While visiting family this summer, my return flight got canceled and when the airline rebooked me for the next day, I ended up with three legs instead of two. At first disappointed but just happy to be going home, I was rather delighted when I discovered they put me in first class for the longest leg of the flight. At the point where the flight attendant brings out the hot towels, the woman beside me leaned over and said, “To be honest, this is my favorite part of flying first class.”

I wanted to say that my favorite part was when they let you go back and kick the people in coach, but I just nodded my head. I understood what she meant, sometimes in life it’s the little things that make such a difference.

The Columbia River Gorge is home to a variety of beautiful and majestic waterfalls, including the famous Multnomah Falls, but sometimes I think tiny little Fairy Falls is my favorite of the bunch. It isn’t, Ponytail Falls (the upper part of Horsetail Falls) is probably my favorite, but I love hiking the trail and coming upon this little jewel where the water tumbles down beside you and runs underneath your feet.

What I love most is photographing the little falls within the little fall.

If things get a little quiet around here for the next month, it’s because I signed up for NaNoWriMo again this year. I reached the 50,000 word goal the previous two times I participated in 2005 and 2009 but I think it’s unlikely I’ll get that far this year. Partly because in previous years I had a better idea of what I wanted to write and partly because there are other things I’d like to do this month, especially taking pictures, editing pictures, and updating my site. Goodness am I behind.

And partly because I haven’t been sleeping as well lately and am often tired at the end of the day, normally my favorite time to write. The other day I fell asleep as soon as I finished eating dinner, for a night owl like me that’s rather embarrassing so let’s just keep that between us, shall we.

In the meantime enjoy this lovely mountain stream flowing over moss-covered rocks, taken on the trail above Wahkeena Falls in the Columbia River Gorge. I went hiking a couple of times in the Gorge in the weeks before my Wyoming trip, trying to get myself back in hiking shape while lugging the camera gear around.

Hint: It wasn’t Ridgefield.

It rarely gets cold enough in the valley to freeze even the shallow lakes at Ridgefield. This sunrise is equally rare, the sun is just about to crest the hills to my left.

I spent most of my time at Horse Lake this winter watching wigeon, pintails, ring-necks, and a juvenile heron that often worked the water’s edge. But I couldn’t resist a scenic picture when I saw the shallow lake had frozen and was reflecting the colors of the sunrise. It wasn’t until a long while later while playing around with the image on my iPhone that I wished I had also switched to my telephoto lens to isolate the distant shore.

It’s so easy and fun to play around with composition on the iPhone and iPad, I wish I had them when I was first getting started in photography many years ago, but better late than never.

A heavy crop of the picture above shows what I wish I had taken with my telephoto lens.

A wider shot of Horse Lake, where in the past I haven't spent much time since it is the first lake on the auto tour and attracts a lot of visitors. It's more of a large pond than a small lake, but this winter I spent a lot of time there and came away with a number of nice pictures.

I walked alone
I stood alone
ghosts of trees
memories
within my grasp but fading

My mind turns to Japan at this time of year as soon as I see a cherry tree in the neighborhood start to bloom. I visited Tokyo six years ago on a business trip, unfortunately a week or two too early for the full bloom of the cherry trees. Nevertheless I had one free day on my own which I spent wandering the grounds of the Imperial Palace, delighted to at last find a tree blossoming in the East Garden, even if it was not the traditional cherry.

My heart aches for the people suffering from the earthquake and tsunami, I pray healing follows tragedy as spring follows winter.

Old oak trees on a foggy night in the fall in Portland's Irving Park

Even though Irving Park is only a few blocks from our house, I never set foot in the park the first six years we lived here. But since adopting Ellie two years ago, I’ve visited daily during our walks. But during those two years I never took one picture. Not a single one!

A few weeks back while walking Ellie I was struck by the beauty of the old oak trees on a foggy fall night and wished I had brought along my camera. Then I remembered I had an always-with-you camera in my pocket and pulled out my iPhone. Its tiny sensor doesn’t do well in low light — which unfortunately is my favorite light to shoot in — but I’d rather have these pictures than none at all.

The next few posts will contain some pictures taken with the iPhone. It’s not good enough to make me forget about my big camera, but it has reignited my desire to take a camera with me more often. May be time to get a small camera bag to complement my shoulder bag. Maybe a small camera too.

Hoop Dreams

While on our walk Ellie suddenly started barking into the night. I couldn't understand why until I noticed the lights of this spaceship hovering over the horizon. Unfortunately the aliens that emerged were rather small and hedgehog-shaped. First contact did not go so well.

The end of one year and the start of the next offered a dazzling display of wildlife subjects, but the third day of the new year was quiet and the animals distant. At first disappointed, I soon matched my mood to the day and enjoyed the subtle moments. As I watched coots diving under Rest Lake to feed below, I was struck by the pattern of light dancing across the ripples and turned my lens from birds to water.

I certainly didn’t have pictures like this in mind when I bought the big lens, but it was the right tool to capture this unexpected beauty.

We hiked the Rinconada Canyon Trail at Petroglyph National Monument amidst the many petroglyphs new and old, many depicting the animals of the canyon, such as this petroglyph of a bird (a roadrunner perhaps?).

I spotted another bird in the jumbled rocks, this one very much alive, a mourning dove sitting on a thin nest of grasses. We hiked during the evening hours and heard doves calling from all around the park, bringing back fond memories of growing up back east where the coo-coo-cooing of doves serenaded us on many a night.

I haven’t been to Ridgefield yet this spring and was going to make my triumphant return today, but I’ve been feeling pretty rundown this weekend and decided to stay home and rest instead. Late in the afternoon I heard some sad news, a couple was bird-watching on the auto tour at the refuge and drove off the road next to a shallow channel of water. They landed upside down and both drowned in a few feet of water, still buckled into their seatbelts.

Not many details have been released yet, although I know how easy it is to be watching wildlife and not pay enough attention to the narrow road, but the speeds are so slow I always assumed a mistake would be embarrassing rather than tragic.

Regardless of how it happened, my thoughts and prayers go out to their friends and family, such a sad end to what I’m sure had been a lovely day at the refuge.

After driving through the auto tour at Ridgefield early one winter morning, the refuge shrouded in heavy fog, I stopped at the start to use the restroom. When I returned to the car, the fingers of the rising sun started punching through the fog. I scrambled to change lenses and take a quick handheld picture as within seconds the effect was gone. I darkened it when processing, I liked how it looked more like the aurora borealis than a sunrise.

While I loved the largest of the trees and never tired of seeing them, I suppose some of my favorite redwood scenes were of the mixed-age forests. Old veterans scarred black with fire, hollowed out even but still standing, damaged by winter storms through the centuries. Beside them healthy young trees or spindly saplings, some from the logs of fallen trees, a variety of shapes and colors and textures between them.

One thing I hadn’t remembered from my previous visit to the redwoods were the magnificent ferns that filled the forest floor underneath the towering trees, the forest feeling at once magnificent and ancient and certainly unlike the forests of the east that I wandered in my youth. I have never been a big lover of ferns, but I came away so impressed that I wanted to come home and create my own floor of ferns in the backyard.

While I did resist that urge, when I found a scraggly fern late in the winter hidden down in one of our wildflower gardens, I cleared out an area around this hardy survivor and hope it will grow and remind me of this spiritual place.

Redwoods have a shallow root system and fall over more than you might think, such as this tree that fell off the Hatton-Hiouchi trail. I visited early enough in the spring that winter blowdown still blocked some of the trails, fallen giants that weren’t so easily bypassed as the trees of my youth. When one tree blocked the Prairie Creek Trail I had to climb up the debris field to get across the trunk whose diameter greatly exceeded my height.

I had an easier time of it further on where a tree lay beside the trail and only its branches blocked the path. As I carefully made my way through, a trickster unseen grabbed my right ankle and sent me tumbling.

Even when I stumble, I have a pretty good sense of balance and so rarely fall when hiking. But not this time, the grip on my ankle was too strong and unexpected and I fell face first. Miraculously I stopped just above the ground, suspended in mid-air, and in that moment of confusion my mind went straight to divine intervention. But my guardian angel and trickster demon were one, for one branch had tripped me while another held me aloft.

God helps those who help themselves, so I felt for the ground with my feet and then eased my weight off the branch, collected my wits, and continued down the trail.

Believe it or not, I don’t have a nickname for these trees beside Sora Marsh. I rarely photograph anything in this pond even though something is usually swimming in it. The road along the pond is too narrow to have a good spot to pull off and wait, and while there is a roomier spot where I took this picture, it’s usually not a great place for pictures. You do get lucky sometimes, I photographed a mink swimming across the pond once.

As with the previous picture, there is a bit of wildlife in this shot, a northern shoveler swimming alone in the distance.

The Cactus Tree isn’t the only tree I’ve named at Ridgefield. There are the Twin Brothers and, as seen here, the Seven Brides. And just like with the Twins, it doesn’t matter if the actual number of trees matches the nickname, it’s more about the impression I get when I see them. These trees aren’t actually grouped together, it only seems like it when you reach this part of the auto tour.

I can’t resist including a little bit of wildlife in my scenic pictures whenever I get the chance, this time the honor belongs to a red-tailed hawk perched on a foggy winter morning.

I love color in my pictures, including pictures of fog, but this one even I prefer in black and white.

The hike into Death Canyon was my favorite of the trails I hiked on this visit to the Tetons in the fall of 2005. Wilson Road (which leads to the trailhead) has some massive potholes that are easier to navigate in a vehicle with decent ground clearance, but most cars should be able to handle it if you’re careful. While still on the paved part of the road, there was a mother black bear and her two cubs (as well as a horde of photographers), plus some very active moose.

The trail itself doesn’t offer any views of the Teton range that I can recall, but it is still a fantastic trail, especially with the fall colors such as this canyon wall where the rocks slide down into fall colors. I saw several pikas in the many boulder fields, the first time in my life I had seen these enigmatic little creatures. I apparently just missed seeing a mother moose and her calf bathing in one of the lakes, but did see several deer and a particularly amusing red squirrel, as well as a variety of birds from grouse to woodpeckers to jays. To top it off, the elk were bugling like ethereal spirits hidden in the forest.

Did I mention how much I loved this trail?

Why would I include a picture of a fumarole in a post about my dog?

Well, the other day Ellie added to her growing list of dietary adventures by eating a tub of margarine. That evening, Sam was sleeping on my lap as Ellie’s digestive system struggled to cope. Every so often he’d raise his head up and I knew his superior senses detected an incoming round that mine did not. Much like when I photograph the fumaroles and mud pots and geysers in Yellowstone, I was thankful that I have such a poor sense of smell.

I like to shoot with two cameras when I can tolerate the extra room and weight. While at Oxbow Bend to photograph Mount Moran at sunrise, I noticed these three young men grinning from ear-to-ear while paddling a canoe off to my left. Leaving my main camera on the tripod with its wide angle zoom attached, I grabbed my backup camera with the telephoto zoom and grabbed a quick snapshot. There’s more than one way to enjoy the Oxbow sunrise.

I took this picture in 2006. At the time, the Canon 20D was my main camera and the 10D the backup. When Canon announced the 7D, I wanted to get it and move the 20D into the backup role, but you can’t always get what you want …

It’s been 10 years. I registered the racphoto.com domain on October 25, 1999.

The site itself is much older as I started it while in graduate school at Virginia Tech and ran it off the personal storage I had on the servers there. I didn’t keep track of when the site first went live — which is a shame but who knew what was to come? — but at the latest it would have been 1996 and might have been a year or two earlier. To put that in context, Google didn’t launch until September of 1998.

But 1999 was the year the site grew up and got a real domain name. While the pictures have improved as I’ve improved as a photographer, the look of the site hasn’t changed much in the past decade. I still hand code the main site and while there are things I’d like to do to improve it, my focus has always been on keeping things simple to make it easier to maintain.

The blog is a relative newcomer and didn’t arrive until January 2006, starting off with a story of Templeton swallowing a sewing needle, and I certainly don’t hand code it and use WordPress instead.

This picture of Mount Moran at sunrise comes from 2006, taken from Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park. Everybody, and I mean everybody, photographs the mountains from here. I’ve done it on a couple of different occasions, but I also enjoy photographing the southern part of the range where you can watch the sunrise in quiet solitude.