we hiked. Starting from our camp next to a real, live burbling spring - we hiked 4.7 miles to Penoyer Lake. From there, we hiked another mile, past small sub-alpine lakes and prisine grassland to where the trail, Cowlitz Trail #44, intersected with the Pacific Crest Trail. Sadly, since we only had a day to hike, we had to turn back. I highly recommend this area for hiking. The only thing I'd do different next time is come in from the north side by Bumping Lake (on the big map, it's just right of Twin Sisters Lakes). This way you avoid all the elevation gain and are only .5 miles away from the fun stuff. Also, if you can - please do this as an overnight trip. Shannon and I have every intention of aquiring some good backbacks and doing this overnight later this summer. There is SO many trails past literally hundreds of small lakes that you need a few days to explore.
The Map Really big map (430kb)
While we are at it - does anybody have good tips for forest pictures? All mine tend to have really muddy looking trees. I've bitched about my cameras green response before, but I wonder if it is my camera? There is a lot of contrast in trees, and I am wondering what kinds of tips people have for high quality shots? Should I dump my digital camera for these kinds of trips and go film? (yes) If so, what kind of film?
Wow, that's a hike. I'd love to try that sometime. Were the mosquitoes bad?
Here's some tips for using digital in a highly green/blue world:
- UV filter to cut down on some of the blue.
- Circular polarizer to get better tree shots
- Use a gray card (paint chips work well too) to manually set your camera's white balance.
Film: personally I've found Fuji is much better with blues/greens than Kodak. 100 or 200 ISO are good speeds.I will try all that. I've got the UV filter. THe only circ. polarizer i have is that moose filter, but the tint that makes it worse. A grey card would be a good thing.
And funny you mention mosquitoes. This trail had the WORST fly pop. of ANY trail i've ever hiked on. I'd look back at poor shannon and there would be a literal swarm of flys around her. And they were evil flys that would try to get you. Bring lots of bug spray!
- Spike Lee
Can you provide an example shot you think is closer to what your camera should be capturing? I'm not to clear on what you mean...
All where in now way edited in photoshop for color correction.
- Spike Lee
It looks like the exposure for #1 was tricky, but #2 looks nice- just slightly overexposed. Maybe playing with exposure compensation or a faster shutter speed might help with that.
#3, though, looks like it was corrupted- the top half is bright, the bottom dark. I've had similar happen to me with a bad CF card.. or the file was corrupted during upload.
All three look over-exposed. Can you dial-down the exposure by a half-stop or maybe a third-of-a-stop?