It’s a year in review, the best of 2023. For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, we were asked to show no more than 12 of our favorite images from the past year. Wow, that’s a hard choice.
It wouldn’t be a Rambling Ranger Best of post without at least one wildflower! Easter Sunday in the Cathedral Hills, Grants Pass, Oregon
I couldn’t do it. Too many favorites. So I tried to narrow it down from the 112 I’d picked out of my files to just the ones I had never published. I still had far too many.
My favorite B&W image of 2023.
That’s probably because I’m STILL processing 2023 images and I find new favorites every day. I finally narrowed it down to 15. Culling those last 3 was especially painful, but those were the rules this week. So finally, here it is, my best 12. Unpublished, that is.
Sunwapta Falls, Jasper National Park, Canada
The feature image was obviously taken in Grand Teton National Park, under the most amazing lighting. The first big winter storm of the season was due to hit in less than 8 hours. You could see the front coming in. I had to keep moving so I wouldn’t be caught by it, but I got some amazing shots as I was passing through.
The day before, though, the light was horrible in Yellowstone. Yet that harsh, in-your-face glare made this photograph possible. I never would have seen it if I’d had good lighting on the bigger landscape.
A small piece of a grand landscape in Yellowstone National Park.
I took the Icefields Parkway through Jasper and Banff on my way south from Alaska this year. I’ve included an image from each park. I wish I could have included more. These were the hardest images to narrow down.
Bow Lake, Banff National Park, Canada
My best photo session of the year, though, was Bandon, Oregon. Scenic views, tidal pools… A third of the images in this post are from Bandon, not to mention the photos included in the last two posts. It was a magic couple of days.
This is my favorite image from my time in Bandon.
The next two images seem like a matched set to me, even though one was from Bandon and the other from Cape Perpetua. I just see them hanging on a wall together.
This one is from Bandon.
I was just SO happy to finally visit tide pools and see sea stars!
This one is from Cape Perpetua.
The landscape at Bandon is so varied, so many views. This next image looked like an alien planet to me, with the grey lighting and minimalist composition. Hard to believe it’s the same beach, and the same day, as the other landscape.
Alien landscape
Another great photography day was winter solstice. I’ve included a couple of images from that day. From the base of the Sandia Mountains, I could see the ice blown onto one side of the trees lining the cliff, so I was excited for, and anticipating, this shot all the way up on the tram. I was not disappointed.
Frosty Day
This last shot illustrates just how rugged and wild Albuquerque’s backyard wilderness really is.
Albuquerque’s back door wilderness
What will 2024 bring? Ten days in and I’ve already got zen cranes and raptors hunting. I’m so excited to see what’s next! How about you?
Well, it’s almost Christmas and Winter Solstice is only a few days away. Kind of reminds me of a Dar Williams song, “Christians and the Pagans”. (Give it a listen) There’s a line in that song, “And you find magic from your God, and we find magic everywhere, ”
I’m a pagan at heart, it’s nearly Winter Solstice, and I do find magic everywhere, especially in the natural world. So here are a few of the places and things I find magical.
Mountains
A magical alpine landscape
I’ve always been a mountain girl, and it’s not only the big peaks that are magical. I’m in love with the alpine, the land above treeline. Not just the big views, either, but every little detail. Especially the little details. There’s another Lilliputian world there if you look closely, and it’s a magical place.
There’s a whole other world beneath your feet!
.I used to play a game with my visitors when I did Discovery Hikes as a ranger in Denali. I would give them circles of string, about six inches in diameter, and have them enclose a patch of alpine tundra. I would ask them to count all the living species they could find in their circle. Then I would hand out magnifying glasses and have them count again. They always found more the second time around, with that closer look!
Water
Waterfalls are magical. Do you see the face in the rocks to the right of the falls?
Water is life. Literally. Without water, there is no life. It’s a magical substance. And there’s this weird thing that happens occasionally when I photograph waterfalls. Although I don’t see it when I’m making the shot, I will sometimes find a face in the photo (the spirit of the waterfall?) when I open it up to process. That’s what happened in this image. Can you see the face? It’s magical.
Trees
Redwoods are amazing trees.
There are a lot of magical trees out there. Have you ever meditated with a redwood? Or wandered through the fairyland of a temperate rainforest, like you might find in the Pacific Northwest?
Olympic National Park has some magical forests.
One of the most magical kinds of forests I’ve ever seen are the Madrone/Manzanita woodlands of Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains, with trees that look like women, decorated with delicate lichens and moss. Magical.
Manzanita in the Cathedral Hills in Grants Pass, Oregon.
Tidepools
Tide pools on Bandon Beach
Tide pools are magical places. Especially to me. I’ve been on a mission to find good tide pools, and I’m not always successful. Timing is everything. If you don’t have a real low tide, forget it. But I got lucky last spring, twice; once at Bandon, my favorite spot on the whole Oregon Coast, and then at Cape Perpetua. I scored an awesome campsite with great wildflowers at Cape Perpetua, too.
Sea Stars are making a comeback!
One of the most miraculous discoveries in my successful tidepooling this spring was that sea stars are coming back! Decimated by sea star wasting disease, it’s been years since there was a healthy starfish population anywhere on the Pacific Coast, but there were a lot of them in Oregon this spring. Brings joy to my heart
Desert
Arches are ephemeral.
Arches and natural bridges are pretty magical, too. I listed them under desert to go with my photo, but you can also find them on the coast, products of erosion, sculpted by the waves. In the desert it’s the wind doing the carving for an arch, and water for the natural bridges.
These nature sculptures are ephemeral. beings. You never know how long they will last. The arch in this photo, Shakespeare Arch, is already gone, collapsing a couple of years ago. I’m glad I saw it when I did because it was a beauty, now gone forever.
Mosaic Canyon in Death Valley
Another magical product of erosion are slot canyons. All canyons are magical, never knowing but eagerly anticipating what’s around the next bend as you hike up one. Slots just bring the excitement up a notch, with the beauty of their polished walls and the way they have of drawing you in, deeper and deeper.
Flowers in the desert can be magical.
A good wildflower season in the desert is definitely magical. To see a landscape that is pretty bleak most of the time, nothing but dirt and rocks, transform into a veritable garden of delight, completely drenched with flowers – well, it’s got to be seen to be believed. Maybe we’ll get lucky this year. Fingers crossed.
It’s not only the quantity of flowers that blows me away, it’s the incredible variety.
Home
Last, but not least, I live in a magical place. When I first came to McCarthy, I felt like I’d discovered Never Never Land. It was a place where you never had to grow up, unique, like nowhere else in the world. That was before social media, before McCarthy was discovered by the rest of the world.
Perhaps it’s not quite so magical now, now that it is on the map. With Instagram, there are no longer any best kept secret magical places. But I’ll bet it’s still pretty magic to people who have never been there before, who are freshly discovering it. And after all, it’s the people who play the largest part in making any place magical, and McCarthy is still filled with amazing, kind, beautiful people, people who keep the magic alive.
McCarthy is a magical place.
Thanks to Ann-Christine of Leya for this week’s Lens-Artist’s Photography Challenge, Magical.
Finding peace in today’s world isn’t easy. So much chaos! So many things going wrong! Cold war with both China and Russia, the war in the Ukraine, climate change and crazy weather, women’s rights going backwards, mass shootings practically every week, inflation, earthquakes….AAAAAAGH! Things seem pretty desperate!
Well, yes, the world situation is desperate. It’s desperate more often than not. Always has been. We’re just better informed about it now. That’s the problem. Bad news gets more engagement than good news so the algorithms are heavily slanted toward whatever will get people’s blood pressure up and make them worry.
A walk on the beach may help you find peace.
How can we overcome this? For one thing, put the device down! Whether it’s your computer or your phone, when you start doomscrolling, cut yourself off. Go outside instead. It’s good to be informed about the world, but we are all suffering from information overload. It’s enough to rob anyone of their peace. And since most of these things are problems we have no control over, the frustration makes it worse.
So let it go. Do not let your empathy paralyze you. Decide if there is anything you can do about the problem and then do what you can. Donate to a relief fund for those in the midst of a disaster. Write your congressperson. Do what you can and then let it go. Don’t doomscroll.
Make sure your walk is somewhere interesting or difficult enough to keep you fully engaged. This canyon in Death Valley was both.
I’d like to offer a few meditative exercises to do that help me find peace. Maybe they can help you, too.
Take a hike or a walk. This is a walking meditation on how to live in the present, how to be here now. Make sure that where you go is interesting or difficult enough to keep you engaged, so that you can shut down the endless tape loop of anxiety you are working and reworking in your head. Shut it down and appreciate the present moment instead. That’s guaranteed to bring you some peace, if only for a little while.
A walk in the forest can help you find peace.
If you’re mobility challenged and can’t take that walk, watch birds. Really watch them, don’t just tick species off your list. Observe their behavior. There’s a lot more to the world than just our species. It’s good to get out of ourselves and get to know some of the other creatures we share our planet with. Finding a way to get in touch with our Mother the Earth is the best way to find peace.
Watch birds.
Perhaps what’s disturbing your peace is a little closer to home. Maybe it IS home. Personal conflicts, work pressures, worries about loved ones are hard to overcome. They can take away every vestige of peace in our lives.
Let the wind and the water wash your worries away.
In some cases we can make it better by being better listeners, keeping quiet and listening to understand another’s point of view. Sometimes we just may need to take some alone time.
Find moving water and listen to its song.
Find moving water. It could be waves roaring in the ocean. It might be a waterfall. It could even be a tiny babbling brook. Find that water and listen to its song. Let it fill your head completely, driving out all thought and agitation, until the only thing in your head is the sound of water. Let it fill you. This is a great way to find peace.
Let the song of the water fill your head.
Maybe it’s your own mind that destroys your peace. Self pity and self judgment are soul wreckers, guaranteed to disturb the peace. Self judgement is a big one for me. Let it go. Give yourself a break.
My favorite way to find peace is to go to a forest or a glade of trees and contemplate the trees, really see them. Think of time the way a tree experiences it. Let yourself be awestruck at their size and the miracle of their existence. Realize how small and unimportant you and any of your petty problems are in the grand scheme of life on Earth. This might help to put problems into perspective and help you find peace.
Contemplating trees helps to put your problems in proper perspective.
Perhaps, you say, that you have no problem feeling small. That feeling small is part of the problem, feeling insignificant, weak, and helpless in the face of insurmountable challenges. In that case, choose a flower. It could be a wildflower or something growing in your own garden. Ponder the perfection and beauty of this tiny being. Think of how ephemeral and insignificant their lives are, yet each flower plays an important part in the world, adding to the richness of life’s tapestry.
As do you, Realize that you, too are precious and beautiful just as you are. Realize that you, too, are an important part of life’s tapestry. Let this realization help you find peace.
You are as beautiful and precious as a flower.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my meditations. I hope they help some of you find peace, even if only for a little while. Thank you to Tina of Travels & Trifles for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Finding Peace.
I’m pushing my boundaries, leaving my comfort zone, by going soft and dreamy for this week’s post. Reducing clarity to create softness is a photographic technique I seldom (almost never) use. I’m one who is always going for more sharpness instead.
Soft and dreamy is a good way to go for some flower images.
It’s a technique, though, that I should probably use more often. Reducing clarity to make an image soft and dreamy is especially effective with some flower images.
I really like what reducing clarity did for this Joshua Tree blossom image.
Reducing clarity and using a mask to sharpen part of the image is great for changing depth of field, too.
Reducing clarity with a sharpening mask over the main subject can create a shallow depth of field.
Foggy conditions naturally reduce clarity without any additional processing.
Fog naturally softens images.
Trees
As I played around with reducing clarity, I discovered that I really love what this technique did to a few of my tree images.
Soft and dreamy maple tree
I was able to make some of my tree images soft and dreamy, giving them a painterly effect.
I love the painterly effect losing clarity had on this image.
The following image was always one of my favorites, but I could never get it as sharp as I needed to. It was always a little too busy, too. But reducing clarity gives it the look of an impressionist painting. I love it!
I love soft and dreamy on this image!
Waterfalls
One place where reducing clarity is especially impressive is in waterfall images.
I love what reducing clarity does for running water.
It makes the water silkier and fuller. You can see this effect in the following 2 images.
Reducing clarity can make running water silkier and fuller.
Perhaps you don’t want the whole image soft, though. In the following photo, I used a mask to soften the water but left the rest sharp.
Rustic Falls on Orcas Island
If you want to obscure a busy background by making the image soft and dreamy but also want to preserve some detail in the foreground, you can use a few different tricks to make that happen. I used a couple of techniques in the following series.
The first image is full clarity. The second is a soft mist filter. With the third, I painted the log with clarity and added a vignette.
Waves
Waves are also fun to make soft and dreamy. Here’s another series.
The 1st is original, 2nd is Soft Mist filter, 3rd is reducing clarity.
By reducing clarity, texture, and dehaze, I transformed this ocean sunset into an almost abstract watercolor.
Way soft and dreamy
Landscapes
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in Monochromes, I usually try to stay realistic with my photos. But this winter is all about getting out of my comfort zone, both physically and creatively. And actually, reducing clarity works particularly well with the Orcas Island landscape.
Reducing clarity works well with the Orcas Island landscape
Reducing clarity and going monochrome turned this flat, boring photo taken in terrible midday light into an image I can be proud of.
Quite a different mood from midday flat light.
Thank you to Bren of Brashley Photography for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Bringing Softness. You’ve helped me to stretch and learn a new technique!
For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, we’ve been invited to share our favorite images of 2022. I’ve been sharing this year’s favorite images in my last two posts, so I won’t be revisiting those images here. You can go back and look at those posts if you missed them!
The God rays are still one of my favorites!
But I would love to share some other favorites. A few of them I’ve published in earlier posts, but most are brand new. It seems my favorite images change weekly! Because of the scarcity of electricity and internet access during my summer months in Alaska, I have still not caught up with my image processing for the past year, and I discover new favorites every day.
This is becoming my favorite abstract image for 2022.
There are so many photos I haven’t even really looked at yet, including winter in Arches and most of my fall shots from Alaska and Washington State. It’s like Christmas every day for me as I continually find new favorite images.
I saw some amazing places in 2022. One that has been on my mind continually this week is the California Coast. Most winters I spend either January or February on the California Coast. I’m not there this year, which may be a blessing. My heart goes out to all the folks struggling with too much of a good thing, with the atmospheric river and torrential flooding.
Amethyst Tide
I spent the month of February 2022 housesitting in Pacific Grove on Monterey Bay. I was 4 blocks from the coast and made a point of doing photography nearly every day while I was there. That is also the batch of work I am currently processing, so a lot of my favorite images in this post are from that visit.
Pacific Grove
Another fantastic roadtrip was driving the Cottonwood Canyon Road in Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument. It was on my bucket list for years, but usually this is a road that requires 4-wheel drive. I called the ranger station to see if it would be safe to drive in just a couple of miles to do some dispersed camping and the ranger told me the road was in great shape and my little Toyota truck would make it end-to-end just fine! Quick change of plans for me, I could not miss that opportunity. The highlight was visiting Grosvenor Arch, and it was every bit as beautiful as I had imagined it would be.
Grosvenor Arch
I’ve also spent a lot of time in Olympic National Park this year. I haven’t processed the fall images yet, but I’ve included a spring sunset in this collection.
Rainbow sunset
My last post included a lot of my favorites from the time I spent at home in Alaska, but I am revisiting my favorite flower photo from this summer.
I love the pattern displayed by the flowers and their shadows in this image.
My best sunset/sunrise of the year was traveling south down Canada’s Cassiar Highway. Every image in the series is so rich and so different. That sunset went through every shade a sunset could possibly have. Intense. I did a series on Instagram last week with a few of these images, 7 Shades of Sunset.
This image looks like I tweaked the color in LightRoom, but honest, it was really that red. I did not saturate the color, I even used Adobe Neutral as my color profile. I published a different swatch from that evening’s palette of hues in last week’s post, ‘cuz this one looked too over the top to me. But now I think it is my favorite.
Cassiar Highway Sunset
I traveled the Mt. Baker Highway for the first time this fall. Although the conditions were less than ideal due to wildfire smoke, I was amazed at the astounding views and the easy access to hiking in the alpine. I can only imagine how stunning it must be when there’s no smoke. A new favorite place, I will definitely be checking that road out again!
Mt. Shuksan
And of course now, I’m on Orcas Island for the winter, where there are some lovely waterfalls. This image is a favorite.
Rustic Falls
I look forward to seeing what favorite images 2023 will bring. If you have been following my travels on Facebook, though, it seems that Facebook has not been circulating my posts much lately. I urge you to subscribe to my blog instead, so that you won’t miss a post.
Well, I couldn’t do it. This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is Last Chance, when we’re invited to show off some of our favorite 2022 images that have not been published in a post yet this year. Since I took such a long hiatus from my blog this year, I have plenty! Too many, in fact. I can’t narrow my unpublished favorites down to one post.
Oregon beach sunset
I’ve been trying, but I have lots of sweet images I’d love to share. Because I have too many, and since the Lens-Artists are taking a week off for the holidays and won’t be putting out a prompt next week, I’ve decided to divide my favorites into 2 parts. This week will be my favorites from below the 49th parallel, and next week will be my Northland favorites.
Tallest trees in the world
Last Winter’s Travels
One suggestion was to include images that would probably never be included in one of our typical posts. I pet sit in the winter but I very, very seldom include photos of my charges in my posts. Here is a favorite shot of a kitty I took care of last January.
This kitty used to chew holes in my clothes!
I spent the month of February on a housesit in Pacific Grove, California. I envisioned this shot and was so excited, especially in post-processing when I realized I’d captured exactly what I’d envisioned!
I love the layers in this sunset silhouette.
I love visiting the redwood forest, and I love capturing abstracts. This is my favorite abstract shot for 2022. Charred bark from a previous fire and living green moss and lichens contributed to hues as bright as a peacock’s tail when looked at closely in this image.
Rainbow Redwood
Check out this cool tree. It’s in Olympic National Park’s coastal forest, and with a burly head, fungus features, and a crown of fern leaves, it’s a people tree! I stop by and say Hello! and give it a hug every time I pass that way.
Tree Person
(Yawn) Another sublime Olympic sunset… The Feature is one, too. I captured this image on Rialto Beach. I love the dreamy feel of this image. The Feature shot is from First Beach. I had so many great shots from First Beach it was hard to pick just one.
Rialto Beach
This Winter’s Travels
My final image from Olympic is fall colors, maples along the Sol Duc Hot Springs Road. Olympic had by far the best fall colors I found in Washington this year.
Maples on the Sol Duc Hot Springs Road
Now I’m on Orcas Island, and I have especially enjoyed the waterfalls here. This one is called Rustic Falls.
Rustic Falls
For my final image, while hiking a local trail I saw this Big Leaf Maple leaf standing, still attached, on a tree branch – perfectly upright and all by itself, beautifully backlit. It’s getting a bit ragged, but mostly green, even though it’s December. It hasn’t let go, just keeps hanging on. This is a great inspiration for those times when I’m feeling a little raggedy! I underexposed the background because it was a bit busy and distracting. Doing this helped me to capture the way this leaf looked to me and made me feel.
Getting a little raggedy, but still hanging in there!
Hope you, too, are still hanging in there and I wish you all a Happy Holiday season!
