These two buildings are typical of those found at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA. The small building above housed a powerful searchlight which could be rolled out to the edge of the bluff and used to spot enemy ships attempting to enter Puget Sound (never happened). I’m not sure what the building was shown below, but it’s being reclaimed by nature.
This is an example of the vignetting you get from a cheap lens. The same cheap 400mm reflex lens that I discussed on my last post (and from the same trip to Whidbey Island and Fort Casey). You tend to get some vignetting with any reflex lens due to design issues, but I was a little surprised at the amount I got in some of my images. I haven’t figured out why some images are more ‘severe’ than others, but there is some in most images. Vignetting can be intentionally added to some images to focus the viewers attention on the main subject. The image below shows how this might work … and is an example of cropping away a lot of the corner areas of the image to minimize the vignette.
Finally, another couple shots from that trip that were cropped to eliminate most of the vignetting.
I recently bought a new lens: a Tokina f/8 400mm reflex. It is a wonderful lens for its small form and cost (less than 10% what a Nikon 400mm ‘normal’ telephoto lens lists for). There are some trade offs for any reflex style lens: you get a fixed aperture and some artifacts from the front reflex mirror. I took it on the Port Townsend – Coupville ferry run and while on Whidbey Island, I walked around Fort Casey.
One of the characteristics of long telephoto lenses is relatively shallow depth of field. You can use it to your advantage, but it can be a challenge getting your image to work out. In the image below, I was focused on getting the kite in the image … which I did successfully. But the kite is just about all that’s in focus.
This is the North Fork Skokomish from the Red Rapids Bridge just upstream from Staircase Campground in Olympic National Park. I’ve been there a lot and this is about as low as I have ever seen the water level.
There are lots of wild growing daffodils in and around Port Townsend, WA. One reason is that they are one of the flowers that the deer (and there are a LOT of deer in Port Townsend) leave them alone (apparently they are poisonous to deer). The image above was taken at Fort Worden State Park, the one below was at Kubota Garden in Seattle.
