A friend of mine, Bill Kaloger, asked me if I'd like to go out in his boat one Sunday afternoon in
January.  It had been a miserable winter so far, and this was a rare day- not warm at all, but
somewhat clear and sunny.  There was no wind, and Bill took the 26-footer several miles out onto Puget Sound, where he cut the engine and drifted.  We watched the light change on the water and on the mountains around us throughout the afternoon.  It was nice, but as the sun dropped behind us, it got really beautiful.  The craggy north Cascade Mountains, which had been white with snow, turned pink.  The warm sunset raked the city of Everett below, reflecting brilliantly on office window panes and casting dark shadows over the waterfront industrial area and naval base. I shot this digital photo using an 80-200 mm F2.8 lens and a 1.4 extender.  Sorry about getting technical, but because the imager in a Kodak 520 camera is smaller than 35 mm, there is a built-in magnification factor of 1.6.  That means that a 100 mm lens on this camera is really a 160 mm, a 200 is really a 320, etc.  You can do the math if you want to know what I was shooting with the 1.4 extender added.  The extra telephoto capability comes in handy with photos like this one.  Mountains in general appear much more spectacular when photographed with a telephoto lens because distance is compacted and vertical dimensions remain intact.  In this case, I was shooting from sea level and those mountains average about 7,000-feet above sea level. The opposite is true with short (wide angle) lenses; 7,000-foot peaks are turned into mere bumps.  For those of you who don't know this region, Everett (pictured) is 25 miles north of Seattle.  The Cascade Mountains, which are highly volcanic, range from California into Canada, cresting about 100 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.