Well, I got a new photography toy to play around with over the holidays, a graduated neutral density filter. The idea is that you can use it to help properly expose a shot with an area that’s considerably brighter than the rest of the shot, like the sky in a good deal of landscape shots (read more here if you’re interested). Usually, you would align the delineation between the two parts of the filter with the boundary between the bright and dark areas of the shot. Playing around with my filter though, I did exactly the opposite, and you can see how the right side of this shot looks considerably darker than the left. It was still a pretty neat effect in my opinion

I’m still playing around with this filter, and trying to get an idea of the proper way to use it. I tried a few shots with the filter’s boundary aligned with the horizon in the above shot, but I think the sun was too bright to really get the effect I was going for.  Another five minutes or so, when the sun went down behind the mountain, I think I would have had a lot more luck, but unfortunately, the lookout tower was closing, and I couldn’t wait around for it.  I did get a fairly nice shot looking away from the sun, and using the filter:

And another with the camera down on the railing of the tower:

-Ben

It was quite the trek, through various poorly kept and even more poorly marked forest service roads, but well worth it.  We stopped at one spot (near some scenic logging operations) on the way to look out over the valley, which was completely covered in low clouds:

Eventually, we made it to our destination: Kentucky Falls.  It was a beautiful hike that followed a stream through the Siuslaw National Forest. After about half a mile, we came to the lip of the upper falls, and about ten minutes of switchbacks later, were rewarded with this great view of the falls from the bottom:

The trail followed the stream from here past a series of rapids, and eventually brought us to the lower falls, which were truly awe-inspiring. We found ourselves down in a canyon, with fairly steep cliffs on three sides. Ahead, there was an outcropping that stuck out from the cliff. The stream here apparently breaks into two flows, each of which comes around one side of this outcropping and falls into the canyon. Unfortunately, the spray from the falls was so strong that I was only able to take a few shots before my lens was coated in water droplets, even about 100 feet away from the falls itself. This is probably the best shot I got (right half of the falls), including part of the viewing platform along the trail in the foreground:

After standing around admiring the falls for a while (and getting pretty soaked), we made the trek back to the car, which was almost entirely uphill in this direction. The trip back was mostly uneventful, except for a brief encounter with some snow flurries at higher elevations. Round trip, and including stops to get out of the car to look around and getting lost in the woods once, it was about a 5 hour trip there and back. It made for a long day, followed by dancing later that night, but it was definitely worth it.  This hike is definitely on my short list of things to do again once the weather turns nice.

-Ben

-Ben

-Ben

I haven’t had as much time for photography recently as I might like, so here’s another older shot.  This one comes from my adventures this past summer.  This photo was taken on the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine.

Kind of an interesting division in both color and focus in the photo between the plant itself taking up most of the left side of the shot and the blurry background to the right.  I also like the water droplets on the flower petals.  They are probably left over from the extremely dense fog that was covering the mountain that morning.

Things are still busy here.  Lots of work to do, but I’m still making time to do fun things when I can. Last night, especially, was a lot of fun.  I ended up going out to dinner in downtown Eugene before going out to salsa and had a great time.  Good food, good music, good dancing, and good company

-Ben