitching together images to create panoramas was ‘click a button’ easy. In those days getting a full rainbow in a single image required wide angle lenses. A 21mm lens (on a 35mm film camera or equivalent digital camera) would capture the whole of a single rainbow. This was taken with a 14mm lens to try and get as much of the double as possible (there has been some cropping of the image on the edges). A wider lens tends to have a strong fisheye effect or at least significant distortion along the edges. In this case, the left end of the double is hidden by trees and the right end is barely visible due to brightness of the sky.
I took this image from the parking lot of an apartment building in Olympia, Washington, across a vacant lot that was going to be part of the complex (or at least, that was the plan).
While many crepuscular rays show the rays coming up from the horizon, you can often see examples of rays coming down through holes in cloud cover. Especially with the panoramic image at the bottom, clicking on it to get an expanded view is quite helpful. All images are from in or around Olympia, Washington. The top and bottom images are from the same day … around midday in late December.
Here’s three shots of crepuscular rays when the rays are pointing upwards …
These were taken in Olympia, Washington in the summer during the evening.
The Northern Shoveler is one of my favorite ducks. Mostly, it’s fairly rare around here and easy to identify with that distinctive beak. This is a male in breeding plumage. I love the gold/yellow around the eye.