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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
I spotted this little scene up in a tree at the Green Gulch Farm, near San Francisco, California:
The spider didn’t seem to mind the soggy weather a bit. Should you find yourself in the San Francisco area (in particular, in Marin county), we’d highly recommend a stop at Green Gulch Farm. The people there are friendly, and it’s a wonderful quiet place for a stroll (even on a wet day)…
A “Margaret Mary” Water Lily, seen at the Mercer Arboretum and Botanic Gardens in Houston, Texas:
Taken with an Oly E-PL2, and the “kit” lens.
Another shot from last summer’s road trip to the Canadian Rockies:
This is a shot across Moraine Lake, just at sundown. We scrambled to get there while the light was still up — we were too late to do any hiking around the lake, but at least I was able to get this shot. Or to be precise, three shots combined as an HDR image.
An old-school boat at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats:
This was my attempt at a conceptual shot for travel, exploration, and the like. What do you think?
Near the end of our recent trip to Washington, D.C., we’d done a big drive down through Virginia to see some old plantations. Rather than drive around the bulk of the Charles river in order to get back to our hotel, we opted to take the Jamestown ferry to get across the river to Williamsburg. As we left the Virginia shore, these two watched the show:
The pier and gulls are maybe a bit darker than I’d like, but I love how the water bokeh came out. What do you think?
Can you call a squabble a territorial dispute when it takes place on water? At any rate, we were headed out of the Phoenix zoo when we saw these two trying to settle boundary issues with each other:
In the end, one of them turned tail and swam off, with the winner in pursuit.
The last time I visited Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats, I managed to get there pretty early in the morning — before Lake Union had time to get choppy from the day’s breezes.
Lucky me — it made for some nice reflections!