I took these recently … more of my continuing interest in (mostly) high contrast black and white images. The top one also was put into Photoshop to detect the edges. The bottom two are just straight high contrast … taking the contrast slider in LIghtroom and increasing contrast to its maximum.
Blackberry brush run through the chipperLooking up along the trail
I did a double-take on this image when I was working on it. I kept trying to make it level and was distracted by the angles of the ridges and the cloud banks … and echoed by the cloud-line in the distances. But the trees show the image is ‘straight’. This is taken from the Hurricane Hill Road just past the Hurricane Ridge Visitor center, a popular snowshoe and cross-crountry ski route.
Lake 22 in east of the city of Everett, along the Mountain Loop Highway. It is one of the most heavily hiked trails in the Cascades. It is also the location of my first backpack trip back in the early ’60’s. I remember having to carry out the wet canvas tarp we used for a shelter … it rained and the little hollow we had set up camp in filled with water. It was only 2 miles or so downhill, but my pack weighed over 70 lbs when I got home. But that was long ago and in the summer. Nowadays, there is no overnight camping allowed. And they have added a boardwalk around most of the lake to protect the meadow areas.
Personally, I’m ready to have winter behind and springtime coming. And summer. So, here is a reminder of winter … here in Port Townsend, it was a pretty mild one with a couple of snowfalls, but nothing that created much of a long term problem.
Mt Ellinor and Mt Washington are the two southernmost prominent peaks in the Olympics visible on the Seattle western skyline. Mt Ellinor was named after Ellinor Fauntleroy, a member of a pioneering Seattle settler family. Ellinor has a trail to the summit and is one of the most heavily hiked trails in the Olympics. The view is spectacular. Mt Washington has some technical climbing in order to access the summit.