my travels through life
It rains a lot in the winter but the occasional sunny 50 degree day definitely makes it worth it. I think Eagle Creek is even more breathtaking in the winter with dozens of waterfalls cascading over the cliffs onto the trails, water overflowing, the fog and mist and the moss that seems greener than it is in the summer. Unlike most places in winter Oregon is still a very colorful place.
I suppose it’s a good thing that I haven’t posted to my blog in a while. I’ve been shooting so much that I haven’t had a moment to post my photos.
Back in February I took off for Israel as a part of Taglit-Birthright (an organization that sends Jewish people to Israel for free). Under Birthright there are a bunch of organizations that actually run the trips. The organization I chose was IsraelExperts. I ended up going on the Israel culinary trip, which was the first of its kind of IsraelExperts. I was a little hesitant at first, thinking that the trip was only going to focus on food and that I was going to miss out other aspects of Israel. We did pretty much everything the typical Birthright groups do and then we added the culinary stuff on top of that. While other groups would eat in food courts we had a delicious meals prepared for us from fresh vegetables in a local kibbutz. We went into locals home to eat dinner, ate Shabbat dinner with a Modern Orthodox family, had tea with the Bedouins, prepared our own lunch from fresh vegetables in the Negev desert, and ate strawberries grown in the sky (yes the sky).
I’ll touch on all of this and what I took away from the trip in a future post. For now enjoy the photos and video from the beautiful land of Israel. I had a hard time of selecting what photos to post here. I decided to focus more on the landscapes and environment than the candid photos of people on my trip. To see those photos, as well as more landscape and environment photos, they can be viewed here on my Facebook albums: Album One, Album Two
Today I headed up to the Top of the Rock, which is on the roof of Rockefeller Center, with my photography friend Lindsay. When I lived her in 2008 I always wanted to make it to the top but either lack of money or horrible weather kept me from going up. I made a point of it this time to go.
The views from the top were incredible and breathtaking. While I was up there it seemed like everyone else was from another country whether it be Great Britain, Germany, China, or Canada . . . all asking if I could take their photo.
When it got dark out came the tripod and within in a minute a security guard was on me. Apparently you can only use a tripod up there if it isn’t open. A little absurd if you ask me considering when I had the legs extended it was only about a foot wide and a foot high. I managed to get around it but straddling my tripod on the metal bars (which was much more dangerous for the people below than if they just would have let me open my tripod out a couple inches). Next time I’ll have to bring my Gorilla tripod which could have easily attached to the bars.
After we headed back across to Dumbo in Brooklyn and finished with some shots of the skyline from the shore between the Brooklyn and the Manhattan bridge.
I’m pretty tired so I’m going to keep this post short and just show a couple selects that stood out to me as I browsed through the hundreds of photos I took today. They’re all rough edits. Enjoy. And now sleep for me.
I was supposed to be on an airplane right now to NYC but I was flying standby and there weren’t any empty seats. Maybe it’s for the best though as I can now rest and recover from this cold. Below are photos from my family gathering at Silver Falls this past weekend. I was planning on taking some star trail photos and doing a time-lapse video but there was a full moon which hid most of the stars.
Every year the swift birds migrate through Portland and nest in the chimney of Chapman Elementary School in NW Portland. Before they nest each night they have a ritual of circling the chimney. It’s pretty amazing to watch. There are thousands of them. You should check it out if you’re in Portland in the fall. I went on Tuesday with my friend Gregg and will probably go back a couple more times in the next week.
