Scenery at Ridgefield NWR

Rising sun obscured by fog at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

A Turn Towards Darkness

One foggy winter morning on the auto tour, I stopped the car suddenly when I saw the trees on the hill silhouetted against the sun, otherwise completely obscured in the fog. However, when editing the picture, I couldn’t get the fog to look right. I came back to this image over the next year but still couldn’t edit it to my satisfaction.

Eventually I got the message — if I couldn’t get the picture to look the way it did to me that morning, why not turn around and go completely in the other direction? In my raw converter, I shifted the levels down towards black, turning a foggy morning into night and the rising sun into an orange moon. Thanks to the surrounding fog, nothing is visible except for the trees against the sun.

It took me a year to get the message, but it’s turned into one of my favorite pictures from 2007.

Sunrise framed by fog at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Breakout

Another foggy morning at the refuge, a gap in the fog momentarily opened where the sun was about to rise, so the orange colors of the sunrise were surrounded by the gray fog. As in the previous picture, I pulled the levels down towards black instead of gray. It didn’t look like this in person, but it emphasizes what made me take the picture: the sunrise struggling to escape from the prison of the fog.

Trees in fog at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Trees Standing at the Edge of Memory

How’s that for a pretentious title?

Just because you arrive at Ridgefield with the dawn, doesn’t mean the sun arrives with you. It can get pretty foggy there in the sloughs and fields next to the Columbia River. This can really limit your options as a photographer, but creates some new opportunities as well.

I liked the way these two trees appeared to be floating on an island of clouds, and all pretentiousness aside, it did remind me more of the memory of trees than of the two trees themselves. I should take a picture of these trees sometime in the daylight, it’s a remarkably uninteresting scene without the mystery of the fog.

Snow-covered view of Mount St. Helens from Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Gone

I took this picture of a snowy Mt. St. Helens during the winter near the road that leads to the entrance of the refuge. You can’t see this view anymore as there is a subdivision of homes there now. I took this picture when they were digging the foundation of the first home, as I knew it was my last chance.

Ice-covered pond at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

Crowded Channel

The refuge starts to thaw after a nasty ice storm hits the Portland area. Only a narrow channel in the water had opened up in the lake, forcing the wildlife to congrate into a small space. In this picture, there’s a family of river otters, a great egret, a great blue heron, and a pied-billed grebe. A few minutes earlier a bald eagle was circling overhead, and a little while later some gadwall and mallards flew in.