Picnic Point Beach

Another visit to Picnic Point Beach, this time armed with my trusty graduated neutral density filter. This allows me to darken the bright sky so that the ground and sky are no so different in brightness. This, along with the magic of software, allows me to greatly add to the drama of the scene so there is not simply a washed out sky above a boring beach.

At this park, the parking lot is separated from the beach by a railroad track and there is a walkway that goes up and over the trains to keep people and trains from being in the same place together. The image above is take from near the top of the walkway and shows the beach and the distant land.



Around to the right, we look up the strait between Whidbey Island and the mainland. This portion is strewn with logs that have washed ashore.

These logs make for a nice foreground in the image.

As proof of the trains using the tracks I crossed over, this image includes a southbound train. You can see the engine with the lights on pulling along in front. Kind of startling to see how close to the shore the train tracks are laid.

The shadows near the center of the next image is a young couple out for a walk.



And to preserve the symmetry, a northbound train later passed me. This one was a unit train hauling a liquid, I'm guessing oil, with well over a hundred tanker cars and engines at the front and rear. If you look closely, you can see the link of tanker cars extend on beyond the most distant edge of the mainland. It was indeed an impressively long train.