Ah, the Portland Japanese Garden: It’s a bit of a moveable feast for photographers in the Pacific Northwest. Open year round, the garden’s moods can shift depending on the season, sometimes by small, subtle degrees and sometimes in quite dramatic ways. After a long summer of warm weather and blue skies, recent clouds had inspired me to spend some time in the garden. Unlike past visits, I wasn’t really focused on the flora but instead on the stone pathways and its little alcoves and tucked-away areas.
I used my old familiar Canon 45mm tilt-shift, an optically excellent lens that allows me to use tilt and shift in creative ways, rendering different parts of the photos out of focus. I was going for a dreamlike, undefined quality. The darker processing was meant to further add to a nocturnal or even somnambulant tone.
These photos as well as other taken in the Portland Oregon Japanese Garden can be found in my Portland Japanese Garden gallery. More information regarding visiting the Portland Japanese Garden can be found here.
As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding prints, licensing, or anything else. I look forward to talking photography.
Without further ado, I present my small collection featuring liminal spaces in the Portland Japanese Garden.
Like many of you reading this, I’ve spent the vast majority of the past three months at home. For the first two months I didn’t go into grocery stores. I didn’t go into home improvement stores. I didn’t go for a drive. I barely took any new photos, and when I did, I didn’t leave my yard. I just did what I could at home with what I had. This included making weird, incomplete meals, like burritos without wraps or spaghetti with only the sauce and meatballs. And working in the yard, of course.
My indoor time was spent reading online articles ranging from the absurdly optimistic (“Clinical trials advancing quickly! We’ll have a vaccine very, very soon!”) to outright depressing (“We’re all going to die and nothing will be the same.”)
But the silver lining in all this is the amount of time I’ve had to go through my unpublished photos and review them. And I cannot express enough how big of a deal this has been (and will be) for me.
Over the past five years or so the pace of my little photography career had increased rapidly. Workshops and private lessons both in Oregon and throughout the West meant that I was spending most of my time helping clients acquire and post-process photos and doing very, very little of my own acquisition and post-processing. I struggled to post-process my own work when I was away from home.
These unpublished photos were an albatross around my neck. I had a hard time staying motivated creatively. And it’s very difficult to return to a place like Arches National Park for another round of night-sky photos when I haven’t even fully found out what I got the previous time.
My photographic process has always been about refining and improvement, either via my vision, my in-field techniques, my post-processing techniques, or, in some cases, my gear. I felt like I had skipped this crucial step over the past few years, and I owed a lot of that to an inability to mine my archives of its full potential.
I’m not finished with my backlog yet. But I already feel much better about it and am on track to finish it.
Here’s a sampling of night-sky photos I’ve finally had the opportunity to work on and publish. It only took the external forces of a global pandemic to make it happen.
Crumbling rocks in the Utah desert, beneath a Milky Way sky filled with green-yellow-orange airglow. As of the time of publication, this photo (taken two years before), has about 8,500 views on Flickr! The Milky Way arches over Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa and its famous sailing stones. Multi-row panoramas of the night sky can be somewhat difficult and time-consuming to put together, so of course they’re some of the last photos that I get around to processing.The Milky Way arches over the summit of Mauna Kea, with the Keck Observatory being closest (in the left of the frame). Glow from Kiluea’s 2018 eruption can be seen along the horizon at the middle-right of frame.
On June 1, 2013, after a few weeks of sporadic aurora activity, I had decided to drive up to Mt Hood’s Trillium Lake to take some photos of the sunset, twilight, and night sky. Over the previous year I had noticed a steady uptick in the number of photographers that would set up along the shores at the lake, but this particular day/night was still in the halcyon pre-Instagram days, where the odds were, if other photographers were there, I would likely know them, and there was plenty of lake shore to spread out and work together.
Shockingly, I did not own a smart phone at the time. I know, I know…the times were different. About an hour after sunset, my wife, who was at home and had an Internet connection, called me to tell me that the KP had jumped up. I immediately looked to the north, and, could just make out faint glimmers of aurora activity in the blue twilight sky.
I settled in and started snapping photos. As the sky got darker the show became more and more clear: Red-pink vertical columns danced above Yellow-green blurs of aurora low on the horizon.
And then something strange happened.
To the northwest of Trillium Lake is an unnamed hill that’s about 500 to 1,000 feet higher than the lake itself. Slowly, over a couple of minutes, a bright band of glow worm-like light grew out of the hill and began to arc across the sky over the lake, so high that it was nearly touching the sky’s zenith. I angled my 14mm lens upward, trying to capture the full display, but it was impossible. I struggled to point my camera straight up; my ballhead and a knob or two on my tripod simply weren’t allowing me to do it. I could’ve reconfigured my center column to get the angle I wanted, but in the dark with limited time I decided to just shoot what I could.
What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d just met STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), years before STEVE was even STEVE.
And in just 5 minutes, the phenomenon was gone. The strong arc expanded, wavered a bit like it was flapping in the wind, and then it broke up, leaving the aurora display much lower on the horizon to continue on strong.
Strong thermal emission velocity enhancement (STEVE) appears over Trillium Lake and Mt Hood, Oregon, June 1, 2013. To my knowledge this is the only photo I know of that features STEVE in Oregon.
The above panorama was assembled from 4 or 5 photos to give a greater field of view of the scene. I thought the result was better than any of the frames individually, as I was able to show the lake, a tiny sliver of actual foreground in the lower left corner, a nearby tree (on the left), and then a good amount of sky. (Just to illustrate, Polaris can be found about 4/5ths up in the center of the photograph, and Polaris is about 45 degrees above the horizon. I’m guessing my final result was 60 or more degrees of sky, along with foreground just a few feet in front of me.
I put together a quick gif that shows some of STEVE’s movement over a minute or two.
Matera is a small city in southern Italy, near the top of Italy’s boot heel. Its claims to fame are its cave dwellings or sassi, which were named UNESCO World Heritage sites in 1993. With its striking chalk-colored rock walls and winding stairways, the city was a perfect photographic point of interest for me on a whirlwind tour of southern Italy in 2016.
Because of the modern-day wonder of AirBNB, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to stay in a sasso. Yes, I used a website to stay in a cave.
Of course, when you stay in a cave you have to make some concessions, with one of the main ones being that we had to park our rental car about half a mile away from our lodging and schlep our belongings down Matera’s maze-like stone stairways, but even that was a fun adventure.
That night, unencumbered by our suitcases (which we left in our modernly furnished cave) we took a quick hike across a small but steep canyon cut by the Gravina River to the other side, where we watched the sun set. The scene was amazing. The heavenly voice of a children’s choir, from a weekend concert somewhere in town, filtered through the city and reverberated over the valley, creating an eery but magical scene as slowly the city lights turned on and the sun continued to sink below the horizon.
“Matera twilight cityscape,” a low light panorama sweeping over a UNESCO World Heritage Site, summer of 2016. Click to view full size. Prints and licensing available. Contact me for details.
Technical details: This panorama was taken with my Fuji Xpro-1 and a Rokinon 12mm f/2 lens, with a fairly significant crop to deal with the relative width of the lens. The final cropped pano size was 7,807 x 2,602 pixels.
Ah, Hawaii, isle of luxuriant white sand beaches, fruity tropical drinks with tiny umbrellas, and widespread smiling aloha. A perfect getaway for an overworked, stressed mainlander!
And yet for eight days in early June instead of drinks with tiny umbrellas I opted to go to Hawaii to ice my fingertips off in sub-freezing conditions, to spend a few days under skies so thick with vog (volcanic fog) that I couldn’t see the mid-day sun overhead, and to have some hot tephra burped into my eye by a fiery lava deity. And not once did I don a bathing suit!
But I took lots of photos.
With that out of the way, let’s skip right to the end. On the last morning of my trip, my friend Jeff and I decided to get in a boat and go photograph the ocean entry. About a month before, Hawaii’s most active volcano (Kilauea) had begun to get a lot more feisty, issuing forth vast quantities of lava, resulting in dozens of fissures and an enormous lava river that raced toward the sea, fanning out delta-like upon its approach. In the first few days of my visit to Hawaii, while I explored the “sunny” side of the island, which was actually totally vogged over, all of that new lava flow finally reached the ocean, overtaking the beautiful Kapoho Bay in the process. Days later, I signed up for a boat trip to this area for a sunrise shoot.
The 3:30 am meeting time in Hilo was followed by a quick safety briefing and a reminder that we’d be in the open ocean (read: rough waters) for 75 minutes before getting to the ocean entry. By 4 am we had left. Within a few minutes we passed the long dark breakwater that separates Hilo Bay from open ocean. And that’s when the real fun began.
For the entire week I was there high-surf warnings had been issued all around the island, and this particular morning was no different. It’s hard to imagine a multi-thousand-pound boat skipping over waves, but it wasn’t long before the ocean first fell away from the underneath side of the boat and we dropped, belly-flopping back onto the sea with a reverberating “thuuung.” I issued forth a feeble “wheeee.” The captain made a slight adjustment in his bearing, and we soldiered on. Then, about 15 minutes into the journey, the puking began. And it didn’t stop for another couple of hours.
It was dark, and the only thing my eyes could fixate on were the few lights onshore. Most of them came from Hilo, although nearly the entire trip I could see the giant fountain of lava emitting from Fissure 8, the eruption’s most productive fissure. We worked our way along the coast, bumping along, sometimes violently, getting closer and closer to the lava-lit clouds that represented the ocean entry to the south.
With 36 passengers on the boat, our guide was busy shuttling 10 blue plastic puke buckets to a fro, occasionally washing them out with seawater and handing them back. Eventually all 10 puke buckets were in use. A smaller metal bucket labelled “FIRE” was enlisted for barf duty. To my left, three members of a family shared two buckets. The situation was getting bad.
“Is it usually like this?” I asked the guide.
He gagged while rinsing some yellow bile out of a bucket. “No. I’ve never had to give out EVERY bucket.”
At this point I was thankful to be unaffected by the ocean’s motion, but I knew that could all change at a moment’s notice.
We arrived at the ocean entry around 5:15, and small windows in the clouds on the eastern horizon where the sun was rising had allowed some light through. The scene was horrific: Huge columns of orange-colored smoke rose from farther inland, while the sea around us roiled with crashing waves and billowing explosions of smoke, steam, and bits of lava and tephra. The devastation was all-encompassing and surreal, and the waves were relentless. Inland was a blackened, smoldering wasteland. Nothing remained of the once beautiful bay.
I immediately got to work shooting photos. The first of the series had a much higher percentage of blurry, out-of-focus shots than the later ones. The same waves creating those amazing steam explosions also made for challenging shooting conditions for anyone trying to take photos. The experience was a little bit like trying to photograph a rodeo from the back of a bucking bronco. While fireworks go off around you. In the dark.
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“Night lights at the ocean entry,” lava steams in the low light as it enters the ocean at Kapoho Bay, Hawaii. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Lava steam bath,” high surf causes massive amounts of steam and smoke at the Kapoho Bay ocean entry, Hawaii. For licensing or prints, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Lavalands,” high surf triggered dramatic explosions, sending bits of lava and tephra flying. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Roiling waters, Kapoho Bay,” lava snakes its way to the sea at the Kapoho Bay ocean entry. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
As the sun rose and more light hit the scene, the shooting got easier. I continued firing away as the boat made multiple passes along the coast, alternating between having the left side and the right side face the shore. Occasionally we were washed over by steam and laze. My lens completely fogged over as we passed through an all-encompassing steam cloud, and I briefly worried about whether our captain could even see where we were in relation to the lava.
And we got close.
Like, real close a few times. At one point an explosion to my right side showered my side of the boat in black sand tephra, a hot piece of it landing directly in my right eye. For a second I seriously thought that a piece of lava had hit my eye. That I was doomed. I blinked a couple of times in a near panic, and the sand cleared my eyeball. I blinked it out and continued shooting, relieved.
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“Woman with selfie stick, ocean entry,” a woman records video of the ocean entry at Kapoho Bay during a boat tour, June of 2018. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Ocean entry at first light,” the rising sun turns the clouds pink over the Kapoho Bay lava ocean entry, Hawaii. For prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Ocean entry at first light II,” the rising sun turns the clouds pink over the Kapoho Bay lava ocean entry, Hawaii. For prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Land of fire, sea of steam,” water boils at the Kapoho ocean entry, Hawaii. For fine art prints or licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Pele’s fist,” an explosion of steam, smoke, and tephra erupts from the Kapoho Bay ocean entry, Hawaii. For licensing or fine art prints, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
“Mushroom cloud, lava ocean entry,” smoke and steam billow upward after an explosion at the Kapoho Bay ocean entry, Hawaii. For fine art prints and licensing, please message me using the “Contact Me” form.
After half an hour of passes, the captain turned us for home. Bits of black volcanic rock covered my white Canon lens. I had the same grit stuck to my face, as did the people who were sitting around me.
I marveled at what I had just witnessed, trying to suppress my gleefulness for the sake of those on board who were seasick and still throwing up.
We returned to port in Hilo at around 7 am. What a way to start the day.
In June of 2016, I had the privilege and pleasure of spending a couple of days in Rome, Italy with my family. During the day we sweated our way around the city, cooling off with some gelato and the occasional trip to one of Rome’s many fountains. One evening, however, I had the opportunity to grab my little Fuji Xpro-1, my Benro tripod, and my Sunwayfoto CR-30 pano head and hop on the metro. My destination? Back to the Colosseum.
Ordinarily I would choose one or maybe two of these photos to post, mostly because I dislike having multiple shots from the same location (that were taken on the same evening) in my portfolio. However, in this case I thought that the changing light, the changing angles, and even the people I happened to capture in these scenes were different enough that posting all of my panoramas would be a fun change of pace. Plus, I’m really missing Rome and thought I’d slake my thirst for travel with some photo editing.
So without too much further ado, here are my panoramas, as taken in chronological order.
Temperatures cool and the crowds clear slightly during a summer sunset at the Coloseum (Il Colosseo). At far right a nearly full moon can be seen. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
The day’s light fades at Rome’s famous Colosseum, as street vendors go to set up for the evening. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
The mid-day crowds subside during a summer sunset at the Colosseum, Rome. Use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints or licensing.
Clouds lit by sunset streak overhead at the Colosseum. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints or licensing.
Both the Colosseum and Constantine’s Arch can be seen in this wide panorama. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
Lights begin to turn on in and out of The Colosseum during blue hour. Please use the “Contact Me” form to inquire about prints and licensing.
In the mid 1800s, with a booming gold rush turning once-filthy miners into Izod-shirt wearing, boat-shoe clad member of the nouveau riche, the miners of Death Valley decided to upgrade their standard of living and send for their estranged families. Unfortunately, as the kids of Death Valley soon discovered, there wasn’t much to do in Death Valley other than work in the mines. Landscape photography was a pursuit relegated to opium addicts and the criminally drunk, and social media bullying still hadn’t been invented. Children, tired of traditional diversions such as “Kick the Cat” and “Whip the Burro,” were in desperate need of some entertainment.
This necessity resulted in a number of children-oriented structures being built: First, a one-room schoolhouse, then a hugely unpopular wooden slide, and finally a high-elevation summer camp perched far above the valley floor and away from the valley’s main settlements. This camp was aptly named “Fun Camp.”
With the summer weather in Death Valley being generally unfit for both man and beast, the mothers of Death Valley had sought out a location at higher elevations where they could drop their kids off for the summer to learn some of the lost pioneer arts of their forefathers, such as animal husbandry, husband wifery, and fence whitewashing. At 4,000 feet above sea level, the location for Fun Camp was a bit of an anomaly, as it rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit all summer long due to coastal zephyrs that, as one 19th century writer put it, “Flowed o’er the seas, gathering up its coolness and finally spat that coolness upon the upper flank of the Panamint Range like so much chewing tobacco in a spittoon.”
During the spring of 1866, dozens of barracks were built. In the summer of 1866 the first group of kids moved in. Over the following decades a number of improvements were made to the 15-acre grounds, including something called a “swimming hall,” rudimentary thrill rides, and what historians later believed to be a sacrificial altar.
But despite all this fun, the camp had its problems. Hilarious but fatal dingo attacks were reported to have occurred on a somewhat frequent basis, and even the most basic of injuries were treated poorly, mostly because not a single adult was onsite from June to August, a detail that the mothers of Death Valley had overlooked in their desperation to rid themselves of a seemingly never-ending chorus of “We’re boooooored.” Some things never change!
In 1931, the newly formed Child Protective Services made raiding Fun Camp their first order of business. The camp was closed, and CPS cited unsafe living conditions, amusement park rides that had been both created from and fixed with duct tape, and a plethora of shallow unmarked graves filled with tiny child-sized bones as the reasons.
The Milky Way, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars shine brightly over these abandoned structures in Death Valley National Park. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form.
Pictured in this photo are Fun Camp’s swimming hall, the pub, and the ticket booth for the world’s very first Tilt-a-Whirl. The structures have been preserved impeccably because of the quick and decisive work of a collective of historians named the Fathers of the Eastern Sierras, who in 1933, two years after Fun Camp’s closing, loaded a dozen 20-mule-trains with some 80,000 gallons of epoxy resin and made the long and arduous trek up to Fun Camp, where they used the epoxy resin to coat the entire site for posterity, thus preserving an important but oft-forgotten part of American history.
Taking infrared photos often doesn’t give you a lot to work with in post-processing; if you’re only allowing a very small portion of invisible light and NO visible light to reach your camera sensor, the results are going to be fairly limiting, from an exposure, contrast, and color perspective. Those of us who shoot infrared realize this, which is my many infrared shooters choose to convert their photos to monochrome. This also is why the vast majority of infrared shooters take photos during the day.
But the results that can be achieved by shooting infrared at night can be…well…interesting. I took this infrared panorama in April of 2017, and you can see many of the familiar objects of the night sky. Notable is the bright Antares (mid right), which still looks the red-orange color you’ve come to expect. However, you can also see how strangely infrared rendered the rest of the night sky. Airglow seems to disappeared entirely. And of course the spring vegetation in the desert has fluoresced into some really interesting colors.
Plants fluoresce and an oddly-colored Milky Way shine brightly in the sky over Joshua Tree National Park, California, in this panorama. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form on the right side of the page.
Death Valley has some pretty wild weather in the spring.
One evening, my friends and I had plans to take photos of the salt patterns in Badwater Basin. However, 20 minutes before we were scheduled to meet, my friend Jake knocked at my door.
“Have you seen this?” he asked, and I looked past him to see, well, a sandstorm. The campgrounds across the road were completely consumed by blowing sand; there was no visibility at all. Even in the breezeway outside my door, which was somewhat protected by the hotel, sand was swirling into my face, landing in my eyes, mouth, and hair.
The sand particulates had so filled the air that the valley floor was glowing, particularly as the sun continued to descend lower. Instead of driving to Badwater Basin, we headed to the Mesquite Flat Dunes. Before emerging from the car, I put a long lens on my camera. About half an hour before sunset, still in the middle of golden hour, I shot the photo below. The low clouds, and the sheer amount of particulates in the air seemed to bring an early end to the golden hour; twilight descended rapidly on Death Valley.
Rays of light filter through airborne sand, clouds, and the Panamint Range, Death Valley National Park. Use the “Contact me” form at right for prints or licensing.
During my trip to Baja, my small group spent a couple nights camping near Baja’s Bahia de los Angeles (also known as LA Bay). It was an area I’d remembered visiting on a trip 15 years before, and surprisingly I didn’t think it had changed much. The quaint small town nearby was still quaint, the bay was still amazing, the weather was mostly good, and the night sky was breathtaking.
The day had intermittent clouds rolling through that made me a little nervous, but those clouds had largely dissipated by the time I awoke for a 4 am date to photograph the night sky. After leaving the tent, I was greeted with an amazing sight–the full galactic core of the Milky Way (the 28.9-degree latitude helped with that) as well as three planets: Jupiter (brightest, in center), Mars (in the galactic core), and Saturn (just to the left of the galactic core).
A vibrant Milky Way and three planets glow over my camp in Baja California Norte, Mexico, in March of 2018. Click photo for a larger version. For print or licensing inquiries, please use the “Contact me” form to the side of this page.
By the way, the yellow-orange glow you see in the sky isn’t light pollution. It’s airglow. The skies down there were fantastically dark, and there’s no way the tiny towns around there can put off enough light to affect the night sky.
Another side note: While I was taking this panorama and a couple of others, I could hear a pod of whales snuffling and splashing as they came to the surface in the strait to my left. At first I thought the noise was a change in tides, but over half an hour the noises moved from north to south, and included a couple of fins slapping the water. Additionally, a raccoon-sized animal scuttled across the rocks at the left of the frame around this time, too, but I couldn’t quite identify what it was in the dark, and my headlamp had dimmed to the point where I couldn’t make it out when I shined a light on it.
The annotated version of the photo can be seen below.
A vibrant Milky Way and three planets glow over my camp in Baja California Norte, Mexico, in March of 2018. Click photo for a larger version. For print or licensing inquiries, please use the “Contact me” form to the side of this page.
Portland Japanese Garden
