Tag: California

Different Forest Types

Open Pine Woods / Grasslands

I have been posting a lot of views of the Olympic National Park and the big trees. I spend a lot of time there, mostly since it’s close to home. But occasionally I do travel to other areas and experience nature in other environments. The image above shows some open pine woods and grasslands down in California in Inyo National Forest. At least that’s my memory … my notes are sketchy on that trip.

On the other hand, the image below is back up in Washington, but down along the Nisqually River Delta area in a section of the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge that is no long accessible. What a difference in woods.

Marshlands and River Banks
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Grub Portal and Piano (in need of tuning)

Grub Portal

Driving around the area 50 miles or so south of Death Valley, we came upon a abandoned mining area. There was still mining going on (surface deposits) but they had upgraded the facilities. I liked this one better, though. Twenty miles farther north, Ballarat is a mining town that has a single inhabitant. The piano is sitting on the porch, and doesn’t get tuned often.

Piano in Ballarat
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Snowy Mountains

Elwha Valley in Winter December 2015

I know many folks are wanting to enjoy the warm weather and here I am showing photos of snowy mountains. I was going through some older photos, doing some sorting and organizing and found these two images that with the new editing feature in Lightroom that just really made these two pop. So I figured I’d share. The top photo was taken while snowshoeing at Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. I’ve hiked the Elwha Valley many times and always enjoy looking down on it. The image below is the Sierras from the east near Lone Pine, California.

Sierras from the East March 2017
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Enhanced Resolution

Orion over Mt Whitney

I took this photo a couple years ago (it’s got a lot more snow this year). In the middle distance is the top of Mt Whitney. I was camped in the Lone Pine (California) Campground. This is a 15 second exposure at ISO 3200 taken with my Nikon D810. Below the three stars of Orion’s Belt, the bright star is Rigel. Just above Orion, the yellowish star is Betelgeuse. To the right the bright star is Aldebaran. The small group farther right is the Pleiades.

What’s new with this photo is that I used Lightroom’s new AI noise reduction to minimize the noise associated with the higher ISO and longer exposure. Below see the before and after image … zoomed in 300% so you can see the difference easier. (At 300%, you also see a little of star motion.) You see a lot of the color dots are gone … that was mostly noise. Unfortunately, a few were likely very faint stars. But mostly, I wanted to do a little show-and-tell. You can see it is smoother. Some images will benefit from this new feature more than others. Sorry, but you can’t use it on a JPG image (yet) …

Detail of the Aldebaran area: Before
Detail of the Aldebaran area: After
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