I never shared my first winter landscape outing this winter, so let’s start there.  Back in December, my good friend Dan Sherman and I went on our first winter adventure in 2 years!  Dan had moved all the way to Florida for his job, but loved the Pacific Northwest too much to stay away.  Our plan was to stay Friday night at Mazama’s Lodge, wake up early to shoot sunrise, then head up to Tom, Dick & Harry Mountain! After a good night’s sleep at Mazama’s, I wasn’t feeling well, and the conditions were far too warm for epic snow camping, so we modified our itinerary, and abandoned the TDH climb.  At 40 Degrees the little amount of snow turns to slush, so if either of us gets wet, we would have to immediately end the adventure because we would be at risk of hypothermia.  Plus, we both wanted epic powdery snow, and at best we would get crusty, iced snow, which is good for delicious snow cones, but not good for taking pictures.

Saturday morning and afternoon we went searching for this epic meadow we had both seen pictures of, but had eluded us.  We are confident that we have found it now, and hopefully we’ll have pictures to share in the near future.  For sunset, we headed up to Timberline Lodge in search of some new perspectives on a familiar place.  We found some interesting new compositions, but the sky didn’t blow up until we headed back to the car, so we stopped to shoot this scene!

In January some friends invited me to stay in a cabin up around Crater Lake, and I was so looking forward to that trip!  Unfortunately, the night before I got “stay in bed and grip your pillow sick”, so I was unable to go.  Being sick was bad enough, but seeing pictures of them having the time of their life on Facebook makes it that much worse.  Hopefully there will be other opportunities to spend some time with them here, but we are already planning other adventures for the summer.  J

This last weekend I was finally able to get my Crater Lake fix with a short car camping trip.  I drove down for Sunset, took some night photos, got some sleep in the back of my car, shot sunrise, and drove home.  On the drive down I was concerned that there wouldn’t be any snow on the trees, and the powdery snow would be gone.  I was glad to see that both were still waiting for me.  I got clear skies, but as you can see from the picture of sunset above, there were some very nice colors to be had.  The conditions were also perfect for night shots, so I wasn’t too disappointed by a cloudless sky.  I am always amazed by how many stars you can see out away from the light pollution of the city.  I killed my first battery shooting sunset and taking a few long exposure shots in freezing temperature, then used my entire second battery on this one 30 minute exposure below!

When I got back to the car I briefly thought about making the drive back home, but I remembered I had batteries in my vertical grip attachment, so I plugged it in, saw that it had full strength, so I jumped in the car to get a few hours of sleep.  I got a new Omni-Heat sleeping bag from Columbia Sportswear that I was excited to test out, and wow is it warm!!!  Definitely worth the investment!

I woke up at 5:00 am on Sunday for Sunrise.  I have been to Crater Lake 6 times, and this is only the 2^nd sunrise I have shot, so I was super excited.  I found my composition, took 3 test shots, and my emergency AA backup batteries died.  Noooooo!!!  I only had one opportunity left, and that was to put in my other dead battery, so that I was running off of 2 dead batteries.  Wouldn’t you know it, 2 dead batteries equal 1 functional camera!!!  Thankfully, here is the shot that I was able to get.  J