Filtered Sunshine! O, the joy!

Filtered sunshine, when the sun is still strong enough to produce a shadow through a sheet of clouds (generally cirrostratus or altostratus), provokes a diverse array of reactions in people. Some people see it and think, "Oh boy, it's sunny!" Some see it and think, "Oh dread, it's cloudy!" Still others see it and think, "I wonder how flowers would look!" I, it seems, am of the latter type...

So I took a quick dash over to Hamlin Park in Shoreline, to take pictures of the fireweed and blackberry flowers. Once I arrived, it was just plain old overcast most of the time, but I did squeeze a few shots in while the filtered sunshine was still around:

Since the fireweed stand in Hamlin is more favorably located than some of the others in local parks (i.e. the plants are closer to the path), I was able to do some relatively close-up stuff as well.

And, as promised, the blackberry flowers. The himalayan blackberries are blooming everywhere (hopefully we'll get some good berries later...?).

Finally, an interesting comparison of a feature called white balance. I'm still grappling with the basics, but here's how I understand it from experimenting and reading the camera manual: White balance controls the color cast of the image, by setting what color the camera reads as "white" or neutral. You use this to either change a scene's color scheme, or to compensate for the color cast of a light source. For instance: A lot of pictures taken under incandescent lighting look very yellowish; this is because cameras are more set up for outdoor lighting and aren't compensating for the yellowish cast of the light source. My camera has a built-in preset for incandescent lighting; when I took a picture out the window, it made everything outside look all bluish, because it was envisioning a color yellower than outside overcast light color as "white."

I have a custom white balance setting on my camera that I occasionally use for sunsets; it skews the colors in favor of magenta and amber (as opposed to green and blue). The first is with the setting I usually use (pretty neutral for outdoor, only a bit warm) and the second is my custom setting:

Interesting, huh? The green of the leaves shows up better in the first, whereas the deep color of the fireweed flowers is much more strongly expressed in the second. I'll experiment with these settings this week; maybe I can create a new custom setting that still has a strong magenta cast but isn't so strongly biased toward amber; the greens would show up better and I would still have the purple flowers!