Photo Album 1

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Field trips

Olympic Natinal Park 10/14/01
Robt, Caroline and I went on a little field trip through the northern part of the Olympic Peninsula. Alas, it was cloudy and we didn't get to go up Hurricane Ridge. We stopped at the Salmon Cascades and wound our way around on hwy. 101 to get to the Hoh Rainforest. There were a few stops along the way, of course. I think I took about 24 rolls of film in this one trip.

Wildlife tour with Puget Sound Express 10/7/01

The above three pictures of the Cascade mountains were taken at around 7am, Oct. 7, 2001 while we were heading north to Bellingham on I-5. The car was traveling at 60mph, and with the window rolled down, so there's quite a bit of blur. =P We embarked on our trip from Bellingham... For the above pics, my Nikon was at max 300mm zoom and I used the "landscape" preset.

We saw five bald eagles. Two on the rocks (one of which is pictured above) and three in the trees as we were heading back to Friday Harbor -- I ran out of film by then :( To note, we also saw some harbor seals, lots of cormorants, a minke whale (the dorsal fin anyway =P), and a bunch of Japanese deer (and some antelopes?) The middle and right pictures are of the Dall's Porpoises that frolicked around the boat. They were so fast! And with every one of them splashing about, it was hard to figure out where to aim for a quick snapshot. The close-up in the middle was the last shot in a roll of film. Lucky! The one on the right was an awesome shot... you can see the bubbles coming out of the blowhole just under the water surface; and even the tip of the tail is visible under the splash. And because the splash also cast shadows, the body of this 6ft or so mammal showed up pretty clearly. As we were leaving the area of the encounter, the porpoises paced with the boat up to a record speed of 15.8 knots! For the porpoise pics, I had the camera on the preset for Focus Track with the high shutter speed and also on Landscape.