Loowit Imaging

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Shelton, WA
Loowit Imaging

On-location portrait, scenic, landscape and maritime photographer for the Puget Sound area. Formerly known as Fire Mountain Photography.

Formerly known as Fire Mountain Photography, Loowit Imaging provides the utmost in top-notch customer service and the best custom photographic services available. Photography is done using the latest in Nikon imaging equipment. Loowit Imaging specializes in nature, scenic, custom portrait services plus custom print and framing.

03/03/2026

Tahoma basks in evening alpenglow. Taken last night from Olympia Regional Airport.

12/15/2025

On Saturday, I drove up to my favorite spot to photograph Tahoma on a whim since it was a clear day. The light danced with her slopes so eloquently, as the sun passed through gaps in the advancing high clouds. Even more surprisingly is that Pahto (Mt. Adams) was visible quite clearly as well from the same spot.

11/21/2025

Wednesday afternoon, while driving to work, I stopped at the high point of Mason Lake Road just north of home, to take in how wonderful the light was playing on the slopes of a glistening-white Tahoma. The shadows of advancing high clouds made for an especially pleasing visual treat. The view didn't last long, however. In a few minutes' time, the peak was under total cloud shadow, and by that time, my SD card had run out of space.

In the meantime, in the last couple days, I've spent some time restoring a vintage Nikon FE 35MM SLR. Hoping to go back to basics in film sometime very soon.

11/17/2025

Last Tuesday, I took a drive out to Bonney Lake to sit and ponder. It had been one day after my 46th birthday, and the weather had been exceptional. Tahoma had been dressed in a fresh white robe and I just knew the light would play on her slopes in a fantastic way.

I also shot two high resolution gigapixel panoramas, that I unfortunately cannot upload to Facebook due to size restrictions. In the largest panorama, an 80-frame stitch with an effective megapixel resolution of 530 megapixels, details as small as boulders three feet across can be discerned in the snow on Upper Mowich Face.

11/10/2025

A selection of photos taken of Tahoma's dance with the light last night. We truly live in the greatest place on Earth.

11/01/2025

Washington State is home to five stratovolcanoes. Until yesterday, I've photographed four of those five.

The fifth, and least known (yet most dangerous) of the five is a peak known as Glacier Peak.

Yesterday afternoon, I managed to locate Glacier Peak using a peak finder app while in Manchester, on a whim outing after work to photograph Tahoma.

As it turns out, from Manchester, Glacier Peak lines up in a straight line of sight with Queen Anne Hill in Seattle - quite evidenced by the three television towers of KOMO TV 4 (ABC), KING 5 TV (NBC), and KIRO 7 (CBS).

This was captured using a 480mm apochromatic telescope on a Nikon D5500.

10/24/2025

Flashback Friday.

Although not on an anniversary date by any means, these photos, taken on May 18, 2004, are the very first digital photos I ever took. They were taken on a measly 1.2 megapixel Vivitar digital camera, which for all intents was a digital "disposable" camera...

Recently, while doing a purge of old hard drive data, I found these photos, tucked away in an old folder. After I took these, I'd soon upgrade from the 1.2 megapixel Vivitar to a 4 megapixel Minolta DiMAGE S414 camera, and would use that camera for a number of years, until I upgraded to Nikon equipment in 2011.

09/25/2025

Tahoma has just a bit more snow on her now, than she did when I took these photos last Friday.

Since I took this photo, I've come to a startling conclusion, based on cursory examination of photos taken by me and others of Tahoma just this year, and a historical average going back 20 years using historical imagery available through Google Earth.
That conclusion: Tahoma is rapidly losing glacial ice mass. And permanent snowfields are disappearing en masse.

On the south side, Nisqually and Wilson glaciers are no longer conjoined ice masses. They are now divided by a rock ridge nearly two hundred feet high in places and over five hundred feet in width. Wilson glacier, based on imagery and photos last year, has shrunk by approximately 22% just this year alone. Nisqually glacier has retreated a few hundred feet. YES. FEET.

Additionally, on the south side, a permanent snowfield named Fuhrer Finger is gone, as is a trio of well-photographed snowfields on upper Wilson glacier headwall. Another permanent snowfield named The Turtle, beneath Kautz Icefall, is almost gone. Van Trump and Pyramid glaciers? Gone entirely.

On the southwest side, Kautz and Success glaciers have seen the most damaging impact of this year's summer. Based on 2024 photos and Google Earth imagery, both Kautz and Success glaciers have lost over 25% of their mass. Kautz glacier's uppermost reaches, now no longer appear in photographs taken from Paradise. A cirque is all that is left.

On the west side, seen here in this photograph, three glaciers have shrunk approximately 15-20%. South Mowich, Edmunds, and North Mowich glaciers have seen extreme damage, and six permanent snowfields on Mowich Face are now gone, including a 60-acre snowfield on upper Mowich Face that has for decades, formed the famous "elk head" silhouette seen in many photos taken from the Puget Sound region. North Mowich glacier has retreated three hundred feet.

Carbon glacier, the most sheltered on the north side, and Flett glacier on the northwest, see little impact due to sun angle shading. Even still, Flett glacier has lost about 10% of its mass. Permanent snowfields on and around Echo Rock saw significant shrinkage this year.

On the east side, the views from Sunrise have similarly been greatly impacted... Winthrop and Emmons glacier, the two glaciers with a conjoined, massive breadth of Tahoma's east and northeast flank, have retreated over three hundred feet in two years and have seen significant shrinkage this year alone. Inter Glacier, on a topographic prominence known as Steamboat Prow (where the climbing route for Camp Schurman resides), nearly disappeared this year. It now gives the appearance of a stagnant glacier, whose size shrunk 22% based on last year's satellite imagery.

Beneath Little Tahoma peak, Frying Pan and Sarvent glaciers have also significantly shrunk.

This look, is definitely not normal. Not by any historical stretch.

09/23/2025

This image here, without a doubt, is a photograph of Tahoma I will forever be proud of.

The master resolution of this monster, a seventy-seven frame panorama, is ginormous. Its effective resolution surpasses 650 megapixels, and is over 55,000 pixels wide. If printed at its native resolution, it could wrap the side of a Walmart easily, with crystal-clear clarity and no pixellation.

To accomplish this massive image, I used a Nikon D5500 DSLR, set to 1/1000 second shutter exposures, at ISO 100. The lens? A beasty Meade Series 5000 480mm f/6 Apochromatic refractor telescope. Each of the 24 megapixel sub frames are coma and chromatic abberation- free from edge-to-edge, which allowed for seamless stitching of all seventy-seven frames. The stitching was completed in three separate batches to preserve processing power, because my computer could not handle stitching all seventy-seven frames at once.

Twenty-one hours of automated script-based image processing time was required to produce this monster, in addition to over twelve hours of manual editing and fine-tuning. My only complaint is that Facebook does not allow for the uploading of the original. Details as small as boulders three feet across and house-sized glacier seracs are easily discernable in the master file.

https://flic.kr/p/2ruRDZT

09/21/2025

Friday afternoon, I took off to Bonney Lake for the last summer set of Tahoma images for 2025. This time, I took my 480mm Meade apochromatic refractor and used it as a camera lens. The first image in this series was taken through the Meade APO.

In addition, I will be releasing a gigapanorama of Tahoma. 77 frames, at an effective resolution of 650 megapixels. Details as small as three feet can be discerned. The final panorama required twenty three hours of image processing time, and multiple stitches in Adobe Photoshop.

A special note: the clouds seen in these are dust clouds kicked up by massive rockfalls on Success Cleaver, that I witnessed while driving out to Bonney Lake. These rockfalls continued through the afternoon and well into sunset. Viewed through a Meade ETX telescope, car-sized boulders were seen cascading down, shattering into dust on their way.

One thing is certain, my documentation of Tahoma's barren slopes have generated a fair amount of controversy on social media, especially Facebook where many claim that this is "normal" in spite of no photographic record existing, ever, of this magnitude of barrenness.

09/18/2025

Late evening light on Tahoma (Rainier) from 70 miles away, using a 500mm Meade apochromatic telescope as a camera lens.

Comparisons between this photograph, and others taken this year from Bonney Lake and this very vantage point in September of last year reveal a staggering, and quite alarming loss of glacial ice mass and the sheer disappearance of formerly permanent snowfields.

Visual estimates of the amount of glacial ice lost this year is probably around an additional 10-20 percent. Nearly every glacier has significantly shrunk, in addition to the absolute loss of two glaciers. On the south side, Nisqually and Wilson glaciers were once conjoined beneath the Wilson glacier headwall. Today, they are now separated by a rock ridge nearly five hundred feet wide and two hundred feet in height. A permanent snowfield named The Turtle located beneath the Kautz Icefall has nearly disappeared. Van Trump glacier has entirely disappeared, and Kautz and Wilson glaciers have significantly shrunk.

In these photos, seven formerly permanent snowfields have now entirely disappeared accounting for the loss of over 350 acres of snow cover. Beneath the central Mowich Face, Edmunds and North Mowich glaciers have significantly shrunk or ablated.

The sheer barrenness of Rainier this year, is unprecedented. And a testament to the fact that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is very much a real threat. As a landscape photographer for over 20 years, I've never seen such barrenness, and a cursory examination of the pictorial history of Mount Rainier National Park shows no time in the recorded history, of it ever reaching this level of rock exposure.

09/02/2025

Another moody capture of Tahoma. As alarming as this stark, barren appearance is, I have to say I do like it.

Address

511 E. Dartmoor Drive
Shelton, WA
98584

Website

http://loowitimaging.wix.com/home

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