Fairhaven Environmental Photography

  I chose these three photos to capture the beautiful water scenery in Bellingham. I enjoy photographing water, whether pictures of the waves washing up on shore or shots of the beach that capture the sky in the background. This field trip took place at Clayton Beach where the water was shallow and washed up on the shore in small waves. As mentioned in the Kruckerberg reading, tidal heights in Puget Sound can vary. Typically, the waves can reach up to two feet, but this will depend on weather conditions. My photos captured the rainy and cold vibe of the Pacific Northwest using a lower ISO.

We woke up and started our day—me and my dog. She needed a good walk, and I needed to do my homework. So we decided to go down to the Skagit River in Mount Vernon. We started at the local park, looking over to the barn and the other side of the river, trying to get a good photo. We walked around, and I took tons of photos, only a few stood out to me. Then my dog and I decided to walk to the other side of the river to get some photos from different angles. While we were walking to the other side, we crossed the bridge. On the bridge, I took a photo I was really impressed with. It was a beautiful bridge with the river and the coastline in the background. The water was moving slowly down the stream, looking so peaceful. I loved the background of buildings, houses, and barns. The bridge itself looked like it had been there for years.  

  I went to Glass Beach to get my photos. I started taking photos of the water but I couldn’t get anything good or interesting until a bird flew up next to me, and stood next to me looking out into the distance like he was waiting for me to take a photo of him. So I decided to take my photos of the bird near the water and in the water so I still was able to keep the theme of water. The first photo I took was just of the bird looking into the distance. I was far away and zoomed in a lot and then slowly I walked toward him so he didn’t move and was able to get pretty close and on my knees to get on his level. I think in that photo I was about 10 ft away from him and then zoomed in enough to be able to clearly focus on him and get some detail of his feathers.  The second photo I got was the bird in the water. After about 5 minutes of him standing and posing for me he went into the water and floated around for a few mins before flying off. This photo was really cool to capture bec...

  1:37 p.m. 3:22 p.m. 5:03 p.m. 7:22 p.m. Boulevard Park in Bellingham, Washington. While I was unable to record the specific camera settings, I can describe my approach to adjusting settings based on the lighting conditions.  At 1:37 PM, the early afternoon sun was still relatively high, casting bright but slightly diffused light due to winter’s lower sun angle. The light was cool and crisp, illuminating the water and trees with stark contrasts. I would have used a lower ISO (around 100-200) to reduce noise since natural light was abundant, paired with a mid-range aperture (f/8-f/11) to capture sharp details in both the foreground and background. By 3:22 PM, the sun had lowered slightly, creating longer shadows and a softer glow on the landscape. The golden hues began to emerge subtly, but the daylight still allowed for a balanced exposure without needing to drastically change the settings. I likely would have adjusted the white balance to maintain natural tones and slightly ...

  So I kind of cheated and did 2 things but I wanted to see how each one would look at different stages of the day. They were both close to each other, one further up closer to the sun, the other lower down.   The first picture I took was at 11am, the sun was blinding and it was hard to adjust the exposure so that the picture was not over exposed, after fiddling around with it for a while I got a result I was happy about. The next time was at 1pm this was far more mellower with shadows starting to come in, I had a much easier time adjusting the light balance to get the shot, you can see shadows creeping down on the bush and the tree. At 3pm it was getting darker still, more shadows and the wind was getting a bit nippy, you can see it had gone from sunny to overcast. At 5pm it began to get dark as I waddled out to take my next picture, breath hanging from my mouth icily. While in the beginning I had struggled to take a picture due to too much light I was beginning to struggle d...

 

{ 7:41am, ISO400, Shutter Speed 1/10, F16 }  { 9:17am, ISO400, Shutter Speed 1/100, F7.1 } { 11:20am, ISO400, Shutter Speed 1/1600, F5.0 } { 4:20pm, ISO400, Shutter Speed 1/2000, F4.0 } I struggled to find an area I was able to photograph over different periods of time. I tried photographing a tree outside my apartment but only got one good photo. Then I decided to go to Boulevard hoping to get some pretty shots of the water. Unfortunately, I was not able to stay there long enough to get all four photos. I ended up photographing an area outside of my job, featuring the Carver building. I like this path as the contrast between buildings is dimly lit as students walk to class. I wanted to use the light bouncing off the windows as an element while my shots were focusing on the tree. As the weather has gotten colder, the trees have lost their leaves and frosted over. It allows me to question what this photo would look like in the spring once the leaves have grown or in the fall when th...

 My subject for this assignment was this collection of potted plants in my parking lot. Ive had this pot for a while now, and I kinda put planted random seeds I find in it and see what grows. I normally don't even bother watering it and just let it gather natural rain water and moisture. Surprisingly, the plants have managed to hold up over the test of time, however a few of them are very dead. The challenge I had with this photo shoot was the rapidly changing light levels and shadow length. To try and combat this issue, I played around with exposure level to try and capture the most amount of light available. Luckily, the camera I borrowed from ATUS had a light setting similar to what we used at Sutter's pond and Lake Watcom. That setting was able to help deal with the ever changing light levels. I unfortunately did not give myself enough time to fully take a photo once the sun had set, however I look forward to the challenge. Getting a chance to shoot during the winter time p...

                                                                                11:20am                                                                                                     2:00pm                                             4:30pm 7:00pm I decided to take a photo of my back porch. I took the first one around 11:20 ...

  The first thing of note is that I struggled with the settings of the camera I was using. Although I feel like I have a fairly good novice-level grasp of aperture, ISP, and shutter speed, I don’t feel like the camera I have been borrowing from ATUS is all that good at navigating through them. The dial used to adjust all of the settings, for example, is super sensitive. So, I can only rotate it a click or two before the button feature of the dial depresses and alters the settings in some way that I don’t want to do. In short, I plan on trying a slightly better camera once I return from Alaska. The stairs being reclaimed by nature in my photos are just down the hill from my apartment building. From the bottom of the stairs, once can see the glow of some sort of street lamp just beyond the top steps, but the actual source is not terribly obvious. My daughter and I lived in the same apartment building when she was about 4-years-old, and we called them the Narnia stairs and talked ...

         On Saturday, January 25th, I went out four times throughout the day to take pictures of the nature around my apartment. At first, I struggled to decide what I wanted to photograph, but I ended up finding a bush across the street with some beautiful juniper berries on it. Growing up I was very close with a girl I babysat who was named Juniper, so this was very meaningful for me to find out they were juniper berries. I did some research and found out that while most people forage for juniper berries in the fall and summer, they can be foraged year-round in order to obtain the “winter taste”. In connection to the winter natural history, I noticed how quickly the light faded throughout the day. I took my first picture around 12 pm, when the light was so bright it was almost challenging to fully focus the picture on the berries. When I took my second picture at two, the light was almost glowing and brought the color of the bush and the berries out so beautif...

(5:22 pm- 1/80, f13, ISO 2000) This was the last picture I had taken to cap off the day. The sunset was in the opposite direction but was still beautiful in this frame. Winter sunsets are superior- the sky is more pink due to the colder, drier weather, which restricts light to spread through the sky, creating these beautiful results.  This was the hardest picture to take because of how dark it was. I brought the ISO high, but the lowest I could without hitting its limit, and brought down the shutter speed down to 1/80, to try and bring in                                                            more light to the frame. By the end of the day, I feel like my skills on                                                ...