Rising From the Mists

Here are a couple of shots from a hike I took with a few friends last December at Mount Pisgah. We decided that we needed a break from studying for finals and were able to find a nice hike not to far away from Eugene.  We climbed up the trail through some pretty dense fog, but as we got closer to the summit, we broke out of it and were able to see the sun for a little while (before the fog caught back up with us). These are a few pictures from that boundary area that I thought turned out pretty cool:

Treetops

Whew, the last few nights have been pretty rough trying to catch up on all the work I didn’t do this past weekend. Here’s another pair of pictures from the trip to Odell Lake:

It’s not often I catch the moon close enough to the horizon during the day to get a shot of it with anything but sky in the picture. My moon photos usually don’t come out this clear either, so I’m happy on both counts.

This one was taken on one of the cross county ski trails around the lodge. I really like the way the clouds turned out in the top left corner. They contrast very nicely against the dark blue sky from the polarizing filter. I would have liked to have gotten the entire sky that dark, but it didn’t work out with the sun at the time. I also like how the dead tree left of center kinda matches up with the leading edge of the clouds in both shape and color.

-Ben

Experimenting (Take 2)

In my last post, I talked about playing around with my new graduated neutral density filter, but I didn’t have a great example of what the effect really was. However, this weekend, I went with a large group from the math department up to Odell Lake, up in the cascades. It was a gorgeous place, and it was nice to get away from Eugene and work for a few days (though I’m making up for all that missed time tonight…). Saturday afternoon, I went down to the docks at the lake at sunset, and had a chance to play some more with the filter. Below are two roughly identical shots, the first without the filter, and the second with it

Notice that the surface of the lake is exposed about the same in both shots. The difference between the two is the exposure of the sky, especially on the left side of the shot (where the sun was going down). Overall, I’d say it was a fairly large improvement in the shot.

I’ll post more about the weekend adventures (and some more photos) next time. But for now, it’s back to work…

-Ben

Still Water

This is another shot from the trip to Acadia earlier this summer.  This is Eagle Lake, near the middle of the park.  Polaraizer came in handy here to get the reflection.

-Ben

Spilling Over

Here’s a (slightly) older shot from May.  A few days before graduation, a few of us from Main Campbell went for a hike at a place called Tinker Cliffs.  It was a great hike, made more difficult by the fact that it started raining once we were about 2 miles into the hike, making several climbs up muddy hills necessary.  It was slow going for a little while, but the rain eventually tapered off by the time we got up to the cliffs, giving a a gorgeous view across the valley.  One of the coolest things was seeing the clouds “spilling over” the mountains across the valley.

We could also see some of the nearby mountains poking out of the low clouds.  Here’s a shot of the group that made the trek:

And here’s a neat shot of the fog in the woods after the rain stopped:

Anyway, it’s been kind of a rough week here, but I made it to the weekend.  Time to relax a little and go dancing in a little while 🙂

-Ben