Friday, January 27, 2012

Oct. 15 - Mt. Baker

Bill and I took advantage of one of the few sunny, relatively warm days to drive up to Mt. Baker, a beautiful snow-covered mountain in the North Cascades.

 Bill and me in front of Mirror Lake (aptly named!), which is obviously in front of Mt. Baker!

 Down to just my point & shoot, none of these photos do the scene any justice whatsoever.  No, seriously, the p&s just blows out the snowy mountain scenes.  Without filters and greater capacity for capturing subtleties in the dynamic range, you end up with too high of contrast and inevitably lose some valuable chunk of the photo.  I could either have the top half exposed sort of correctly or the bottom half but not both in the same image!  And forget any kind of resolution!  If you want to see a really nice photo of this mountain and lake (same time of year and everything), look here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/55256003@N08/5121207124/  It was really tough not having my SLR when confronted by such beauty, and that was compounded by the feeling of me no longer being "one of us."  A small horde of SLR-owning, tripoded folks were always to be found on that little platform you can see on the left.  But I was no longer one of them.  I could not stake a claim to being one of the lucky many who could capture a decent image of the place.  I felt left out, irrelevent, illegitimate, nearly shunned.  From now on, I will have more compassion for those holding teeny little metal boxes up to the view - you never know, they could very well just be displaced SLR users!

 Looking the other direction, the lighting/subject matter was not such high contrast and came out OK, more or less.  But that wasn't where the big deal stuff was either!

 A trail rings this popular (and even with my shabby photos, you can see why!) lake.

 The best I could do...  OK, so it was also probably the wrong time of day (too bright out, etc.), but I know I could've gotten better shots anyways with my SLR had it not been in hospital (boo-hoo)!

 Mt. Baker is nearly 11,000 ft tall, heavily glaciated, volcanic (second most active volcano in the range next to Mt. St. Helens, and you know how that turned out!), and often has tons of snow.



A sign for a fish - and ice cream!?! - market between Anacortes and Burlington...  Mmmm, all the references to seafood sure make that ice cream sound yummy, don't you think?!!  Can't you just taste that shrimp ice cream or maybe some oyster gelato or something?!  Yicky!!!!!!  I wonder who thought those two types of food would market well together...?!  But who am I to say?  Maybe they sell tons of the stuff!?!

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