fourpointedstar

In my mind, traveling before 1830 would have been absolutely terrifying. In the past 200 years, transportation across country has progressed from walking and horseback to paved roads, trains, and even aircraft. This view upstream near the Vermillion River reminds me of all of those dangers.

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There is something fascinatingly unattractive about this photo. It’s not that humans have ruined a scene – so many beautiful vistas are ruined by power lines, trash, or other remnants of humanity. No, this is just the backwater area of a creek that is very low right now; as you’ll see in a photo later in this series, barely a trickle.

The stone wall is muddy and inaccessible, and the water was murky and dirty. But I still love the location and the reminder that not everything is pretty – and it doesn’t have to be either.

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If you visit the lower area of Matthiessen State Park, you can walk through a naturally carved tunnel on the left side of the canyon to get a unique view of the waterfall and cliff face. While I was standing there, I felt like this was my little hiding place, so I edited this monochrome image to match that feeling.

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I first visited Matthiessen State Park back in 2014 on a day that I photographed 4 of the waterfalls at Starved Rock as well. You can see how sunny it was in quite a few of the photos, but the sunshine made it almost impossible to get a longer exposure of Cascade Falls – that is, until a cloud drifted overhead. The same thing happened throughout the day on this trip to Matthiessen; the clouds drifted overhead allowing for some longer exposures.

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When you go on vacation there are typically photos that you know about before hand, but this photo, I don’t think I could have anticipated even if someone had mentioned it before our trip.
If you stand on the loading platform for the Bainbridge Ferry you can see this one tree that is missing in the treelike along Wing Point. But the windows along the platform are highly reflective; all of them except for the one window that allows you to line up the Space Needle with the empty spot in the treeline.

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This might be my most serendipitous shot from our Seattle trip in October. Sarah and I were walking back to our VRBO that evening; Sarah wanted to look at a chocolate shop, but as we passed Union Street, the moon caught my eye. My feet were tired and I didn’t have my tripod with me, so this was taken with my Sony propped on top of a circular railing over the 3 story drop onto Post Alley. I probably took more than a dozen photos in my attempt to capture the scene; the ferris wheel would stop rotating, someone else would bump the railing, or I wasn’t standing perfectly still … but in the end I captured this 4 second exposure and only later discovered that it included Venus!

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