Winter Travel Update

On January 10th I left a very snowy Hood River for what turned into over two months of travel, kiteboarding and producing various projects. One trip blended into another, and before I knew it I had gone from the deep blue waters of the sea of cortez in Mexico to the neon turquoise paradise of Barbuda, deep in the Caribbean.  It was amazing to be able to experience so many different cultures in such a short time, and on top of that pull it off with some amazing friends along the way. Mexico delivered like I always knew it could, I met some of the most genuine people on the planet in St. Lucia,  the boat trip from Antigua opened my eyes to the only way do the caribbean (sailboat) and every time I think about Puerto Rico I want to book the next 4am flight in.

Couple shots from the hill

After getting skunked with rain on the mountain a few days ago, it was awesome to finally get a bluebird day WITH a healthy blanket of blowdryer powder. Apparently everyone else knew today was going to be the day too, so instead of fight with soccer moms and bro’s with mohawks on their beanies in the lift lines, we decided to grab the camera and hike a large portion of Private Reserve. Here’s what we came home with…

Home for the holidays

Here’s a quick photo set from my recent trip home to the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington. When a gap in the cold fronts opened up some blue sky the day after Christmas I thought it’d be a good opportunity to check out two local lighthouses, North Head and Cape Disappointment. No porcupines were harmed in the making of this post.

Preseason Poaching

It’s getting to that special time of year here in the Pacific Northwest when days get shorter, storms get longer and the number of days between seeing the sun turn into weeks and sometimes even months. That time of year when getting out and making something of a bluebird day, especially one in November with snow on the ground, becomes crucial. You just don’t know when the next break in the weather will come, if at all. Yesterday, we had one of those days.

I was wondering if this was fake seeing it in real person, too

After a crazy scenic drive to skibowl, Nick Allen and I met up with Jon Montana and Kevin Schuette and pulled out some corrugated pipe for some filming and an entertaining (read: painful) game of s.n.o.w. Footage should be up in the next few days… definitely some banger crashes in there!!

When we were over the corrugated we spotted a nice little up ramp to chairlift stall on the way back to the cars, which turned out to be a perfect photo setup to close down the session.

Real stoked those water droplets on the lens were in the right places

Grooming the in run and setting the chair

Tyyyaaap

Jon Mon gettin' poppy

Kevin gettin some double bonus land

Setting up the speed

HDR rad-ification

So the other day, after what seemed like an eternity locked up indoors in the editing suite (aka my room) I managed to pick the locks and get outdoors for a bit to shoot some photos. It was a beautiful cloudless fall evening, so I decided to drive up HWY 35, find some logging roads and see if I could find a good vantage point of Mt. Hood. It took me about 20 minutes to find exactly what I was looking for up a winding, undeveloped road just outside Odell, OR.

Since the sun was setting and casting a pretty mean shadow across the North face of the mountain, I figured it’d be a good opportunity to try some High Dynamic Range photography, HDR for short. Read about HDR photography here. HDR allows you to expose every area of a photograph perfectly, regardless of sharp differences in lighting. On the conservative side, HDR creates an image that’s closer to what the human eye actually perceives. However, HDR turned up to 11  can create an image that lies closer to psychedelic illustration than to photography.

I’ve been wanting to try this technique for a very long time but because of lack of proper gear or more recently lack of time, I had not given it a try.

Until now.

Sun sets over the Hood River Valley

5pm, Mt. Hood

Can't wait to retake this after some new snow

It’s crazy how each one came out a bit differently. The process involves several software and setting intensive steps, so I doubt I could reprocess any one of these and make it turn out the same.

I really like how you can walk the fine line between photo and illustration with these images, so I’ll definitely be fine tuning and utilizing HDR a lot more in the future.