So this is just a quick wrap-up post to the Pacific Northwest Photo Trip series. As you all know by now, I have been fortunate enough to be chosen as one of 50 Samsung Imageloggers, essentially, a brand ambassador for Samsung’s line of mirrorless camera systems. And as you know by now, this is the first trip in which I battled with myself beforehand on whether or not to bring the DSLR I’m so used to and that has been the crux of my work for several years. And, well, I was pushed by my peers to challenge myself…so I did.
Today is the day that the first part of this trip ends and the second part begins, and it switches gears a bit. While the connection to Mother Earth has been the primary focus for the past 7 days, the next several days focus on the connection to the beauty of the human emotion. If you follow me on Google+ or Facebook, you might recall a post about a month or so ago about a close friend - one of the strongest, purest, most beautiful warrior souls I’ve ever known was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She rushed into surgery soon thereafter and she began chemotherapy the very week we were up in Pacific Northwest. Seeing as how she was with her family just across the state in Spokane, Washington to begin her battle with the ‘big evil,' I jumped on the opportunity to take the 7-hour Amtrak journey from Portland to spend a few days with her
For the final couple of days, we returned to some of the same general areas we were at the first couple of days. This time it was raining fairly heavily and didn’t let up, so we took this opportunity to actually capture scenes with the pitter patter of the rain hitting the leaves of the trees on it’s way down, the drops dancing on the miniature tide pools and ponds surrounding the river. After a few hours playing around on the riverbank bordering Lucia Falls, we decided to head across that bridge you saw in the second post in this series near Moulton Falls, and we got on the other side of the river, which ended up just being another magical playground of various floras and faunas flanked by a grove of douglas firs.
So we decided that day 4 was going to be our "takin’ it ‘easy for all them sinners” day (extra points if you get that reference…). After charging it pretty hard the past 3 days from sunup to well past sundown, we were understandable a bit groggy this morning so decided to sort of ease ourselves into the day and let the day play out on its own, especially since we had already got more footage than we expected in the can. We decided to play it close to home and started off by heading into the Forest Hills Park that spoons the city of Portland from the west side.
The second complete day of this thing was a bit of a lesson in just going with the flow and seeing where it takes you, even if it means thwarting your original vision and plans, especially when conditions that are beyond your control dictate those decisions.
So this was the first full day of this thing, and the weather forecast told us it was going to be 100% chance of rain. Not exactly what we wanted to hear, but, well, that part of things we can’t control. We headed out to our first location anyway to see what would happen, and the fact that it was hailing and there was ice induced accidents on the side of the road were not encouraging signs. However, once we turned off the main highway onto Lucia Falls Road towards Moulton Falls, our first destination, divine intervention stepped in and it started to clear up. Literally, the clouds parted, and the sun began to shine.
