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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Reader photos capture essence of summer outdoors

Summer in the Inland Northwest serves up a lot of eye candy for outdoor photographers.

Nesting birds and newborn fawns turn heads. Moose pose like models. Our numerous water bodies are full of features to admire through the lens.

Whether they paused to gawk at mushrooms and wildflowers or marched up a trail to climb a mountain, people who found the essence of the the region’s outdoors took their best shots and posted them on The Spokesman-Review’s Readers Outdoor Photo Gallery.

Some of these photos were published in the Thursday Outdoors section to highlight their beauty or timeliness to what was happening that week in nature or recreation.

Some were simply pretty to look at. Some inspired our next outing, while others stimulated discussion

A photo of a hummingbird in August prompted the discussion among birders on how difficult species identification can be after the boom in newly-fledged birds whose plumage isn’t fully marked.

A photo of a grayish moose elicited an educated explanation from a moose biologist.

Buck Domitrovich of Cheney, who regularly submits wildlife and nature photos from Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, posted a lynx image from his travels to Alaska and a great gray owl photo from a field trip to Montana.

Olivia Chantry and Benjamin Read of North Idaho shared several images of their adventures of the Selkirk Mountains, from carving turns on the last gasp of the season’s snow to climbing new routes on granite peaks and cooling off in jewel-like alpine lakes.

Tiffany Hansen didn’t pout when she couldn’t break away to experience the path of totality during this summer’s solar eclipse. Instead, she scored great outdoor images from just outside her office in Spokane.

“I do regret that I couldn’t travel after seeing pictures made from the path of totality,” she said, “but I had to work.”

Hansen, 29, said she enjoys photographing anything outside. “It makes me happy to experience the outdoors and capture that beauty in my camera,” she said.

On Aug. 21, she set up her camera during a party break her office had for the eclipse and, using borrowed filters, fired off about 40 frames during the course of the moon passing between the sun and the Earth.

“I wanted to show the eclipse from start to finish, but didn’t want to lay it out linear as I’ve done with lunar eclipses,” she said.

The aspiring photographer, who’s selling her work at tiffanyhansenphoto.com, picked out 15 images that were made 10 to 15 minutes apart. “I wanted to see significant change between each one,” she said. In the final image, the 15 photos are arranged in an arc that complements the shapes of the sun during the eclipse. The image is captivating even though the sun is still a crescent at the top instead of the blacked out totality image so many photographers captured and published.

“That’s what we saw from Spokane,” she said. “That’s my reality.”

Although Hansen is pleased with the product, she says she’s already making plans for the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. “I’m going to chase that one,” she said.