About the subjects

Over the last few years I’ve photographed in a number of regional areas including forest lands by Mt. Rainier, the Rainier valley, Seattle, and the Coast. Each area offers many unique rewards. Following is a brief summary of some of the image types.

Wilderness and Forest Lands

There are endless spectacular scenes around Mt. Rainier and capturing and reproducing selected moments from my many excursions has been a great pleasure.

There is said to be an Elk population of about 600 around Mt Rainier. Elk are remarkable creatures. They live in a challenging environment yet show a poise and strength that all admire. I've had the great fortune to observe groups of elk over a fairly long time span. Some of this collection illustrates their home and habitat end especially their dominant sense of family.

Elk have an obvious and very strong sense of kinship. They are territorial yet have a vast territory. Much of their time is devoted to insuring the safety of the group. Young elk play an interesting and dominant role within the family. They will often decide much of where the group spends it’s time. When a young elk decides it’s time to climb to a distant peak or lay down and take a nap, most of the others will do the same. Adults always stand guard. Clearly the older elk love to follow the young ones yet watch out for them. They like to see the world through their children’s eyes, just like we do! The elk’s sense of family and strength in groups helps to insures their survival in one of the most ruggedly beautiful places on our planet.

Farmscapes

There are a number of breathtaking farm lands to be found in the area. I've captured delightful images samplings of several farms during different seasons, to illustrate the awesome beauty that the area proudly offers.

CityScapes

Seattle has remarkable vistas that combine city, water and expansive views. I've captured some of these in innovative ways reproduced them as dramatic, high resolution panoramic images that show many of the faces and moods of Seattle.

Ocean and Water-Scapes

Panoramic images are the perfect format for capturing waterways to produce results that simply wasn't practical in the past. The results are beautiful and highly unique. My ever growing collection of captured scenes by water are amongst my favorites, and they are often the most challenging to produce.

Panoramic Images

Panoramic photos are a recent addition to my art. I really enjoy what this addition has permits me to achieve. Panoramic photography takes the art of photography to the next level. While a traditional work captures an image, panoramic photos capture a scene and enables a view that is closer to the way the eye sees things. Panoramic imagery is one of the best fruits of the digital age!

Panoramic images are far more complex to compose and print than traditional single shot photography. My panoramas or “panos” as they’re sometimes called, typically employ between 3 and 20 or more images that are digitally assembled by a process that’s called “stitching.” Due to this process, the images can be a lot bigger than a typical single image, are always a lot higher resolution. The aspect ratio is different than single image photography. On my web site, panoramic images often look much wider than they are tall, but when seen at full scale they are up to about 2 feet tall and up to about 6 feet wide.

With traditional single image photography, if the photographer wanted to capture a broad vista, the only choice was to use a wide angle lens and crop photo so that only the center portion remained. Then the center part would be enlarged. The end result was often an over-enlarged fuzzy image that suffered due to lack of fine detail.

In contrast to traditional photography, with panoramic photography, the images have substantially greater detail. Lets say that a typical single frame image is roughly 10 mega pixels in size. When a series of images is stitched together, the resulting images may be between 30 and over 200 megapixels. The end result is an extremely high resolution image that often appears to be something between a traditional photo and a surreal or super-real high detail painting. Combine a stitched image and a smaller reproduction and the work takes on a stunningly unique character that you have to see to fully appreciate.

To precisely reproduce these on a web site would require that the images are too big to be practical. They would take a long time to download and even with two big monitors side by side you would only begin to get a sense of the detail these actually have. To keep the image download times tolerable, I display the panoramic images as a little bigger than the others. Usually they are about 1200 pixels long by their corresponding height.

I hope you enjoy the opportunity to explore my work.