Last Week-Rain, This Week-Rain, Next Week-Rain

Big Leaf Maple, Mount Baker NF, © Jay Goodrich

We have returned home from the dry side of the Cascades, leaving the sun and beautiful colors of the Painted Hills behind. The weather in the Pacific Northwest is needless to say a little wet. In order to welcome us here, the rainfall average is 68% above normal. I wanted moisture. Always be careful what you wish for, right? That’s great for snow, if it weren’t so warm. And I am not going to ever be tan again. Just call me Chaulky. My wife always says that I need to look at the bright side. Here you go sweetie-I guess I won’t die from skin cancer, unless I already have it. That’s positive right?

Where is this going? If it is going anywhere it would be that the moral of the story is to throw caution to the wind and go out and get wet. Nature is wonderful no matter what the weather is doing, and actually, the forest can be pretty amazing during the rain. That is just what we did upon returning home. We spent a morning shooting in the Mount Baker National Forest in, you guessed it, a rain storm. The Mount Baker Highway possesses some of the easiest accessible forest imagery I have ever seen. This image of a big leaf maple covered in moss was taken using a Singh-Ray LB Warming Polarizer. What this great little filter did was pull all of the sheen off of all of the foliage and the Nooksack River, and then warmed the cool blues being generated from the rainy overcast conditions. I love the texture and forms of the forest along this road.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 1:08 pm. It is filed under news, photography tips and tagged with forest, landscape, maple, trees, Washington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.