I recently wrote about a weekend trip up to Lake Cushman in the Olympic Mountains and the dam that formed the lake; see Lake Cushman in the Winter. Like any trip, this one started early in the morning around a steaming mug of coffee. Mug in hand I wondered from my camp towards the rising sun and Hood Canal. It was while strolling on the shoreline that I saw this opportunity to grab a golden sunrise.
Behind the Photo
There were a couple of things that drew me to this shot. One was the golden color bathing everything, the log which looked like some medieval dragon and then the texture that the morning light was bringing out in the rocks on shore.
The key to grabbing all of this was to bracket my shots with a 2 stop over/under exposure then ‘sandwich’ them into an HDR photograph using Lightroom. There are plenty of tutorials on the subject so no need to rebake it here.
The trick is not to go for that surreal painting effect you often see but rather to just create what your eye saw when you were there. The eye is still much better at dynamic range than any camera on the market; at least for now.
Hood Canal was named by the Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver on May 13, 1792, in honor of Admiral Lord Samuel Hood of that navy. Vancouver used the name “Hood’s Channel” in his journal, but wrote “Hood’s Canal” on his charts. The United States Board on Geographic Names decided on “Hood Canal” as its official name in 1932.
Hood Canal is long and narrow with an average width of 1.5 miles and a mean depth of 177 ft. It has 212.9 miles of shoreline. Its surface area is 148.9 sq miles. Hood Canal extends for about 50 miles southwest from the entrance between Foulweather Bluff and Tala Point to Union, where it turns sharply to the northeast, a stretch called The Great Bend. It continues for about 15 miles to Belfair, where it ends in a shallow tideland called Lynch Cove.