Category: Special Places

Another One that Got Away

Since Leslie didn’t have to work Friday, we headed out to Northwest Trek.

It was a beautiful, bright, sunny day and I hoped to get some great shots of the animals but was quite disappointed by the actual shots I ended up with.

Much of the park is set in deep woods, so I had problems with high contrast. I was constantly adjusting the camera’s ISO back and forth between 1600 and 100, but managed to forget to reset it for several shots that might otherwise have been good.

The biggest problem was sunlight filtering down between leaves or between trees. In many of these shots, large areas are pure white, as the camera couldn’t cope with the high contrast. In other shots, of course, some areas are just plain black, with an equal loss of details. I expected much better shots than I actually got.

That said, I would have been ecstatic if had ever managed to get a shot of this wolverine:

or this pack of wolves interacting with each other

in the wild.

Sometimes we just have to let go of our personal expectations and enjoy what he have done rather than bemoaning what we haven’t done.

Good Time for a Trip

Judging from my final trip to Nisqually before my week-long trip to Colorado, I’m leaving at the perfect time. Though I did see a few Great Blue Herons today, I didn’t see many other birds. It appeared that they all had something better to do with their time:

In fact, the highlight of my day was discovering a huge wasp/hornet nest beside the trail, though it seemed more important to get by quickly than to get a real good shot of it:

Of course, as I’ve discovered several times before, you often discover the unexpected when you don’t see the expected:

This moth/butterfly, blended in with the falling leaves so well that I had a very hard time actually focusing the camera,