Sean Bagshaw Outdoor Exposure Photography

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Exploring Hart Mountain Wildlife Refuge In Winter

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Admittedly, winter is not my most prolific photography season. Cold, darkness and unpredictable weather often get the better of my psyche and I find myself making excuses or prioritizing office work. However, once or twice a winter I do manage to gear up and head someplace windswept and snowy with my camera. This winter Chuck Porter, one of my oldest and best friends, and I spent a couple days exploring the lonesome high desert in the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge. Back when we were more energetic Chuck and I spent a lot of time climbing cliffs and mountains all over the western US and spurring each other on to complete questionable feats of endurance. Once we hiked the entire length of the Wild and Scenic Rogue River Trail, all 40 plus miles, in a day. Another time we climbed Mt. Shasta, Mt. McLoughlin and Mt. Thielsen in a 21 hour push. These days we are happy just to get out and camp for a weekend and do a little ski touring.

Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge is a national wildlife refuge on Hart Mountain in southeastern Oregon, which protects more than 422 square miles and more than 300 species of wildlife, including pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, mule deer, sage grouse, and redband trout. The refuge, created in 1936 as a range for remnant herds of pronghorn antelope, spans habitats ranging from high desert to shallow playa lakes, and is among the largest wildlife habitats containing no domestic livestock. Located in a remote region of southeastern Oregon at an elevation over 6,000 feet, Hart Mountain is a wild and desolate place any time of year. In winter, blanketed by snow, it becomes a quite and seemingly endless surreal landscape.

During our visit, Chuck and I skied through a couple of different areas, both very small in the total scale of the refuge. We talked about coming back one winter and skiing all the way across, but we’ll see if I ever get the winter motivation to take that on. The two areas we explored on this visit were the hot springs basin below Warner Peak and Petroglyph Lake. Petroglyph Lake is sheltered on one side by a low cliff band that houses several panels of Native American rock art.

Instead of going on at length about the skiing, sleeping in the car, eating bad food and all the other standard tales from a trip like this I’ll just let the photos speak for themselves. You can click on each image to see it larger and then hit the back button to return to the article.

Hart Mountain rising out of the clouds above Hart Lake.
Old building at park headquaters.
Winter Landscape
Rok Chuk
Hotsprings basin black and white
Meandering hotsprings stream
Skiing toward Petroglyph Lake
Desolate and windswept
Warner Peak above the high desert plain
Skiing around Petroglyph Lake
Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs
Wind sculpted snow
Skiing in a snow shower

On the Edge at Palouse Falls

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At the beginning of October, David Cobb and I were returning from a productive ten day photo trip in Montana and Idaho. We decided to detour slightly for a final stop at Palouse Falls in eastern Washington. We took a 30 minute stop for lunch in Baker City, Oregon which caused us to miss the sunset at the falls. We arrived at the falls about 30 minutes after sunset thinking that we had missed our window. However, the final glow on the horizon before the scene went totally dark was amazing. The orange post sunset glow in the sky reflected nicely off the cliff walls creating a moody, alien scene.

Palouse Falls drops over 150 feet into the deep and winding Palouse River Canyon in eastern Washington. The landscape in this area, not far from the Snake River Canyon, was carved by the massive Misoula Floods created when an enourmous ice dam broke in Montana at the end of the last ice age. Taking this photo required positioning my tripod legs right on the edge of the 370 foot high canyon rim and fighting back sensations of vertigo while standing on tip toe to see through the viewfinder.

Canon 5D, 16-35mm f/2.8 L lens, circular polarizer, 3 stop GND, 30 seconds @ f/13

Photo Journal: Photographing Double Falls

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This amazing location required a 4:00 AM wake-up and a cross country hike through grizzly country in the dark up on Logan Pass in Glacier National Park. It was well worth the effort. Streams cascading off all sides of a bowl shaped valley converge at this narrow slot in the rocks. During the summer, melt water flows off the canyon walls in several places creating four of five separate falls, but in the fall just the two main falls remain.

I first became aware of this waterfall from Galen Rowell’s classic photograph. A couple of years ago it ran on the cover of Outdoor Photographer Magazine and included the following caption: “Light conditions like this are notoriously difficult to photograph. The contrast between the sky and the shadowed ground is too much for film or an image sensor to handle. At the time Rowell made this image, he used a split neutral-density filter to control the contrast. If he was alive and photographing the same scene today, Rowell would have used a digital camera. He’d have known that he could employ some sophisticated RAW-software techniques to double-process the image file.”

I took that advice and photographed the classic scene in two separate exposures, one for the sky and one for the dark foreground and then manually blended the two images in Photoshop to allow the entire range of light that I experienced to all be contained within a single image.

The magazine caption also noted the irony that in a location famous for being on the continental divide, a place where water usually flows in opposite directions, toward the east or the west, would also be a place where so many streams flow together.

Two exposure manual blend. Canon EOS 5D, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, 3 stop Sing-Ray split neutral density filter, circular polarizer, 3.2 sec @ f/10 (sky), 15 sec @ f/10 (fore ground), ISO 100

Sean Bagshaw Greeting Cards

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Greeting Cards
Greeting Cards

For the last couple of years I have been selling greeting cards that feature my photos through the Ashland Artisan Gallery. I’m now happy to announce that my greeting cards can also be ordered in sets of six through my website. Six different cards are currently available including favorite images such as Red Willow Sea and Crimson Gorge. The greeting cards are printed on heavy, glossy card stock, measure 5×7 inches, come with envelopes and are blank inside for your personal message. They also fit standard 5×7 frames, so after they have been used as a card they can also be displayed as wall art.

Each set of six cards is priced at $25 with free shipping and are perfect for holidays and other special occasions. You can view the card choices and order from my website HERE.