Japanese Garden

This past weekend I stopped by the Japanese Garden in Manito Park to check out the fall colors. It was much better than I expected! I will create a link to some of the pictures later on. In the meantime I'm printing some of them as greeting cards for my November show at Arbor Crest, River Park Square location-

Got sidetracked!

I've been working on several photography "projects" as well as the Cle Elum airport during August & September. I will now try to catch up my Blog for the nearly 10 week time gap! In this time, outside of work, I have visited a couple wineries to collect scenic and commercial images, shot some portraits and worked my way through a Photoshop CS3 book. Well, a book focused on a simplified editing system, not a comprehensive, learn-everything-possible book!

The image below is from Hattrup Farms in Yakima, WA. They are not a winery, simply a vineyard growing mainly red varietals and selling all the fruit to wineries in Washington and Oregon. I believe these are Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with the sunset in the background-

Getting caught up in Cle Elum...

OK, finally recovered from the wedding and helping move some of Skye & Sarah's stuff to Auburn. I'm back on track at my inspection job in Cle Elum. Takes a while to get back in the mood! We're finally building the runway base and should have asphalt in place by the end of the month. In the meantime we had some visitors on the site this morning. Just some young bucks checking out the scene...

Skye & Sarah's Wedding!

The final event of a busy summer! Just a quick note here with a couple pictures- I will update this more later. The wedding was held at the Davenport, arranged by Tom & Kim Olson, parents of the bride. It was a wonderful event, too many details to describe at first! A storybook beginning to a wonderful marriage of two young people who are working hard at doing life the right way!

Long hike...

I'm trying to post once a week but I haven't taken interesting photos lately, just a hike that was too long with too little to show for it!

The Cle Elum-Roslyn-Ronald area had a long history of coal mining. You can hike an old railroad bed that was converted into a trail several years ago. It' s interesting due to family history- my maternal grandfather was an electrician in a coal mine. Longer story for another blog! Anyway, if you are in the Cle Elum/Roslyn area this is one way to kill two hours and end up with sore feet! Wear stiff hiking boots or shoes because there is plenty of mid-size gravel in places. My feet were beat up by wearing running shoes.

The 2nd picture here is some old piece of equipment. It's hard to see any evidence of the old mining operations. I'll have to explore more later....

Peaceful moments are easier to find at sunrise, even on a job site. We are starting at 5AM in Cle Elum for now, with the heat wave, so I've been able to enjoy some quiet mornings. Here's a shot of site equipment a little after sunrise. Below that is a farm at the east end of our project (shot late in the day.) I'm using a 16:9 crop ratio in iPhoto when it helps the composition. Gradually, though, I will migrate my workflow of artistic images to Adobe Bridge & Photoshop. For now iPhoto is a good basic program like Picasa when you know only basic editing tools are needed.

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Stuttering start in Cle Elum...

Well, I was in Cle Elum for all of a day and a half when my schedule changed. Along with serious work I did find the trail next to the runway which is useful for daily exercise. It also provides wild flower photo opportunities. Someday I might run into a horse on the trail!

Here's a screen saver of some flower I found. Guess I'll learn the name of it later-