Whale Watching and Hurricane Ridge at Night

This was a long day. I scheduled a whale watching trip leaving from Port Angeles at 10:30am. I got down to the port early so that I could eat breakfast before the boat set off. The company which is Island Adventures guaranteed a whale siting or you could reschedule another trip for free. When the boat left it was a little breezy but once we got out into the Strait of Juan De Fuca the wind picked up. I thought no big thing because I was on a bigger boat than the one that I was on in Monterey California. The problem was that there were a lot of whitecaps and the wind dispersed any spray from the whale’s spout very fast and that is what the captain would look for to find whales. Well now I can book another trip because that guarantee is good forever if the company is still in business. I was using my Sigma 150-600mm lens so that I would be able to fill the frame with any whale that I say. I was able to get some images of harbor seals on one of the beaches that we passed. And I got a good image of a sea lion attacking and eating a fish, so the trip wasn’t a complete bust. The weather forecast for the evening was supposed to be all clouds but at about 7:30pm I looked out the door of my trailer and the sky was clear. I grabbed my camera and my backpack with my lenses and headed up to Hurricane Ridge hoping that I would be able to catch the sunset and get some pictures after dark of the stars and the Milky Way. Success kind of, I got some good pictures of the snowcapped mountains. I used my Nikon 28-300mm lens shooting at ISO 500 to 800, shutter speed between 1/200 and 1/500 with a f-stop from f/3.5 to f/5.6. Once it started to get dark, I switched to my Nikon 14-24mm wide angle lens. My ISO ranged from 2000 to 3200. I set my f-stop to f/2.8 and put my shutter speed on BULB. Using a remote shutter release and a tripod the time that I kept the shutter open ranged between 16sec to 32sec as the night got darker. Unfortunately, the ambient light from Port Angeles wiped out the possibility of getting a good shot of the Milky Way. But it still amazes me at the number of stars that are up there. We just can’t see them in Jacksonville or any other city that I have lived in since I was a kid.