I hereby declare the 2009 Northwest Photography Season open...

[regnaD kciN]

After one of the strangest winters in Washington state history, one that featured blizzards, windstorms, record cold spells, major flooding, and not only a White Christmas but also a White St. Patrick's Day (as well as the usual weeks of slate-gray skies and steady drizzle that make nature photography futile) we got the first sign of light at the end of the tunnel on Sunday, with warmer temperatures and blue skies, with just enough clouds to make things interesting. Time to get out the camera and get back to (creative) work...

My destination that day was the Skagit Valley. While the world-renowned tulip season was still a week or so away, the daffodils were out at several of the farms in the valley.














As evening drew on, my plan was to head out to Rosario Beach State Park to catch the sunset. However, the state park system must not have gotten the memo about spring being here, because the gate to Rosario was chained shut, with a "closed for winter" sign. Strangely, the state park at Bowman Bay, a few hundred feet off the same road, was very much open. (Go figure.) So, Bowman it was, despite the sunset view being nowhere near as photogenic as Rosario.

A couple of shots along the beach trail at Bowman.








And, as it turned out, it probably wouldn't have mattered that much, as, instead of the broken clouds supposed to come in at twilight, we got more like a solid bank of low-level clouds, giving us a moody sunset rather than a spectacular one.











All-in-all, though, a great start to spring in the Pacific Northwest. Need I mention that, two days later, we're back to the steady overcast, rain, and wind? So it goes...

[ManiacJoe]

1. Might have to see if the weekend weather holds

for a trip to the daffodils this weekend while waiting for the tulips.

For bloom maps - http://www.tulips.com/bloommap.cfm
http://www.tulipfestival.org

[GentryDixon]

2. Lovely Pictures.

Here's mine from my visit to my womb mate (twin) in Oregon last September.

Taken from our hotel at Depoe Bay.



Ditto.



Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach.

[Celebration]

3. I love your pictures and your state!!

Okay, I have a daughter in Seattle, so I get to hear about your weather all the time.

Yours are absolutely outstanding pictures, but it is so scenic there it is almost hard to go wrong. We went to a wedding here a couple of summers ago. I wasn't really into photography at the time, but still managed to get a few good pictures.

One thing I remember is that on the peninsula some places would get over 100 inches of rain a year, and other places less than twenty!! And they would be something like 15 miles apart. Weird!!

If this is a Washington state thread, here are mine--

Great place for a wedding!



On the way there is this cute little Cascadian Farms place



Here is a beach on the Olympic Peninsula



And a rainy sunrise hear Neah Bay

[Trocadero]

4. From prior seasons...

[Mira]

11. LOVE shot number three. So incongruous a depiction. What a picture! n/t

[JeffR]

5. Moody that sunset may be

but it's captured with great vision and expertise. Looking forward to some water falling over things. Soon!

[regnaD kciN]

17. About WFOT 2009...

...first of all, I did post a couple installments back in January. Granted, one was a washout and the other was of a man-made waterfall in an urban garden, but they still mean that the next one will be Part III.

When will I have more? That's a difficult question. First of all, I've shot basically everything available locally, and I really doubt anyone wants to see yet another photo of Snoqualmie or Weeks Falls from me anytime soon. Anything left would be in the mountains, which are still under many feet of snow.

What I would like to do this year would be to make another trip back to the Columbia Gorge, plus one further south to Silver Falls State Park and/or Proxy Falls (long on my must-photograph list) in central Oregon, as well as finally getting out to Sol-Duc Falls on the Olympic peninsula. Each of those, however, is a weekend-long trip, meaning that I need to get several weekends between mid-April and the end of May with cooperative weather for waterfall-shooting -- i.e. solid overcast but no rain. That can be a tricky combination up here. I really don't want to spend ten hours or more on the road, only to get either an equipment-ruining downpour, or sunlight that turns the subject into a mess of high contrast.

Oh, and some of those weekends are going to be tricky anyway. I was planning on taking a workshop on waterfall photography with Bryan Swan (an excellent nature photographer, and the owner of the Waterfalls Northwest web site) next month up at Stevens Pass...until I took a look at the calendar, and concluded that Bryan must be a) single and b) probably an orphan -- he had scheduled his workshop for Mother's Day, where no married-with-family guy will be out shooting waterfalls unless they no longer want to be married-with-family. ;-)

[CC]

6. Gorgeous flowers and sky.

The look like you could walk right into the photos and pick a daffodil. The trail and sunsets are beautiful. The sunsets have such rich colors but that last one is my fav. Love the foreground and diagonals along with the muted blues and pinks. This does mean we will be getting "Water Falling over Things 2009" soon right? :evilgrin:

[Blue_In_AK]

7. It's so heartening to see

that it's spring somewhere in the Northwest. We've got quite a ways to go here. These are absolutely beautiful, every single one of them.

[ConsAreLiars]

8. Stu..., stu..., stu..., stu...,

ah,
Stupendous!

[Celebration]

9. Did my daughter say something about snow in Seattle?

Haven't talked to her, but it was on Facebook. :silly:

I just hope these various blooms weren't disturbed.

[glinda]

10. Stunning!

[Mira]

12. Your season openers widen the field, so to speak, I 'm happy spring has expanded to reach you.

Without your photos I would not have even conceived of fields of daffodils, and you would have been one of the artists I would have wanted to show them to me.
So much color, so much promise. Delivered.
the middle sunset photo does it for me. I want to go there right now and dive in but it would disturb the perfection.
And you get to live there!

[intheflow]

13. Gorgeous!

It must be so lovely to have spring sprung already. You are truly blessed to live in such an extraordinarily beautiful area.

[Tindalos]

14. Hope those daffs survived the recent cold snap

That April's Fools day snow wasn't funny. Hmph! x(

[Trocadero]

15. I don't understand why they don't harvest the flowers

I mean, if they are blooming in the field, it's too late to pick them and ship them somewhere and sell them.

So I think that all those flowers - all the acres in Woodburn - are for show, and for tourism, but so many bloom in the field and are never picked. That must be so expensive! How do the economics of that worth? They get more money from $5 per car, than by selling the flowers?

[regnaD kciN]

16. Not really...

They harvest them as soon as enough bloom (my guess is that they probably started the Monday after those pictures were taken) and put them on the market locally.

I'm not really up on the mechanics of flower-harvesting, but the tulip-growers seem to have worked out a pretty good system whereby they harvest some flowers (not a full clear-cut of the fields) every day and sell them, while keeping the fields themselves in enough color to serve as tourist attractions. They've been doing it for decades, and the system they have seems to work well.