Fort Ebey state park scenic views.

Few days ago on beautiful sunny, but windy day we took a hike in Fort Ebey State park. Air was very clear, and spring grass was bright green. This 645-acre camping state park is located near small town Coupville on Whidbey island, and was originally built as a coastal defense fort in World War II. Here is the map:

A trail goes for a while along a high shore with beautiful views of an ocean.

And if you go there, make sure that you are careful and stay on a trail:

Bright spring flower photo.

While walking in a park today, I took some closeup pictures of different things on a ground - it was fun just to aim on little pieces of moss, grass, flowers. Looking tonight on those photos, I found a nice flower, I am not sure what is the name of it. I played with it a little in photoshop changing a temperature, saturation of the photo to make it more bright and vibrant. I like to manipulate with temperature - it's easier to do it in RAW format. Most of the time I lower temperature until I am satisfied with effect. I can't say for sure how much - every photograph is different. Degree of saturation also depends on a personal taste and quality of the image. It's important to shoot with minimum ISO available on your camera, and working with photos in RAW format. Here the excelent article about it:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/why_use_raw.html

Here is the final flower picture I got. I think it would be a nice note card for any occasion, or a print on the wall.

Halo around the Sun.

It was an interesting atmospheric phenomena in the sky this afternoon - a halo. They were lightly colored ring with reddish inner edge surrounded the Sun, and sky inside looked like a dark cloud, at least darker than sky outside the halo. Usually they are formed by sunlight going through ice-crystal cloud. I took a picture of it, with dish antenna blocking the Sun (I didn't want to burn my camera sensor).

Photographing flame in my backyard.

Yesterday I made a campfire in our backyard, burning old branches, and took a few pictures of it. I wanted to show a flame texture, making a sharp image of it, so I played with trying to get flame in focus. Since it was daylight I could use fast shutter speed 1/125 (with ISO 100) and f/6.3. There are of course lots of other ways of photographing fire and there are different types of fire - single flame of a candle, big bonfire (especially interesting in a dark) and so on. The longer exposure at night time would show beautiful lines of flying sparks. Flame is very interesting subject for photography and I am going to continue making experiments, photographing it.

Psychedelic colorful photography of a drift wood.

This morning I woke up with very bright sort of electric colors images in my mind. Something similar to psychedelic art.  I liked the idea and I started playing with my photos. Here one of the first experiments. And, no, I didn't smoke anything and didn't eat mushrooms.

Photography of nature abstracts.

We went for a walk in a woods near Bellingham, and at the end of our hike came to this small mountain lake with really interesting reflections in it. I took a few photos of it.