Mt. Rainier wildflowers and fog, Mazama Ridge

Joe Rossbach and I are working hard right now to put the finishing touches on our newest eBook, Five Landscape Challenges 2, which we hope to release next week. This book contains tutorials for five common types of landscape scenes. One of the five tutorials is “Alpine Flowers,” and it contains everything you need to know in order to make great mountain flower photographs. One of the images in the book is featured below. I took this photograph [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 24, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier, Waterfalls |

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Carter Falls, Mt. Rainier National Park

Getting back to my series of Mt. Rainier photos, here’s one of Carter Falls, one of the park’s “smaller” waterfalls. It’s actually a fairly decent-sized falls, but it pales in comparison to the thundering cascades of Comet and Spray Falls. What it lacks in stature, however, it makes up for in adventure—that is, if you want to get to the base of the falls and photograph it from below. Finding the falls is the easy part. [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 21, 2010
Posted in: Dreamscapes, Mt. Rainier |

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Wildflower abstract, Mt. Rainier

As the old saying goes: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. As outdoor photographers, we are often at the mercy of the elements. Actually, we are always at the mercy of the elements. Despite our best efforts to arm ourselves with weather forecasts or to pray to obscure photo gods for benevolence, in the end the weather will do what it wants. All we can do when nasty weather [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 17, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Moonset and Earth’s shadow, Mt. Rainier

Turning back to my Mt. Rainier photo series, the following image was taken on a clear, windy morning. The light over Mt. Rainier was unexceptional, and this, along with persistent winds, made wildflower photography unappealing. While hiking along one of the trails in the Paradise area, I turned to see the full moon setting through the shadow of the Earth. Although I have seen earth shadow many times before, it takes on a [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 12, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Spray Falls, Mt. Rainier National Park

Spray Falls in Mt. Rainier National Park is located on the popular trail to Spray Park, a high alpine meadow filled with ponds and wildflowers. I made two visits to Spray Falls during my recent Mt. Rainier trip, once on a sunny day on my way up to Spray Park, and once on a rainy day a few days later (Spray Park turned out to be past peak for wildflowers but at [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 7, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Mt. Rainier wildflowers on Mazama Ridge

Here’s the latest image in my Mt. Rainier series, a photo I took after about a week in the park. Although I got lucky a few mornings with interesting light, I had a long stretch in the middle of my trip when high pressure, blue sky weather moved in, severely curtailing my photographic opportunities. While most people think of sunny days as being great for nature photography, I argue the opposite. [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 5, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Mt. Adams from Mt. Rainier

Here’s the latest in my Mt. Rainier series. I made this image after scaling Pyramid Peak in the dark for a planned sunrise shoot of Mt. Rainier. I was hoping to catch glorious sunrise light on the great mountain from the rocky crags of Pyramid, but unfortunately, when I got to the top after an hour of hiking, I found the view north towards Rainier to be somewhat unremarkable—no clouds or anything [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 3, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Comet Falls, Mt. Rainier National Park

The third image from my Mt. Rainier series travels to Comet Falls, which plummets 400 feet over a series of drops, including a dizzying free-fall plunge of 320 feet at the top. This popular waterfall is on the trail to Van Trump Park, which is a beautiful high altitude alpine meadow with great views of Mt. Rainier and a carpet of wildflowers in the summer. There are a lot of compositional opportunities [...]

By Ian Plant | Sep 1, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Mt. Rainier Wildflowers

I’m finally back from two weeks of shooting Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington, with a brief side-trip down to Oregon to photograph the Columbia River Gorge. My previous post from Mt. Rainier, as you may recall, squarely fell into the “nothing special” category, as I didn’t dare process any of my good images on my uncalibrated netbook computer. Now that I’m back home, I have begun to process my images on [...]

By Ian Plant | Aug 25, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Greetings from Mt. Rainier!

I’m halfway through my Rainier trip, taking a small break from camping to catch up on some admin stuff and to wait out bad weather. And when I say bad weather, I mean blue sunny skies. Not a cloud in the sky for days—most folks think that’s grand, but for us nature photographers it’s purgatory. I spent most of the first part of my trip working the west side of the park, [...]

By Ian Plant | Aug 17, 2010
Posted in: Mt. Rainier |

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Mt. Rainier here I come!

All right, I know I said I was going to Lake Superior, but a few things came together in the right way for a change, so now I find myself with cheap plane tickets to Spokane (thank you William Shatner—that’s Priceline folks, not Star Trek . . .) and a reservation for a cheap rental car. I hear the flowers are beginning to bloom around the mountain, so I’ll be there [...]