Park-hoppin'

I visited no less than five parks this morning! I thought I might as well use our temporarily dry weather to scout out some West Seattle locations for this coming spring and summer. I did end up taking a few pictures, but mostly walked around taking mental note of the parks' attributes.

1) Schmitz Park: Seattle Parks' website describes this wooded park as an "old-growth" forest, which is a bit of an overstatement. There are a few stretches of the park with some pretty old cedars and firs, but a lot of the park consists of younger deciduous trees. So, even though the forest is maybe a bit older than most around Seattle, it doesn't resemble the legendary old growth forests of the Olympics, for example. It was a nice park, but nothing I'd drive that far to visit very often. Some stretches of the trail were thickly surrounded by salmonberry bushes, though, which will look nice when they begin to flower. If I return, it will be for this.

I took these pictures in the park:

2) Solstice Park: This park basically consists of a few tennis courts, a community garden, and a grassy little hill with a viewpoint on top. It also has some summer-blooming flowers like yarrow, chicory, queen anne's lace, and others. Combine these with the view of the Olympics and there might be some potential this summer.

3) Roxhill Park: The natural part of this park consists of some boggy areas. There are a lot of diverse flowering plants all jammed together - including fireweed - so there could be some summer potential here.

4) Lincoln Park: This park consists of a lightly wooded bluff and a wide, paved beach walking trail. This would be a good place to have a picnic or something, but doesn't look like it'll offer much exceptional in the way of nature photography. The madrone groves were interesting, but I can probably find scenery like that closer to home.


5) Seahurst Park: This one is actually technically in Burien. It's nice for a stroll, but the beach isn't very natural and the forest isn't any more interesting than those I could find much, much closer to home.

...And, I have finally found the time to do experimentation with RAW format. My first attempt was thoroughly unsuccessful. I generally liked the way I got the lighting to turn out, but the three images I had printed were too soft. I'll have to do more experimentation with sharpening, both to the RAW file and to the converted TIFF.

Happy Winter

Happy winter, everybody! To celebrate the solstice, as well as the lack of cloud cover this morning, I did some picture-taking this morning, at Magnuson and Hamlin Parks. Magnuson wasn't as frosty as I'd hoped, but there were still some cool-looking plants; the meadow area of Hamlin, on the other hand, saw very heavily frosted.

I really like the way this sunrise one turned out. I got pretty low to the ground and close to the trees. I got the sun to look like that (with the rays coming out) by using a relatively narrow aperture (f/20). I also like how there is still tonal definition in the grass; I didn't even use a filter! The blurry black thing in the top middle is some piece of dust or something that got on my sensor. By the time I'd cleaned it off, the sunrise was gone and I had to accept the pictures I already had.

In this next one, I liked the way the sun was hitting the water on these trees. I turned my camera's D-Lighting feature off (this helps equalize light contrast). The higher contrast brought out the water better.

I've taken cooler pictures of frosty Queen Anne's Lace than this next one; still, it worked okay. A bit on the soft side, due to a very slight breeze and the fact that I was still working with a pretty slow shutter speed (something like 1/30). Some creative color adjustments might help bring the frost out a bit more.

At Hamlin, I wanted to capture frost on Scotch Broom plants. These three are my best. The last two are the same shot; I couldn't decide which focus point I liked better so I decided I'd post both.

Finally, I thought this plant looked really cool in the frost. I believe it is Canada goldenrod. The pictures I got weren't the best, but thus is the nature of experimentation. It'll definitely be worth another try the next time it is frosty.

Happy Winter!!

Frosty Morning

Hello all, it's good to be back! I've been pretty busy with work, studying for grad school tests, working on grad school applications, and other such things. Additionally, the shortened daylight means that daytime commitments interfere much more with early morning and late evening photography (when sunrise is at about 5:10 am and sunset is about 9:15pm, as in the summer, it is a lot easier to keep those times free than 8am and 4:30 pm in the winter). But winter vacation is coming soon, so hopefully, this post will be the first of many in the next month or so.

(A while ago, I saw some hits from Ireland. If that's Christo and/or Mary, hello and I hope you are doing well!! If not, then I'm honored to have someone from Ireland reading my blog!)

First, I finally got out to take some pictures the other day. Magnuson Park was not as frosty as I had hoped. Since it sits close to the lake, I assumed that it would be one of the frostiest places around (as, indeed, it has been other times). This time, however, there was hardly any frost; the few places with frost were already beginning to melt. Nevertheless, since I was already there, I tried my luck in a few spots. I was surprisingly pleased with the results--the fact that the frost had begun to melt accentuated the colors of the frosty objects, and those colors' contrast with the frost itself. For instance:

I believe the leaves I was photographing belonged to a blackberry bush of some kind. I also got this one, the frosty remnants of what in the summer were hardhack blossoms:

Now onto other photography news:

-Lightroom. I went ahead and bought it (they had a Deal of the Week on Amazon), and have been liking it. Editing pictures in RAW format is proving to be much more difficult than I thought. I like the latitude I get with setting lighting levels, but it seems that RAW images need more computer sharpening than JPEGs, and I'm trying to figure out how to do that without ruining the image.

-Lens. I am going to buy a new lens, probably later this winter or spring. Of course, it's a bit subject to how my money situation turns out, but I'm probably going to do it. It will be a 10-20mm wide angle lens.  My main lens is 18-200mm, which is pretty wide. But there have been times when I've wished I've had something a bit wider. Additionally, the minimum focus distance of the lens I want is about 9 inches, compared with a less impressive 1.6 feet of my lens. I've seen some cool wide-angle close-up pictures in books and photography magazines, and want to try my hand at that technique. I could get even funkier and buy a close up filter for it.

Cheers, and I hope to write again soon!

Lord Hill

This past Saturday morning, I took advantage of the rain-less-ness and went to Lord Hill Regional Park. I think it was the first time I've ever gone there without getting extremely tired, or cramps, or something. But this was also the first time I've taken adequate food and water with me to the park. Maybe they're connected.

In other news, I've been playing with a free trial of Adobe Lightroom 3. So far, I really like it. It remembers all your edits - even after you close the program - so it's really easy to tweak or redo your changes. None of the changes are permanent until you export them to a new image file. I just got some prints in the mail of pictures that I had edited with Lightroom, and they look good. (The only problems I had were problems I've had with prints from other editing programs as well, so I'll have to figure them out but I don't think they're related to Lightroom). At Lord Hill this weekend I took some pictures in Camera Raw format. I'll share the results of those and give a more detailed account of my Lightroom experiences in a future blog post.

Here are the best, at least the best without any editing (I am going to experiment with some of the more contrasty ones in Lightroom before I publish them online).

The park has some very nice viewpoints! The only other time I made it to one of this park's viewpoints was on a morning of thick fog...which basically defeats the purpose.

Recent Adventures

It's been a relatively uneventful couple weeks, photographically speaking. Rain and especially work have taken their toll once again (although I suppose being busy with work isn't in itself such a bad thing these days - it means that I will have more money to spend on photography when conditions are more ideal). So I've only gotten out a couple of times. I'm starting to experiment, though, with photo-editing software. I downloaded a trial version of Apple Aperture, and the darn thing crashed within about 5 minutes. I'll try again later, but I don't want to use a program that bogs down and crashes while I'm editing (I had read about the same problem on online reviews). So I'll see if I can track down trial versions of Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Capture NX, etc. and see if those work. Mostly I want one that lets me work on images in Camera RAW format, and that has high-quality editing tools.

Anyway, the pictures. This one, I think, is cool and a bit moody. The juxtaposition of the remaining flowers against the dead plant parts was what I had in mind. I suppose it's a bit busy, but I didn't want to lose too much of the focus on the flower by taking down the depth of field any more than I did.

Also, I'll bet you didn't know that fireweed leaves turned colors in the autumn. I sure didn't!

And a couple other autumn shots that don't really have anecdotes behind them:

I think this last one could stand some enhancement - the yellows of the leaves in the top half of the picture could maybe be brightened and/or saturated. I think it would make the picture a lot more interesting if that color stood out. This is why I need some photo editing software! I can feel my creative impulses yearning for freedom!

Arboretum!

Another recent trip I took, one much more successful, was to the Washington Park Arboretum. It's a popular park, but if you can manage to get there early on a weekday morning you can actually get some solitude. I made it just in the nick of time to photograph sunrise from Foster Island.

There was a thin mist in the air, which made for some of those classic rays-of-sunlight shots. This was the best:

And some leaf closeups! I was pleased with the way they turned out; I managed to get pretty close, and there was almost no breeze. And plenty of photogenic dew. Just the way I like it. The only problem is that the dew, especially in the first of this pair, had a lot of glare, even with the polarizer. Oh well, I still like it.

Summer's Rot

Maybe it's just because it's still early into autumn, at least foliage-wise. Or maybe it's not the most fantastic autumn because it's been rather wet and windy. For whatever reason, though, a recent trip to the Coal Creek Nature Park was a bit disappointing. The maples (vine and bigleaf) whose color had already turned didn't look very good - the leaves, instead of turning nicely yellow or orange, just had nasty brown spots on them. I was especially disappointed by the vine maples, since I've heard that those turn nice colors in the fall. Maybe that applies more to sunnier places or the mountains or something. Most of the forest made it seem that autumn had never come; instead, summer had just died and began to rot away with nothing to take its place.

Still, some of the trees looked nice, including some of the cottonwoods and one tree whose leaves had interesting red spots. My pictures of those were the day's best.

I also got some nice pictures along wide spot on the trail. They were a bit dark, but it's nothing a bit of brightening in editing software couldn't fix. As soon as I can afford editing software. Soon. Very soon.

And, finally, these ones of the forest. I liked the way the colors turned out, despite the depressing leaves.

Spider Heaven

A few days ago I spent a morning in the company of spiders and fisherpersons at Bob Heirman Wildlife Preserve. It sits on the Snohomish River and is close-ish to Monroe. There is one main trail that runs through a grassy meadow, along the river bluff, and (after some obstacles in the form of fallen logs) through a forest of alder and cottonwood to a wide gravel river bank.

First the spiders. I like this shot I got of a web; I would have liked to get closer but that was as close as I could feasibly wiggle my tripod. The next lens I purchase will probably be a macro lens with a greater focal length (i.e. I can get equal magnification at greater distance).

This tree was completely draped in spider webs, which made it look strange/interesting:

Beyond that, it was a very pretty autumn morning, with a thick fog giving way to warm sunshine. There were a lot of dead fish lying around the riverbank in various stages of decay. I'm not sure why this is; I couldn't find anything online that would suggest a cause. This actually caused some stomach unpleasantness on my part. But other than that, I very much enjoyed the park.

Combinations of sunshine and fog always make for interesting scenery. I stood around for what must have been 45 minutes waiting for the fog to look like this:

Until next time! I'm going to try to seek out some vine maples next.

Scenes of September II

I returned to Magnuson Park yesterday morning to face September's challenges again. I ended up with some nice shots, in my opinion. Most of them were not nearly as sharp as they should have been, and I blame the unusually brisk morning breeze. (I held up my end of the bargain - I used a tripod, cable release, mirror-up mode, etc.) Still, I thought I'd share them. You can't really tell on Blogger, but you'll have to take my word for the fact that some of these - specifically the berry picture and the second aster picture - are barely acceptable when it comes to sharpness.

Scenes of September

September is a difficult month to photograph. By then, the grass is all brown, most summer flowers have gone to seed, and many leaves are looking a bit dry and battered. Autumn color, however, has yet to appear. Add all this to the fact that I've been a bit busy lately, and fighting off sporadic colds, and you have a recipe for a limited array of blog-able pictures.

These next two are from Magnuson Park the other morning. I was fortunate enough to enjoy some very calm air, which was the only way I was able to pull these off. I'm not often brave enough to try a shaded macro shot early in the morning. In this case, I tried wide and narrow depths of field. These leaves were pretty small and I was already pretty close in. I guess I could have gotten a bit closer, even, but it's still okay. Besides, any closer and I might have upset the arrangement of branches that put these leaves where they needed to be.

My life is settling out a bit - and (fingers crossed) I might even be getting a "real" job - so hopefully I'll have the time and money in the near future to take more pictures. Heaven knows I've been missing it. Just because September is sparse doesn't mean it's fruitless. And I've already charted out my October/November fall color destinations in the area. Move over, New England! The Puget Sound's in town!

Summer's Last Gasp

Well, it looks like our brief interval of summer weather is over. It went out with a bang, though, didn't it? Heat, hazy sunsets, the works!

I wanted to catch what will probably end up being the year's last hazy red sunset at Discovery Park. My pictures didn't turn out as well as I had intended. Part of the problem was that my cable release - which enables me to take a picture without touching my camera - has been falling apart for a while, and finally decided to stop working very well. (You might ask why I don't just use my hands and use the self-timer feature. This is inadequate for two situations. The first is that for exposures between about 1/15 of a second and 1 second, or so I'm told by books, you get sharper pictures by using the "mirror up" mode, locking the mirror up, waiting a few seconds, and then taking the picture. The second is that, especially when shooting plants and leaves, by the time 5 or even 2 seconds have passed the subject may have been blown out of focus by even the slightest of breeze. Focusing, releasing my hand and immediately taking the picture with the remote is more reliable if the tripod is tight.)

Still, these shots ended up interesting. The first wasn't as sharp as I'd wanted, because I had to press the actual shutter button; at a 1/20th of a second exposure, this created a slight blur. But it's still cool enough to post.

Many people I know are of the fall persuasion; autumn is their favorite season. I, on the other hand, will always be a summer person. Summer is the season of ostentatious wildflowers, lush forest foliage, warm sunshine, grass brushing against my legs, red sunsets, seed heads waving in the wind, soft mornings and evenings, the smells of grass and fir needles baking in the sun, the sounds happy bird songs and the sweet singing of insects at twilight. I appreciate autumn's beauty, but part of me dies every autumn, and doesn't come back to life until warm summer weather returns. So...until next year!

An Unstable Sunrise

This morning's weather was rather interesting, wasn't it? Even before the showers cropped up, I knew something was amiss. There were some very photogenic clouds just before sunrise, as you can tell from the next picture. This cloud and others, however, were convective - i.e. puffy, formed by warm air rising rapidly. This would be more normal in mid- or late afternoon, but not before dawn. Hmm.

The hazy sunrise, also photogenic, was rimmed by clouds that looked like they were of some type of altocumulus and cumulus persuasions if I'm not mistaken. Also a sign of trouble. There were some larger cumulus clouds to the south, and I wondered if we might be in for some rain or thunder in the afternoon. But for the time being, it was all making for some sweet pictures. The third of this next set has a bit too much dead space in the upper left hand corner, in my opinion, but otherwise I was pretty pleased with how they turned out.

After sunrise, I wandered around taking pictures of aster, blissfully unaware of the skies above me.

Then God, in His infinite sense of humor, decided to confirm my prediction of rain a bit early. At first, a light sprinkle started coming down, which confused me because the skies rimming the horizons were blue. But there was a big ugly cloud parked right above me. At this point, I was laughing loudly and uncontrollably to myself in the park. After about 10 or 15 minutes of light shower, it absolutely poured for 5 or 10 more minutes and then stopped. I heard rumbling thunder three times throughout.

Who totally called it? Jeff Renner said there was "a small upper level weather system" moving up from Oregon that brought in all that moisture. I'll wager that it also brought in some cooler upper-level air, thus getting the convection going. Hopefully Cliff Mass will blog about this.

How about all that!