Rivers meet Sea

Now with a stay-at-home order effective for Washington State, I probably won’t be doing much photography away from home for a while. As I mentioned in my last post, Tanya, I and the dog took a hike last weekend. The hike was on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula, which has several rivers running off of the mountains and into Hood Canal. For those of you who don’t know Washington State geography, Hood Canal is a long thin extension of Puget Sound, essentially a fjord. Our trip home from the trailhead took us only the shore of Hood Canal for many miles, thus giving me the opportunity to stop and photograph were river meets sea with my drone.

I made two drone flights, one over the mouth of the Duckabush River and one over the mouth of the Hamma Hamma River (shot above is from the Hamma Hamma). I’m still learning how best to operate the drone and how to best shoot still photography and video with it (still using auto mode, which never do with my Canon 6D and almost never even do with my cellphone). But I think I got some interesting shots.

I was intrigued by the color changes in the water where distributary channels from the rivers had cut into the delta sediments (my geologist side is showing here, distributaries are the opposite of tributaries; they are streams that branch off and away from the main river channel; they typically form where a river discharges into a larger body of water). I mostly shot from an altitude of about 250 to 350 feet. In hindsight, I should have investigated shooting lower. For example, some oblong shapes I though were driftwood, when zooming in on my images, appear to be seals or sea lions.

I would also like to go back to these spots and shoot again later in the year. Most of the vegetation on the deltas had not yet greened up for spring. It will be interesting to compare shots taken in summer with these taken in mid-March. But that will obviously have to wait.

Hope you enjoy the images. Stay safe and healthy out there!

Small channels on the Duckabush delta

Small island on the Duckabush delta, note the seals congregating on the lower end

Curving distributary channel of the Duckabush, small white streaks on the upper mid-left are birds landing in the water

Colors on the Hamma Hamma delta

Channels of the Hamma Hamma

More from the Hamma Hamma delta