Tag Archives: Washington

Taking a Short Break

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If all goes according to the plan, I’ll be on my way to Buenos Aires this evening, the first leg of a journey to Antarctica.  I expect to be totally disconnected from the Internet for the next 20 days, which means tI won’t be posting anything  or visiting the sites of fellow bloggers during that time.  Also, I won’t be able to reply to any comments until I get back.  Hopefully, I’ll have something interesting to share when I return.  In the meantime, here are few images to put us all in the mood for the cold weather.

Canada 01

Sunrise, Vermilion Lakes, Canada

Canada 02Fresh Snow, Banff, Canada

Mount Rainier

Clearing Storm, Mount Rainier

Crater Lake 01

Morning Light, Crater Lake

4th of July Waterworks!

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One of the less well known benefits of living in the Washington, DC area is that it has some of the best whitewater action in the world. For those who are skeptical, here is a link to an article in today’s Washington Post. And the most difficult stretch of that action is the Great Falls of the Potomac which happens to be about 3 miles from my home. I’ve been following the action for seven years now and it is always exciting. It’s pretty cool to go to an Olympic level competition, get a prime viewing spot, and not pay a dime. So that’s where I was yesterday, photographing the boaters as they practiced for a competition that was held today. Here are a few shots from the practice session.

Kayak Kent Blog 01
The water level was perfect for the center line which is perfectly located for viewing from two of the overlooks in Great Falls National Park on the Virginia side and pretty good viewing from the overlook from the Park on the Maryland side. It is also a dangerous route over the falls. A competitor was killed last year when she made an error during a practice run causing the event to be canceled. It should be noted, however, that this was an extremely rare incident; these participants are all highly skilled and numerous rescue capabilities are in position for these events. The image above was taken from the water level not normally accessible to non-boaters. I was about 100 meters from the falls. (Technical data (Nikon D800E handheld with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens extended to 200mm; Exposure was 1/200th sec. @ f/8, ISO 400)

Kayak Kent Blog 02
This is a tight crop from the same image, so it shows the value of having an extremely sharp lens. The competition is a timed course so each competitor has to negotiate a series of cascades, finishing with this 20-foot (plus) drop and then making a sprint a short distance to a finish line (out of sight to the left). There are two runs and the boater in each class with the lowest cumulative time is the winner.

Kayak Kent Blog 03
This was taken from Overlook 2 in Great Falls National Park (Virginia side). It is about the same distance from the drop as the location down at water level. I went back this morning for the actual competition and used an old Nikon 80-400mm zoom lens. It’s been a while since I have used it, since that extra three pounds is no fun to carry in one’s back-pack. But it seemed this would be a good comparison test on sharpness. Because of its weight, I used a tripod. And as it turned out, the images taken with the 70-200 model at maximum extension are sharper than those of the 80-400 at its maximum length. This despite the fact that the images from the 70-200 have to be enlarged twice as much to match the size of objects in images from the bigger lens.
But I digress. This is a post about kayaks and the Great Falls of the Potomac. So let’s wrap it up with two images taken two years ago during another practice day.

Kayak Kent Blog 04
As noted above, the water level of the Potomac River dictates where the race will be run. The difference can be quite small. For example, the center line (first three images) is used when the water measures between 3.3-3.8 feet at a specified measuring location. That is a range of about 6 inches. There are three other routes, depending on the level measured on race day. This image was taken from Overlook 1 on the Virginia side of the park. It is an amazingly exciting viewpoint because spectators are less than 100 feet from the boater when she/he goes over. Unfortunately, there is very little room there and for a photographer with a tripod, there is literally only one optimal spot. And the Spout cannot be seen at all from any of the other overlooks. But I got lucky and saw a few boaters practicing when the water levels called for this route. Same camera-lens combination as above, exposure was 1/1,000th sec. @ f/5. This is a fairly tight crop, mainly because there was a lot of uninteresting foreground in the frame.

Kayak Kent Blog 05
But there were two other boaters practicing together and the image above is a full frame shot with the lens extended only to 100mm. It’s hard to see here, but when this image is printed large you can see the big smile on the face of the paddler waiting for his friend to complete the drop.

June 28, 2014

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Thanks to the post of a fellow blogger, I was reminded that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of what seemed a minor event but was the spark that led to the outbreak of the Great War, now known as World War I.  My grandfather, whom I never met, served in WW I.  So I decided yesterday was an appropriate occasion to do something I had been postponing for too long: to photograph the DC War Memorial which was erected to honor the 499 citizens of Washington, DC who lost their lives in the war.

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Sunset, June 28, 2014

I want to acknowledge the post by the DC Bike Blogger (see it here), a highly informative source about the District of Columbia.  I thought I knew my way around this city until I bumped into his blog several months ago.

The DC War Memorial is not well known, but is conveniently located on the National Mall along Independence Avenue directly across from the Martin Luther King Memorial.  It is especially attractive at twilight.  A simple lighting system illuminates the interior and seems to be timed to come on about 15 minutes before sunset.

The photograph is a single shot, using a Nikon D800E on a tripod with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 26mm.  The exposure was 1.6 sec. @ f/16 EV = -1.0, ISO 400.  Adjustments were made in Adobe Camera RAW to reduce the highlights (-53), open up the shadows (+56), and add some clarity (+20) plus a little vibrance (+12).  A minor curves adjustment was made in Photoshop CC to lighten the exterior of the dome just a bit.

The Washington Monument: Opening Soon!

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The Washington Monument is the iconic structure of the city of Washington DC and I have been photographing it since 1999 when I first got serious about photography.  Yet despite the numerous images I’ve made of it in the 15 years since then, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I never made it to the top during that time.  But even though I do have a few excuses—such as an earthquake—it serves no purpose to bore you with a recitation of them.  Instead, I have seen the error of my ways and I fully intend to be up there as soon as possible when it re-opens next month.  Details about the re-opening are below, but first a few highlights from the past 15 years are in order, not necessarily in a chronological order.

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Continue reading →

Yet Another Cherry Blossom Report

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I returned to the Tidal Basin yesterday afternoon to check on the progress of the Cherry Blossoms.  The marching battalions of pre-scheduled tours are now in full swing, the tour buses that brought them here are jostling for parking spots, and the weather is balmy.  But the trees have other ideas.  And the absence of photographers with tripods confirmed what I expected:  “Still too soon.”  But the trip wasn’t a total loss, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

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So here is an image showing the status of the cherry blossoms.  The buds in the foreground–like all the others on the nearby trees–are still quite tight, or at least they were as of about 7:15 PM last night. I guess it will be sometime this weekend before any blossoms actually emerge.  The official Festival prediction for peak blooming to appear is still April 8th and I see no reason to dispute that.  (Technical data: Nikon D800E, 24-70 mm lens set at  55 mm, no tripod: 1/50th sec. @ f/18, ISO 1600)

Still, you never want to come away without any images, so I worked on a panorama composition as the twilight blue after sunset began to intensify.  This was taken about 20 minutes after sunset.  It could be a great composition to use  when the blossoms hit their peak, but I suspect that the walkway will be cluttered with fellow photographers. (Technical data: Nikon D800E, 24-70 mm lens set at  35 mm, using tripod, 3 images shot with aperture priority set @ f/16, shutter ranged from 6-10 secs.; ISO 400)

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As a side note, you can see the dark forms of protective netting around the trunks of the trees.  I assume this is intended to frustrate any beavers that might want to use the trees for gnawing practice.  There is at least one of them there; it swam within two meters of me, but submerged immediately when I began to swing my camera in its direction.  Curses!  Foiled again.

 Aside from the brief excitement of a close encounter with a beaver, the trip downtown also enabled me to check the status of some repair work projects on the mall.  As indicated in the panorama image, the removal of the scaffolding on the Washington Monument is now below the tree line.  There is still about 10 meters to go, but I am hopeful that the scaffolding and the construction fence will be removed in time for the Lunar Eclipse on April 15. There is more good news: The World War II Memorial fountains are now up and running at full power and the lighting is also operating.   A closer inspection will be needed to see whether the repairs on the west side of the Memorial are finished.

 So stay tuned for the next episode of the exciting mystery:  “Are they out yet?”

Lunar Eclipse

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While we are all waiting for the Cherry Blossoms to open up, it’s not too soon to think about April 15th which, besides being the last day for filing taxes, is the date of the next total Lunar Eclipse that will be visible in Washington, DC. These are pretty rare events and, in fact, the next opportunity won’t come until 28 September 2015.

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That’s the good news.  The bad news?  Full totality starts at 3:08 AM and lasts until 4:23 AM.   Not enough bad news?  Here’s more: A lunar eclipse is hard to photograph.  One reason is that at the climactic moment of totality, the moon is in deep shadow.

If you have never attempted to photograph a lunar eclipse, you will want to check out this website which goes into extreme detail but speaks the language of photography.  There are two basic ways to photograph a lunar eclipse, either with a single image as shown in my two examples here, or tracking the passage of the moon through the eclipse using multiple exposures.   One example of the latter technique, which I have not yet tried, can be found at this post by Sean Bagshaw.

The above image was photographed on November 8, 2003.  The only other photographer there was from the Washington Post and an image quite similar to this (with his byline) appeared on the front page the next day.  I was still shooting with film back then and, as usual, I was using Ektachrome 100VS transparency film and a Nikon F-100 camera.  I was using my 70-200 mm zoom lens and I would guess that it was set for 200 mm.  The only other thing I remember is how cold it was.  This image shows one of the problems with a lunar eclipse; the illuminated portion of the moon (the part not yet in the earth’s shadow) is about 8 stops brighter than the portion in the shadow.

The image below was taken on December 21, 2010.  I really didn’t want to miss this one because it was happening on the night of the winter solstice, and there would not be another chance on the solstice for several hundred years.  And if I thought it was cold  on November 8, it turns out I was wrong.  This night  was really, really cold–something like ten degrees.  By now I was shooting digital, a Nikon D700.  The lens was a Nikon 28-300 zoom extended to the full 300 mm.

The image is actually a photomerge of two images.  The first included only the top half of Washington Monument  without the moon. The exposure was 0.8 secs at f/5.6 at ISO 400. The second image included just the cap of the Monument plus the moon above. The exposure was identical except that the shutter was open for 1.3 secs.   The two images were merged and then some of the lower portion of the Monument was cropped out.   The total eclipse phase was still a few minutes away, so the illumination was in better balance than in the November 8 2003 image.

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Cherry Blossoms–Not Yet!

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Like most local photographers, I am eagerly awaiting the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin and elsewhere in the city.   Unable to contain my enthusiasm any longer I drove down this morning to check things out.

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Already forewarned by Mitch Zeissler’s blog post yesterday, I did not expect to find any blooms but I did want to see what new parking restrictions the festival authorities had dreamed up.  As the image above shows, there was a mystical fog hanging over the Tidal Basin and the trees are still a long way from their peak performance.  Here is another view with a composition that might be worth going after in a week or so, no matter what the weather is.

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In the right conditions, fog can add a unique dimension to a photograph.  The image below was taken on March 22, 2012.  The blossoms were very early that year.  The fog in this image was not as  dense as this morning, but the effect with the Jefferson Memorial is quite different that would have been the case on a sunny morning.  A large version of this image is hanging in a conference room of a building on Pennsylvania Avenue (no, not that building).   Technical data: Shot at 1/125th sec. @ f/16, ISO 400; 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom lens set at 24 mm.  I was quite close to the tree so this is a Photomerge of six separate images in Photoshop.

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The Festival authorities have imposed the usual parking restrictions around the Tidal Basin.  Ohio Drive is closed to southbound traffic and parking there is restricted to tour buses and vehicles with handicap permits.  The small lot adjacent to the paddle boats concession is closed and is filled with media and commercial partners in tents of varying sizes and shapes. The tents will detract from images you may want to shoot from the Jefferson Memorial side toward the Washington Monument.  People in other categories, however, will no doubt appreciate the health benefits of the long walks from the special parking areas set up on Haines Point.  Just follow the pink signs if you drive. In truth, driving is a bad idea when the blossoms approach their peak unless you plan to arrive before sunrise.   Take the Metro instead.

I’ll be updating the cherry blossom status with new posts in the coming days, but I would also recommend that readers check out the blog post by Mitch mentioned above; he has links to several live webcams that show the current conditions the Tidal Basin and the Mall.