The “Goodland Van Gogh”

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Here’s a bit of artistic Americana, captured just off I-70 in Goodland, Kansas:

The

Why, you might ask, did I wander here? Like many (I’d guess most) visitors, I was driving home from an out-of-town trip via I-70. I needed to stop for some gas (not a lot of gas stations in the middle of Kansas), and happened to drive by this on my way into the heart of Goodland.

Granted, a 24′ by 32′ reproduction of a van Gogh painting isn’t what you’d expect to see in the middle of the prairie, so I did a bit of research on it. It turns out that this artwork was put up in 2001, at a cost of $150,000. Part of a project of Canadian painter Cameron Cross, it was intended to be one of seven similar works spread across the globe, all based on van Gogh’s sunflower paintings from the late 1880s — so far, only three have been erected (the other two are in Altona, Canada and Emerald, Australia).

As it turns out, my accidental timing was perfect — this summer, the painting was taken down from its easel and repainted. It was put back where it belongs a bit over a week before I passed through. So the new paint job should be good until 2023 or so — swing by if you’re passing through (as you can see, parking is no problem!).

Want to read more about this structure? Check out Roadside America, the Goodland Star-News, or the painting’s Facebook page.

The sleeping giant

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A view of Mt. Rainier from the east, along the White River:

The sleeping giant

I brought this image together using HDR Efex Pro 2 from four raw photographs. It was a bit of a salvage effort, since the sky was particularly hazy the day we visited. I was impressed at the software’s ability to pull detail out of the sky, avoiding a flat white backdrop for the snow-shrouded peaks.

Wild weather

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Not having spent much (really, any) of my life near an ocean, I’m not used to just how rough water can get when there’s a storm nearby. Our recent Puget Sound trip gave us a little reminder of that on a day when we drove along the west coast of Vancouver Island:

Wild weather

Normally, Long Beach in the Pacific Rim National Park Preserve is a serene place. As you can see, it was a bit more… boisterous when we visited.

Morning comes to Victoria

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Another shot from our Puget Sound air-/road-trip. This one’s looking back toward Victoria, BC from the ferry headed south to Port Angeles, Washington.

Morning comes to Victoria

This shot would have looked about as nice if the sky had been clear and blue. Still, I like the smooth background light that the light overcast gave the scene. For those of you taking notes, I made this image with an Olympus E-M5 camera with the 12-50mm “kit” lens.

Point of departure

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We recently returned from a multi-week vacation to the Puget Sound area. This trip followed our now-standard approach — fly to some interesting locale, rent a car, drive a thousand miles or so over a few weeks while taking in the sights and sounds. This is the first picture I’m posting from the 2,000+ photographs I collected in the process:

Point of departure

It’s a view out the front windows of the ferry between Vancouver (the city) and Nanaimo (on Vancouver Island), both in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. I was originally hoping that I could capture some nice scenic views on this leg of the trip, but it proved… wetter… than the weather forecast had predicted.

So when life gives you rain, you take rain pictures.

At this point, the ferry was just leaving the Vancouver docks; that white-outlined dark spot is a small fishing boat heading out ahead of us. In retrospect, I like the sense of mystery that focusing on the water gave this shot. I took another version of this shot, but focused on the small boat — doesn’t look nearly as interesting.

Fireworks with an Olympus E-M5

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Over the years, I’ve settled into having two semi-related sets of photography gear — a “large set,” and a “small set.” My small set of gear is all micro-4/3 stuff, and I recently upgraded that body to an Olympus OM-D E-M5 (yes, bit of a mouthful there). Or to be more accurate, I should say that I ordered an E-M5 back in March and it finally arrived a few weeks back.

So buoyed by reports of good performance in low-light situations, I took my shiny new (surprisingly small) little camera with tripod and cable release to a fireworks display that our town put on recently.

Celebration

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