Mt Hood, Oregon's tallest peak as seen from Tom Dick and Harry Mt, and surrounded by a winter wonderland bathed in the finest of alpine light is an image that has eluded me for quite some time. I don't remember what I first had in mind when I began chasing this scene but I do remember my first trip here to this very spot. I followed direction from a guide book and parked at the Mirror Lake snow park ("A wide spot on the highway"). My wife and I grabbed our gear from the car with vehicles careening down the snowy roadway just feet away. The mid-morning snowshoe hike up to the lake was nice. While we were the only car at the trailhead we found several groups at the lake. After pushing all the way to the Tom Dick and Harry summit to find no views of Mt Hood I set up the tripod for a quick portrait.

Winter Bliss We made our way back down to the car with visions of pizza and beer putting gusto back into our pace. Once the highway became visible again I realized that my car wasn’t. An inspection of the patch of snow where I had parked revealed a “NO PARKING” note freshly spray painted in pink. Only thing to do was hike a mile down the road to the ski resort. The guy at the pro desk said he saw the “state boys” with my car earlier and recommended a tow company that might have my ride. After a $200 impound fee I finally had my wheels back with a parking ticket waiting for me on the windshield. Could it get any better!?! Fortunately it didn’t.

Fast forward a year to my next attempt at this shot. I started snow shoeing at 2:30am in knee to waist deep powder and -7 degree F temps only to run out of steam just before reaching the lake you see in these photos. I was physically exhausted from breaking trail and only made it half way to my goal. Admitting defeat I began heading back the way I came and watched as the most beautiful light filtered through the snow covered trees. I wanted to kick myself but I couldn’t lift my legs that high.

In the years after, another couple attempts during terrible snow years resulted in a couple seriously lack luster images.

It finally came together for me and timed it right to meet this amazing sunrise. I’m pretty happy to have this to show for all of the efforts. Sometimes it makes me question whether I’ve gone mad or if it was truly worth it. Then I think back at all the adventure, drama, stories, perseverance, and fun I had in the process. You bet it was.

To that end I recently had the pleasure of using a Nikon D4 with an SPL housing to photograph the world famous shorebreak waves of Oahu’s North Shore. Not being accustomed to Nikon cameras or flagship models, the first thing I noticed about the D4 was all of the controls. I soon realized many were duplicative for shift hand shooting. Being a long time Canon user it was difficult to find my way to the settings I needed. During the time I had the camera I got pretty comfortable with all its functions. Fortunately this type of shooting allowed me to just set it and forget it. A key feature of the D4 that made this possible was its brilliant Auto ISO options.

The Auto ISO feature (should be called “Smart ISO”) allows you to set a maximum ISO setting for the camera to use. The D4 has really great performance at higher sensitivities thus allowing comfortable use all the way to 3200 and beyond. But wait, here’s the best part; you can also set a minimum shutter speed! This allowed me to use whatever aperture I needed for depth of field and keep a quick enough shutter to catch the fast moving waves just right. The ISO adjusts for everything else with no worries about loss of quality. The improved metering system of the camera does a fantastic job at accomplishing all of this at incredible speed.

So here’s the next best part about the D4, 10 frames per second of continuous shooting until your little memory card has a fat happy belly. With the speed at which incoming swells turn into breaking waves and subsequently explode on the beach, having a camera with rapid fire greatly increases the chance of capturing a wave just right. The rubber pistol grip release of the SPL housing feels great and you can hear the D4 humming along when you hold it down. The unfortunate side effect of this is that filling your memory card it a bit too easy and will leave you firing blanks in no time at all.

On the down side of the D4 is Nikon’s choice to include the XQD card slot. It was enough to worry about swimming with very expensive rented equipment. But having to open a surf housing on the beach to swap out memory cards is an operation of anxiety. In hind sight I should have asked about renting an XQD card in order to make use of the data overflow but then I would also have to figure out how to download from the card.

My overall impression of the D4 is a sweet machine with some serious muscle that can hang ten with style. The 16 megapixel sensor is great for making large prints but not quite enough for serious landscape photography. The frame rate is incredible but will force one to acquire non main stream memory cards. By far my favorite feature is the parametric ISO and shutter combination.