Tony Seeley Photography

I’ve been on vacation to Hawaii a few times now, it’s one of the real benefits of living in the Pacific North West as the islands are only about a 5 hour flight away.  If you’ve never been you probably have a romantic view of what it’s like.  Maybe you’ve see Hawaii five 0 (the new series or if you’re old like me the old one with Jack Lord).  Perhaps you even remember Magnum PI with Tom Selleck (as a kid I loved that show – talk about a man crush!)  Either way let me tell you this, Hawaii is everything you ever dreamed… only better!

It truly is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, the beaches are just stunning, the scenery is amazing and totally exotic and if you want to relax, it’s the only place on earth to go.  At least that’s what I thought!

We’ve been to Maui a couple of times, Kauai once, and this year we went to Oahu.

People at work who haven’t been to Hawaii asked me how the islands differed.  The easiest way I could come up with to explain the difference was as follows.  Kauai is a small village with a couple of shops, if you like big malls or crowded places Kauai is not the place for you, but if you want total piece and quiet, it’s heaven.  Maui is a small town, nice shops, good restaurants (all your favorites) a little touristy with lots to see.  On Maui you can lie on a beach in the morning and shop in Tiffany’s in the afternoon (been there done that).  Then we get to Oahu.  For me this was a big city to Maui’s town or Kauai’s village.  Oahu has it all going on, mad busy beaches, big cities, HUGE shopping complexes, a massive navel base and traffic like Seattle in rush hour.

If you like the beauty of Hawaii but need the hustle and bustle of home Oahu is for you – it’s just not for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really pleased we went but I want to go to Hawaii to relax, not sit in traffic for 90 minutes after going to one of the biggest open air malls I’ve ever been to get back to my hotel.  While there we stayed in Aulani the Disney Hotel and complex in Hawaii.  This is a place where you need to take a LOAD of money as it was the most expensive hotel I’ve ever stayed in.  Now I like Disney as while it’s pricy you get value for money, but the food in Aulani was just terrible but still SUPER expensive and as they have you as a captive audience on the west coast, you kind of have to eat there!

Anyway, Oahu it was this year.  Issues aside we had a wonderful vacation, the pools and facilities in the hotel were really nice and the kids had a blast.  While there I took a few pictures 🙂 and really enjoyed visiting Peal Harbor and walking on the Missouri (that’s history for you right there!)

Will I go back to Hawaii again? No question a huge YES.  Oahu though? Probably not.

Here’s a selection of some of my favorite pictures.

For the last two years I’ve visited Las Vegas for the Photoshop World photography conference in September. While the conference is great fun and you learn a load I thought this year I’d try something different. So for a change I decided to go on a Photography Workshop. I looked online for a workshop I liked the sound of and found a local Photographer (based out of Seattle) who ran a number of workshops all over the county.

Justin Resnick (here’s a link to his site) is a landscape photographer who travels all over the world. He has workshops all over mainland USA and others in Hawaii, New Zealand and Iceland. As some of the overseas workshops are pretty expensive I wanted to make sure I learnt something from Justin first and liked his training/teaching style. So for my first workshop I opted for “Palouse”.

Where the heck is Palouse I hear you say?

Well Palouse is an agricultural region in western Washington. It’s right on the Washington, Idaho border spanning down to the top of Oregon, and the best bit is I can drive there from Seattle in around 4 hours. The thing that makes Palouse interesting is the land formation. Imagine miles and miles of undulating hills, all different shades of green! It’s really something amazing to see.

So I booked a place on the workshop and off I went.

The workshop lasted four days and was pretty intense. We would get up at 4am go out and shoot sunrises, come back to the hotel for 6am, have breakfast and go to sleep for a few hours, head out at midday and shoot until sunset. Try doing that for four days.

During the workshop I shot around 3,500 images and I’ll still be processing the shots in August. This blog post just includes a few of the early processed ones I really liked.

So what was the workshop like? Well there were only 5 students in total so we all got lots of time with Justin. Justin was just fantastic. He’s an amazing photographer and spent the whole time making sure our experience was great. All he cared about was did we get the shots we wanted, did we have any questions, where did we want to go to today?

At each location he would tell us what to look for, where best to set up and what the best composition was. I really learnt a load and will definitely attend one of his workshops again.

One of the highlights of the trip was our visit to Palouse Falls for a sunset shot. This is a huge waterfall in the middle of nowhere. In fact it’s now the official waterfall of Washington state. When we arrived Justin explained how we had to set up right on the cliff face. This was pretty scary but definitely gave us the best view and some amazing shots.

Anyway I LOVED the workshop, and will try and get on another one next year. Hope you like the images.

I was sitting at work this week and someone told me about this very easy to find waterfall that was up on Stevens Pass.

Now I’ve played the “I’m going looking for a waterfall game” before (read some of my earlier blogs.  And your see that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  Usually you spend a few hours stomping through heavily wooded areas that are covered in overgrown sharp stuff that hurts your legs.  If you are lucky you eventually find “the waterfall” (well actually if you keep looking you find a waterfall, it might not be the one you are looking for) and usually (for me) it’s a disappointment.

So the idea of “easily” finding one of these bad boys got me all excited.

Stevens Pass is one of the mountain passes through the Cascade range in Western Washington.  The pass is about 90 minutes from my house so I figured I’d go out and see what I could find.

As is usually the case it took a little while, but it was all driving.  In fact when I finally found the waterfall, I nearly drove past it as it was pretty small.  But find it I did and walked about 2 feet from the car to get this shot.

This picture was taken on the tripod with a ten stop neutral density filter on my wide angle lens.  This stops light entering the camera so the camera has to keep the shutter open for a long time to get an accurate exposure.  Long shutters make flowing water look like ribbons and produces shots like the one below.  As the shutter was open for around 30 seconds, the camera has to remain on a tripod so there is no camera shake – which results in a blurry picture.

The only downside of long exposures – especially when you are shooting a scene like this, is that any wind makes tree branches move and they look blurry in the picture.  Luckily for me this waterfall was totally sheltered from the wind and it wasn’t a problem.

I literally drove for 90 minutes.  Got out of the car, took this picture and headed home 🙂

On the way home I passed this truck in Sultan and couldn’t resist shooting that too.  The whole trip took just over three hours and I got two nice pics.

So I’m driving home from Cannon Beach and we go past this barn in a field full of dandelions.   The sky was blue and it looked really pretty.  So I pulled over, grabbed the camera and took a shot.  To do this I had to walk into the field and get down super low.  Now you wouldn’t think that this would be a problem but the owners drove up as I was doing this and gave me a nasty stare!  I kind of waved nicely with a big smile and carried on.

After taking the one picture I walked back the car and drove home (which was around 3 miles away – I pass this barn every day).

The following day on the way to work I drove past the barn and saw that the owners had mowed the entire field.  It looked terrible!  I guess they either didn’t want people on their property, or they hate dandelions 🙂

Either way I got my picture.

Earlier this year the family had a long weekend break in Cannon Beach Oregon.  If you haven’t been there or know the name, this is a really pretty town on the Oregon coast that is perhaps best known for the landmark, Haystack Rock.  Haystack Rock is this huge (235 feet high) natural rock that’s right on the shore line.  During low tide you can get to the rock and a number of small rock pools around it’s base.  The area is actually protected as a marine sanctuary and there’s always someone there to make sure people aren’t “doing naughty stuff” (not sure what that is but if you look at the rock funny they tell you off – in my experience anyway :))

The beach itself is just huge, it’s this beautify sandy wide area and it’s great for kids and dogs to run wild.  The water on the Oregon coast is pretty cold so you don’t often see people swimming, but you do encounter lots of vacationers taking walks, making sand castles, flying kites and having picnics.

Something that’s pretty unusually about the town (and beach) is that they are amazingly dog friendly.  Most hotels let you take your dog and some shops and even restaurants allow pets on their premises.  It’s also ok to let the dob off the leach on the beach (which too these days is a little unusual).

If the coastline looks kind’a familiar, you should also know that The Goonies (1985), Twilight (2008), and Point Break were all filmed in this area too.

Anyway we drove down there (takes about four and a half hours from home), took Roxie (our dog) and had a great time.  We stayed at the Hallmark Resort which is a very large hotel right on the beach that overlooks Haystack Rock.  In fact the first image below was taken from my hotel room balcony.

I think we stayed for four days, took lots of walks on the beach, ate fish and chips and generally relaxed.  Lisa and Abi rented beach bikes and cycled up and down the beach for an hour (James played on his computer while I read a book).

I took lots of pics while there, some of the town, some of the family and am uploading a sample here.

If you want to relax, I can really recommend the town, the people are very welcoming and the scenery is beautiful.  We will definitely go back again.