Asiana Flight 271 Preparing for Emergency Landing


I caught this image today as I was waiting to board the Ferry from Kingston to Edmonds. I saw this Boeing 777 dispersing fuel over Puget Sound. Knowing this was an unusual situation, I grabbed my camera and snapped off some shots. The reason the airplane had to dump its fuel was because it was preparing to make an emergency landing at Seatac due to one of its engines shutting down. To make the landing safer, the aircraft dumped its fuel to decrease the fire danger and reduce its own weight. Here is a link to the full story. Here is the Seattle P.I. story.

Trillium Grandiflorum



Found this growing on the north side of the house we're renting in Everett. I wanted to get a decent image of it, but I realized that picking this flower and bringing it inside to photograph simply wasn't an option. So, with little light left in the day, and an erratic wind constantly moving my subject around and rain beginning to fall, I snapped off a whole slew of images using a black golf jacket as a background. This image is the best of the hastily created bunch. Hopefully I'll have better luck later in the week with calmer winds. This was shot with my Canon 50D and Canon 17-40mm F4 "L". Shutter speed was 1/60th of a second using an aperture of F 6.3 and an ISO of 400. You can learn more about this flower at this wikipedia entry.

Wood and Rocks

Walking along the Snohomish River I found a piece of driftwood with these stones piled inside it. I liked the differing textures and and the way it looked, so I captured it. My only wish is that I had used a tighter aperture as the image falls out of focus rather quickly in the foreground and background.

A + A

Found on a tree near Mukilteo.

Balloon Festival Setup

Heres an old shot from my files that dates way back to 2005. This was taken during the Tigard Festival of Balloons. One big mistake I made was that I took all my photos using only the .jpg setting in my camera. A HUGE mistake. I should have used RAW or RAW + JPG when taking my images that day. The reason for that is because RAW contains much, much more information about an image you capture, its as close to the digital equivalent of a negative as you can get. Fortunately, technology has caught up with my mistakes of the past and allowed me to create this image. Using specially created software that produces HDR images, I was able to align 3 different images that were exposure bracketed, then I was able to blend them together.

My Favorite Time of the Year


The Cherry Blossoms are out!