This is the Kootenai River in Idaho from the Kootenai Falls Swinging Bridge. It’s just off of Highway 2 west of Libby, Montana. As you can tell from the small section of sky in the upper left, it was a cloudy day… but the trail that runs across the swinging bridge is a nice way to stretch out the legs after a day or two driving (we were going from Seattle to Whitefish … a couple long days of driving).
So I was playing around with various image processing software to see what I could do to improve some of my older images… (this one is from 2017). I had just taken some photos of fall foliage and noticed some elk just down stream from my position, crossing the North Fork Skokomish (just a half mile or so up from Staircase Campground in the Olympic National Park.
I had looked at this image dozens of times over the years, but this was the first time I had ever noticed that there was someone on the other side of the river, watching the elk from behind a log. I can’t tell if they had a camera or not, but I image that there presence was why the elk were crossing. (see below)
Several years ago I was living in Olympia and got up early and drove to Seattle in time for the sunrise. I went to Alki Beach and took a series of photos of the Olympic Mountains intending to create a panorama of the range. Early morning was ideal, since with the sun would be behind my back and the haze would be at a minimum. There was an unexpected problem, however. When I created the panorama, in order for it to be a reasonable height for viewing, the length would be over 10 feet.
But on the way out of West Seattle, I was caught in rush hour traffic. I was in the outside lane on the bridge and traffic was stopped. I have left my camera sitting on the passenger seat with the telephoto lens still mounted. I rolled down the passenger window and took this shot looking over the industrial area. I never processed this image, because I was distracted by the image that was zoomed in on Rainier. Just a reminder to review your past images for overlooked gems.
These are the Staircase Rapids on the North Fork Skokomish River just a little above the Staircase Ranger Station in the southeast corner of the Olympic National Park. It was a dark wet day and I thought about brightening up the image … but in this case I decided that it reflected the mood of the day as it was.
The top photo shows running water with a slow shutter speed and the bottom photo shows a fast shutter speed. The lower photo is more recent and the shutter speed (1/125th sec) was recorded in the EXIF data (info the camera saves for each photo … things like camera, shutter speed, lens info, aperture, ISO setting, etc). The top photo was taken years ago with my first digital camera (an Olympus E-10) and something has happened over the years and the EXIF data on this image went away. I assume it was between 1/2 and 3 seconds.
