Olympic NP Vacation Day 1: Early Morning Hike and the Beach

Early morning overlooking the lake

After a good night sleep, we woke up around 5:00AM PST, but the lodge doesn’t start serving breakfast till 7:30 AM PST so we went for an early morning hike near the lodge. Our first hike was 1.6 miles in the wood across from the lodge. It started out flat then started a climb upward, we heard a couple waterfall along the path but there were not good viewing locations along the trail to get pictures of the falls. The whole hike took us about hour and half to complete. After splitting breakfast, which was eggs, bacon, potatoes, and a biscuit, we did a second hike. The second hike was 3.5 miles long. This hike took us along lake Quinault, over to the Rain Forest Loop, through the Cedar Bog, and back down to the lodge. This was an up and down trail with a few even spots. These trails are not for those who cannot handle hills and are considered a moderate level hikes. We started the trail around 8:00AM and got back to the lodge around 10:30 AM. We then took a quick break before deciding to head out to beaches since the tide was at going to be at its lowest point.

The first beach we stopped at was behind Kalaloch Lodge, which is about a 45-minutes away from our lodge. This beach is a sand beach and had a lot of dead crabs on it. I mean a lot of dead crabs and crab shells. Overall, not very interesting. Since we got to Kalaloch a bit before lunch we walked the beach then got lunch there. The restaurant there was take out only, so we got chicken wraps and ate them in the car before heading up to Ruby Beach which was about 10 more miles up 101 from Kalaloch. Ruby Beach is popular because it has sea stacks. A sea stack is a rock feature in the middle of the beach near the shore. To get to the beach you park in the parking lot then walk down a hill, to the beach where you then crawl across some large driftwood, more like drift logs to get to the rocky beach. This beach is not sandy and is covered in large smooth round stones. They are not too difficult to walk on. We walk along this beach for a bit to get some picture of the sea stacks, we will be going back around sunrise later in the week to get more interesting pictures. Once we finished walking on the beach, we started the journey back to Quinault Lodge.

Sea Stack at Ruby Beach

On the way back to the lodge we stopped to see the “Big Cedar” which is a large cedar tree. It was a very short walk to the tree and is a nice simple diversion. We plan on seeing the tallest Sitka spruce later in the week. This basically concluded our day. We didn’t want to over do it on hiking the first day, especially since Jim is still breaking in a pair of books. Tomorrow, I think we will go over to the Hoh Rain Forest and do some hiking there and stop at Rialto Beach.

The Pumpkin Barron

On October 12th, I had the pleasure of working with the marvelous SunnyRae . The general theme for the shoot was pumpkins but with coordination on outfits with SunnyRae theme evolved into official portraits of an 18 th century Pumpkin Baron. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 1 Westcott Strobe 1 rectangular soft box 1 strip box 1 6x6 silver reflector 2 C-stands 1 light stand Boom arm Color checker clamps Sandbags Backdrop stand Rough canvas backdrop Pumpkins Rough canvas drop cloth Flowers Old trunk Books Letters Wooden crate Fake leaves Chair Tri-level plant stand The set up I wanted to keep this set up a bit rustic yet give the feel of staged aristocratic painting of the time. I started with a plain rough canvas backdrop then placed an ol...

Night Queen

On September 28th, I did a session with May. This session’s theme was designed around a Halloween headpiece I made a couple of years ago but never got to shoot. The vibe of the overall shoot was dark queen. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 2 rectangular soft boxes grids 2 C-stands Sandbags Backdrop stand Fuzzy grey backdrop Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps 2 trilevel plant stands Fake candles Goblets Fake flowers Black fabric Silver fabric Large Styrofoam block Dowel Rods Skulls Fake moss Dry ice The set up I tried to keep this setup simple in nature. I started with the base of a fuzzy grey backdrop to which I added a “throne” made from a large Styrofoam block, some dowel rods, and a piece of black fabric. To that I added two flower pot hol...

Belle Island with Central VA Cosplayers

On October 19 th I drove down to Richmond, VA to attend a Central VA Cosplay Photoshoot meetup on October 20 th at Belle Island. I wanted to go to this event because it was in an interesting location, and I wanted to meet some new cosplayers. For this session I used: Canon R6 2 Speed light Trigger 1 Light stands 24 - 105mm lens Gels Camera Settings: For this shoot, I was transitioning back and forth between being inside an old, dark, abandoned building to bright, sunny woods. Due to the transitions, my settings varied greatly. I mostly shot at ISO 100 except for when I accidently bumped the nob to “Auto” and didn’t notice, so I also took shots at ISO 2500, 3200, 4000, and 6400. The shots at the high ISO actually look fairly decent, and not as grainy as one would expect. My shutter varied between 1/100s to 1/250s with the most common shutter speed being 1/250s. My aperture varied between F5 to F11 with the most common ap...

The Munchkin's Notebook

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