Uploads from Jeff Engelhardt

I dare anyone to try to take a bad shot from here

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 07:58:44 -0700

I almost managed to do it though. Not the most flattering light, but it doesn't seem to matter with Mt. Everest (upper left) and Lhotse (upper right, 4th highest peak in the world) providing a backdrop for the memorial stupa of Tenzing Norgay (and to get it out of the way before Clay says it - yes, this is a stupa photo). It was nearly a year ago I was standing here. Boy how time flies.

A slightly smaller, drier mountain

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 08:45:37 -0800

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Here's the rest of the series from my all-nighter in Death Valley back in September. The above shot and all of the outtakes below, save for the first two, were shot by moonlight.

It's kind of a fun "bucket list" check off that I can say I've been to the highest (we were within sight of Everest, and our highest camp was higher than Everest base camp) and almost the lowest (at -282ft, Death Valley is the lowest in North America . . something like 5th lowest worldwide) points in the world. Death Valley also achieved the rank of hottest this year. Trust me, the coldest (Antarctica) is on my list. It'll take some saving up.

Above, you can see my shadow in the lower left. This is the backside of the "Big Dune" in Mesquite Flats, around 4am when the full moon was getting pretty low in the sky.

Wandering the desert by moonlight is an absolutely surreal experience, and I highly recommend it. It always amazes me that these "extreme" environments (including the mountains from the last post) always seem to be the quietest, most peaceful places I get to visit.

Thyangmoche

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 08:54:29 -0800

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Thanks to everyone for the great feedback on my last post. I had been intending in posting a little more often . . but since I haven't, I tried to include a bunch in the outtakes below. Above is from one of the most enjoyable parts of the trip for me.

We'd crossed a 19,000 foot pass and I'd ended up with a little altitude sickness, set up a partial camp in a blizzard, and spent a miserable night cramped with too-many-to-a-tent and on a severe slope, then descended 6000 feet to this place . . .

. . . and when we arrived it was flat, warm, and sunny. With a few clouds blowing in and some fog on the foothills, I got a cup of tea, took off my boots and planted my ass on the ground with the tripod in front of me and spent an hour shooting roughly 10-30 second long exposures to catch the moisture moving around the ~20,000 foot Thyangmoche.

The perspective on this still seems so unusual to me, because we literally felt like we had to look straight up at the peak - it towered above us - but somehow at 17mm on a full frame it makes it seem far away. Some things you just can't capture with a camera.

The Rolwaling

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:49:10 -0800

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Hello flickr . . . wow, this makes 2 for 2012. One of the many things this year that's kept me away from the computer was an April trip to Nepal. It was quite an adventure, which perhaps I'll get into a little more over a few more posts - because it was a photographic goldmine.

We did not do just any standard trek either, no simple Everest Base Camp one for us. We trekked the Rolwaling Valley - a more remote area visited by very few, and with some much higher elevations (19K feet) and technical work than the base camp treks. Along the way I met this villager (though I didn't get his name) carrying firewood to the town of Beding. I think he liked getting his picture taken, because we later saw his picture in a published guide book!

Moonshine

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:38:20 -0800

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Hello flickr, it's been some time. I have, on occasion, swung back around flickr and seen a few familiar names posting. People I miss. Someone hassled me to post, and there's little I respond to as quickly as peer pressure.

And it's not like I haven't been shooting. Hardly a day has gone by in the past year where a camera wasn't in my hand. So I may have a few things to share.

The above shot is me, with my rented Chevy Malibu, at about 3am on California Hwy 190 . . . right in the middle of Death Valley. I love the desert; I love road trips; and lately I've really fallen in love with shooting the moon.

Happy Holidays

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:33:59 -0800

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Hello flickr, it's been a long time. I hope you've been well. I may start posting occasionally again, we'll see. The best thing - by far - about this site is the people I've met. Last night I got out shooting with a couple guys I've wanted to meet for a long time - Jeff Eickhoff and Nicolas Bouvier. Both really talented guys whose work I've admired for a long time, and it turns out they're wonderful people to shoot with as well.

I didn't end up getting anything great last night, so the main shot above is from a few days before Christmas at Westlake Center - a wealth of people watching. The above, and some of the below, were shot with my new 135mm f/2 - a wonderful, wonderful lens (at least on a full frame camera).

Looking forward to getting back to some of ya'lls photostreams that I've missed lately - Lee, Lance, Clay, etc . . and hope you all have a wonderful holiday.

Sol Duc

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:57:20 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

This has been a long time in coming. I grew up with a poster of this falls (albeit from a different angle) on my wall. I *finally* made it out there this weekend . . way out on the Olympic Peninsula, not far from that little place where the Twilight novels & movies took place (Forks, WA).

Thanks to Lance for tips on where to go/what to do. An Olympics expert, he is.

Is anyone still on flickr? Or have they all migrated to 500px?

Vast Amounts of Not Beautiful

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:40:03 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

One of the things that really surprised me about the drive, all the way from Vancouver, BC area to Anchorage is that a significant majority of it is . . . worthless. There are hundreds upon hundreds of miles of low rolling hills of wet tundra or "muskeg." It's not arctic tundra, which is at least "interesting" in that it is often very pretty (great for macro shots), vast, or at least walkable so you can get out and hike a little.

It's not that kind of tundra I'm talking about. Muskeg is mushy, sometimes wet, but very soft - so much so that it can barely hold up trees (even small ones). The only trees that grow out of it are black or white spruce - trees that even when they're 100 years old are often only 5-10 feet high and never more than a few inches wide. This is why I'd recommend most people *fly* up and then only drive to the good places.

Road Trippin'

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:46:00 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Hello everyone! I got back from Alaska almost 5 days ago now and I'm just getting back to flickr. Had a number of things to get sorted out and quite a few pictures to go through. The road trip was wonderful, but unfortunately the photography wasn't. Put simply, though the golden "hour" in Alaska in June is wonderful (it goes from about 10pm - 6am) it's pretty hard to hit when you're driving for 12 or more hours a day and your place to rest is more than an hour away from any of your shooting spots.

So - between that and the incessant cloudiness of a few days - I didn't come out with a lot of real winners, but I did learn a lot for a return trip (and have tons of recommendations for anyone who wants to go up). I tend to like just being on the road, my companion was one of my best friends (my dad), and the country - despite the light not lending to favorable pictures - was beautiful, so I consider the trip a success.

The above shot was done with a (rented) 14mm sigma (on full frame) held above the car as we sped down the highway. I initially did it just as an experiment, but then when I saw the reflection in the windshield, I ended up taking about 50 of these shots trying to get just the right one.

A Good Day

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:10:18 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

What more is there to say? Cape Kiwanda is one of my very favorite places in the world: I grew up going there, proposed to my wife there, and have been going there about once per year since I grew up (though it's always been at least 5 hours away). For the first time since I've really gotten into photography, I finally hit it at good "photographic" weather . . the right clouds, the right tide, and I had time to shoot. Had a good time out with Darren White and we finally got a chance to share a few beers at the Pelican Pub.

Will be mostly offline for a while, as I'm getting ready to leave for a week in Canada and Alaska on Saturday . . will have more pictures than I know what to do with. Thanks for stopping by!

Benchwarmer

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Fri, 27 May 2011 08:21:33 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Yes, there is in fact a person out there sitting on that bench. I thought that would show up really cool in the photo. Nope. I think I need to reshoot this, but staged - with a person standing out there on the dock . . and maybe me and the tripod elevated somehow. Still, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Hope everyone has a wonderful memorial day weekend. We're headed down to the Oregon Coast, despite the predictions of constant rain. If nothing else, there's a great brewpub (or five) and there's always one way or another to make the coast work.

The tilt-shift, low-tide blues.

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Tue, 24 May 2011 09:29:16 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

What's great about my current location is I'm close enough to this location to head out from work and hit it during lunch time. Conveniently, that's when the super-low tides hit as well - this one being a -3.2 foot tide, which is as low as I've ever seen it.

These pilings are shot constantly by northwest photographers and are the subject of my most-viewed picture on flickr, but I've rarely seen someone try this angle, which is about 15 to 20 feet lower than the normal vantage point. Hopefully it's a little interesting and different spin on a common subject.

Ruston Way

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Fri, 20 May 2011 08:33:37 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

So strange when you find stuff practically in your back yard that you'd had no idea was there. Ruston Way is a drive just north of downtown Tacoma that used to be a thriving lumber-trade area, with mills and shipping piers and all kinds of industry built out onto the water. As the timber industry declined in the area, it became quite a desolate, hazardous site with polluted water and crumbling buildings.

Now, fortunately they've revitalized and cleaned the area, put in restaurants and have a nice little park along most of the waterfront - but just a few feet out in the water they left many remains of the old industrial buildings. It's a photographer's playground . . . and I never knew about it until a week ago. I've been down twice since then. Any photographer visiting the Seattle area really should make this trip.

The bottom two outtakes are from a more 'standard' location down by Alki in West Seattle. One at very low tide (pilings) and an I-don't-know-if-it-works long exposure of a sailboat rocking in the waves.

Beauty & the Beast

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Thu, 12 May 2011 08:25:49 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

These boots were made for sloshin'
and sloshin's what they'll do
If you don't stand back
You'll get wa-ter all o-ver you

Finally got some puddle stomping in, for the first time this year. It's amazing what happens when Elena sees a puddle. It's like some sort of blood lust, like "water, I will CRUSH you!" as can be seen from the below outtakes. Some of you may remember last year's child-versus-water incident (in retrospect, the 2nd outtake from that one should have been the main shot).

The differences in mood are amazing too. The left picture above is just from two days ago, as she was trying on her recital costume. I had to do the diptych, the contrast was just so good. As you can see from the outtakes though, it was hard to pick just one main water shot.

Otherworld

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Tue, 10 May 2011 11:24:22 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

This is from my trip to the Salton Sea with Kevin late last year, one I've been meaning to post for a while. This is a good explanation for why I posted all those architecture shots in the outtakes yesterday - because otherwise I'd probably never get around to posting them. Below are a few other random outtakes from the last couple months, just for some variety.

I'd like to take a moment aside to talk about how much I love Target. Yesterday I was in there to pick up safety pins (for Elena's ballet recital costume) and really had no idea where to look, so I asked a young guy who worked there. He walked me over to office supplies and handed me a carton of paper clips.

I said, "these are paper clips, not safety pins."

"Oh, you mean these then?" he asked, handing me a box of binder clips.

"No, those are binder clips. I want safety pins. You know, a pin with a point and it has a round thing that covers the point?" Seriously, try explaining a safety pin to someone who doesn't know what it is - it's harder than you may think! This is a conversation that never in my life did I anticipate having . . and I was struggling to contain my laughter.

"I guess I don't understand what you want then." He then got on his little radio and asked where they were. "Aisle C25" he said, pointing me in the right direction but not, as they usually do, walking over there with me to actually find them. I think he was really worried that even if he saw them he wouldn't know what I was talking about.

That was, most definitely, the funniest thing that's happened to me so far in 2011.

Hey spring, it's about time!!!!

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Mon, 09 May 2011 08:40:13 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Hope all the mothers out there had a wonderful Mother's Day. We spent some time exploring Vashon Island, just a short ferry ride away, where one of Elena's favorite books takes place (any parents of 10-and-unders out there, get "Red Ranger Came Calling" from author of the comic "Bloom County", Berke Breathed. It's excellent). Seattle has had a remarkably cold and wet spring (even for us) and we were quite excited when mother's day turned out sunny and warm.

Had a wonderful weekend where the shooting just seemed to "work" and found some locations on Vashon that I need to go back and shoot soon, if anyone in the Seattle area is interested in coming out there . . .

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Tue, 03 May 2011 21:47:50 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

I love it when you step back through the archives, start fooling around, and end up with something much better than you hoped for (or even envisioned when you first took the picture). I happen to love the look that tilt-shift can bring even when it's fake (provided it doesn't look particularly fake). For some reason I hadn't even thought of the Huntington Beach Pier in mono before . . just never occurred to me.

It's amazing how much (or how often) we focus on color and sharpness to make a good picture when it is often the tactful absence of those two things that can make it so much better: certainly one of the tensions, tradeoffs, or complexities that makes photography so damn much fun.

Blown Away

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Mon, 02 May 2011 11:40:17 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

Above is the aptly-named "Elements" condo/office/retail complex in Bellevue, WA. I think I could spend every day of a month shooting this building.

Title is my little nod to the fact that there is one less crazy man now stalking the earth - and perhaps more so to the fact that it was a "victory." None of us are perfect people, and I'll admit my moral weakness right up front: when I first heard he was dead, I was initially worried that he'd "passed away" like his kidneys failed or something. I breathed a sigh of relief and of cheer when, a moment later, it became clear that we "got" him. Never a good thing to revel in anyone's death, but I'd be lying if said I wasn't happy that it was a "Hollywood ending." Hope no one is offended at that thought. Pride is one of the vices, and like any vices that you allow yourself just briefly, it feels reeeeeeeeaaally good.

On a different note, I simply can not, in few/simple words, address the amount of inspiration Kevin has provided me (regarding my ongoing posting of shots like this one). I'd never seen architectural photography like his before, and I've been hooked ever since I first tried.

Night Light

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:06:29 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

We spent Easter weekend at my parents' place in Montana. It seems that every time we go back, I feel a need to shoot star trails . . . maybe because I can do it in the back yard, where in Seattle I'd need to drive out of the city (and even then, only in rare clear weather). I've shot very similar shots each time, usually only with a foreground of trees. This time I thought I'd include a little life and shot the house in the waning hours of the evening (during part of which we were hiding Easter eggs).

No wildlife seen this time, unfortunately. But I got a lot of abstract shots (see descriptions of fire shots below) that I'm hoping to draw something interesting out of . . . having been inspired by Tim Heyer's Reduction set.

Don't Hate Me Cuz I'm Cute-iful

nobody@flickr.com (Jeff Engelhardt) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:42:43 -0700

Jeff Engelhardt posted a photo:

It's officially been the wettest, coldest spring in Seattle in decades - so there has just not been much opportunity or reason to get outside shooting. Luckily, someone is getting more willing to pose every day, so at least I've had an outlet for shooting. School & work have been crazy for the past few weeks, but with them tapering now I hope to start getting back on flickr a bit. I've even started going back through the archives and reprocessing shots along a theme or two (I think my brain needs a project).

Hope all is well with ya'll in flickrland. I hope to be getting back to your streams soon! Thanks for checking in, I've missed you guys.