MorseBlog

This afternoon I went for a drive up Trestle Creek not far from the lake. It is a Forest Service logging road. Along the way I stopped at a couple of random locations and scrabbled over fallen logs and brush. There was no trail or destination in mind. I was there to immerse myself in the dark wetness of the steep ravine at the bed of which runs the rambunctious Trestle Creek. An above average snowpack in the Cabinet mountains higher up feeds this fast torrent of clear water as it pours off the mountain eventually to make a small contribution to Lake Pend Oreille.  The Cabinets are a chain of mountains in Norther Idaho along the border with Montana. They are called this because in places the flat faces of the rocks appear as a pile of cabinets left on the landscape. This makes them also very steep; today there seemed to be no place for the water in Trestle creek to rest or pool, it seems always to be rushing off the mountain. June is a very wet month I am told most years and it cert...

Another in a soon to become too repeated series here at Lake Pend Oreille. This will last probably until I at last I move into my permanent residence. Bear with me I until I change location!  This morning I could not get back to sleep (strange surroundings and missing my wife) so I went out at 5:00AM. The lake is so quiet early in the morning and yesterday's rain had passed leaving partly clouded skies and low patches of cloud and fog around the mountains. As I looked out I cursed as I realized I had missed some of the best light. Of course I hadn’t planned to be up so the cursing was undeserved.  I am continuing to enjoy the Zuiko 135mm f2.8 lens adapted to the Fuji GFX 50s ii as mentioned in the last couple of posts. It has enough telephoto to suite my intimate landscape work but is capable of taking in larger vistas as well. Previously in the film domain I enjoyed the 150mm f3.5 on my Mamiya 645 Pro so it was easy to adapt to this new lens. (I can still use that lens on the...

This morning I rose early and went on a short walk on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille. It had rained the whole night and the morning was shrouded in mist and a very fine light rain. The lake surface shimmered with the droplets. Again I went out with my Olympus 135mm f2.8 as well as the Fuji 35-75mm f4.5/5.6 native lens on the Fuji FX 50s ii. This lake has always presented a challenge to photograph well and this morning as no exception. I let the mood and location take me this morning and opted for a Lake Vibe theme and embrace the lake as not only landscape but also as iconic images, recreation and the purvey of people as well as nature. The 135mm shots were cropped to 31 Mpix natively while the Fuji 35-70mm lens I set to a 65x24 aspect ratio based on the Xpan format which results in a 25 Mpix image using the full width of the sensor. All images were edited on the native photo editor found on the iPad Again just like the prior post, restrictions on lens and aspect ratio forced a certain...

One certain way to have a nice time out photographing is bring just one lens or a camera with a fixed lens. The restrictions are more than made up with the simplicity of shooting this way; where lens changes don’t interfere and choices are fewer. You learn to see the world through that one focal length and you learn how to find and compose subjects around this tight restriction.  And so it was the other day when I went out with my Fuji GFX 50S ii with an adapted Olympus OM 135mm f2.8 lens. This light telephoto lens I have reviewed on the camera in a prior post. It had a great reputation in the day as a short telephoto lens often popular for portrait work.  I found it exceptionally good for intimate and conventional landscape work as well and it really holds up to the Fuji 50 Mpix sensor. The fast optics means it is easy to get some nice depth of field for good subject separation while the sharp high contrast image makes manual focus pretty much error-free.  The images I p...