I Aster A Question

Hardy har har!

The aster were blooming the other morning at Magnuson Park, so I naturally couldn't resist taking some pictures of them. Following are my two best. In retrospect, I should have tried getting closer up to them. Nevertheless, I think the compositions ended up decent. I'm always torn between the knowledge that, in flower photography, closer is more often than not better, and a desire to keep my flower subjects "in context." That is, I want to put enough distance between my camera and the flower that you can still tell what it is and sort of see it as it appears in its environment...

...at least, sort of. Artistic nature photography of necessity involves stylistic distortion of one's subjects, but I think this should be done within reason. Some flower shots I've seen are so close that they become almost color abstracts; you can't really tell what the picture is "of." I appreciate the skill that goes into these sorts of photographs, for sure, but I don't find them very appealing or enlightening.

I had a second shot at framing the sunrise against queen anne's lace, and I think I got one that is compositionally as good as, if not superior to, the ones I took last time. Following the dictum I explained earlier, I got closer to the flower, and guess what, it worked!

Finally, I took a picture of some queen anne's lace in the Promontory Point area of Magnuson Park, an oft-neglected area in the south of the park. They've been trying to restore native plant and bird habitats there, and there were certainly lots of birds scurrying around! Unfortunately, large areas are still overrun with introduced plants like blackberries - and, of course, queen anne's lace.

In the background, you can see that a few of the tree leaves (cottonwoods, in this case) are beginning to turn yellow. Noooooooo!

Also note how bright the whites are on the flower. That picture was taken at about 8:15 am, and already the contrast in the sunlight was getting tricky. Early morning photography is the best, but you have to work quickly!

Yarrow There!

To me, one of the most curious features of Discovery Park is the yarrow. For whatever reason - perhaps the population is isolated enough, or perhaps some artificially bred plants were accidentally or purposefully planted - the North Beach Trail area of Discovery Park supports some pink and purple yarrow of a deep hue that I've never seen anywhere else (except in gardens). I've seen yarrow look pinkish-white, but only in Discovery have I found yarrow looking like this.

See what I mean? It's almost always white, occasionally pinkish-white.

Also, fireweed season is dwindling (at least in the lowlands) but not quite over yet! I just stumbled on the first picture, and was quite pleased to have happened on that moody backlighting just by chance:

Finally, this shot of Mount Rainier framed by some yellow flowers (Puget Sound gumweed?). I've always had trouble with shots of mountains and other very distant objects. Maybe my automatic focus, for whatever reason, just isn't up to it. This time, I switched to manual and tweaked my autofocus, setting it all the way to infinity (the autofocus had locked in just short of infinity). The result, while still not as sharp as I'd like, was much better. I'll have to try this approach in the future.

Forest Contrast

It's too bad that you have to pay to use state parks now, or at least pay to park in them, because Saint Edward State Park is very nice. It doesn't boast any old growth or spectacular geological features, but it's pretty accessible, has nice trails, and goes down to Lake Washington. It also has a sweet playground, if you have kids (it kind of looks like a castle!). I visited this park the other day for some forest shots.

Probably the coolest part of the trip was some color contrast I found. One of the trails (the South Canyon Trail if you're intersted) runs along one side of a ravine. Some of the nearby maple leaves were well illuminated and looked bright green, while the plants on the other side of the ravine looked more bluish-green. In this picture, I thought I captured something of what it looked like:

I also took this picture, which frames a maple trunk with cedar branches. The breeze was actually quiet enough for this to work, something I'm not always lucky enough to have:

The forest still looks pretty nice, but it won't for long. The Indian Plum bushes are already yellowing (and not really a good-looking yellowing, in my opinion) and there are a few dead leaves lying here and there. The transition phase to autumn in forests around here isn't that great, because the green leaves look a bit frail and battered. But by autumn, if conditions are right, St. Edward State Park might look nice again when the maple trees all turn yellow; there are a lot of them in the park.

Sunrise, Sunset, Swiftly Flow The Experiments

I recently went to Magnuson Park for an early-morning photo run. I wanted to silhouette some chicory flowers against the sunrise, but they were still budding, so I decided to try queen anne's lace instead. This  was tricky - since the flower was silhouetted, it didn't make much sense to focus on the flower parts closest to me, as is generally my instinct with dome-shaped or clustered flowers like these. I think I found satisfactory focus points, though:

I also photographed some queen anne's lace as it was sunlit; it looked very nice against a little meadow:

Also, yarrow:

The aster flowers at Magnuson are just about to bloom; I didn't get any blogworthy pictures this time around but I'll be back there soon and you can bet that I'll "harvest" some good pictures then!

I also went to Richmond Beach recently for a sunset and decided to try to shoot the sunset through gone-to-seed dandelion heads. I didn't get any good ones with the sun directly behind the head, although that would have been cool; the ones I got had the horizon so tipped that they are useless. (It was so breezy that setting up a tripod would have been impractical, since the shot itself was continuously changing). But they were at least promising, so I've got something to try next time. Here are a couple decent shots, though:

Summer weather yesterday and today! Is it here to stay......??

Prairie Fire

The other day I hiked the Bean Creek Basin Trail (#1391.1 in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest), which is a bit north of Cle Elum. It's the farthest I've ever gone for a hike, and the farthest I'll go, at least for some time (longer trips are a bit expensive gas-wise). I found it, as I find many of my hikes, through the Washington Trails Association website when looking for good hikes to view Indian Paintbrush flowers. The Bean Creek Trail didn't disappoint.

The meadows at the very top of the trail are the highlight. Little dribbles of water crisscross the fields before they coalesce into Bean Creek; these tiny streams keep the growth very green and lush, supporting a surprisingly thick meadow of Indian Paintbrush and other flowers.

Incidentally, note the color of the mountain in the background, and how reddish-orange the rocks and dirt are. I am not sure why this is. But it seems to me that on the west side, I usually come back from a hike and the mud dries to a brownish-gray. On this hike, even the mud dried on my boots to more of a reddish-orange. Obviously the dirt/rock composition is different, but I'm not sure how or why.

There were other cool sights along the trail as well, including a lot of lupine in bloom:

I saw three flower types that I had not previously encountered. The first is elephant's head (Pedicularis groenlandica), the next two are scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata), and the fourth picture, I think, is Columbia monkshood (Aconitum columbianum).

There were also some nice views of the creek:

Finally, there were some sweet mountain views. Unfortunately, as you can see from the first of the next two photographs, a lot of the trees (I'm not sure what variety) are pretty brownish and sick-looking. This made the lower reaches of the trail a lot less interesting.

Still, a worthwhile hike! That is, if you don't mind walking 3 miles nonstop uphill. My advice: start early in the day. Some people I passed were starting on the trail quite late, at noon or even 1pm. While I don't expect people to get up at 4am with me, there are reasons to start an uphill hike, especially one east of the Cascade crest, early in the morning rather than during the hottest part of the day. Oh well, to each his/her own!

My Own Private Wilderness

Just about. At 6:30 AM, I was the first to the trailhead parking lot. Although that isn't really surprising, I do indulge in a bit of pride when I am the first one on a trail or at a park. It makes me feel special, like the sunlight on the mountains, the lovely flowers, and the rushing creek are all there just for me. The solitude and the beauty of it all even prompted me to dance around a bit next to the creek.

The hike I took was the Gold Creek Trail (#1314 in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie Forest, enters the Alpine Lakes Wilderness). I'd seen the valley from I-90 on family drives, and it's very lovely-looking from the interstate. The last time we drove past it, I thought to myself, "There must be a trail there somewhere!" I took note of the nearest exit number (54) and with brilliant cartographic and Internet detective work, found the Gold Creek Trail. Although the parking lot is just a stone's throw from the I-90, you have to walk about a mile down a residential street to get to the trail proper, which probably explains why the trail wasn't very crowded. I didn't see anyone until noon, and even after that only a few groups.

The trail is fairly level, with some relatively forgiving ups and downs, passing through hemlock forests. Occasionally the trail opens up to hillside clearings and/or views of the Gold Creek valley and surrounding mountains. At one point, it drops down to the river shore. The trail isn't too difficult, although the creek crossings get trickier as you go on. I myself got probably about 3.5 or 4 miles in (not counting getting to the trail). I figured out a way to keep going, but I needed to be back for that evening. Next time, I'll keep my evening free and press on (the maintained trail is about 5.4 miles long, with another couple miles unmaintained after that).

First, the flowers. Although the fireweed - my favorite - still haven't quite bloomed yet at the trail's elevation (circa 3000 ft), a mosaic of other flowers are in bloom. First is Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja parviflora, I think, or another Castilleja species). I understand why they call it a paintbrush, but I don't really perceive what is "Indian" about it. Oh well, it's very pretty, and it was the first time I'd ever seen one, so I was very excited:

Next is tiger lily (lilium columbianum), another flower I saw for the first time. The first two pictures are "standard" closeups, and in the third I managed to put some trees and a hill/mountain in the background, giving some interesting perspective.

Finally is columbine; specifically, "red" or "western" columbine (aquilegia formosa). There were a lot of them at the beginning of the trail. In my characteristic fashion, I experimented with different focus points: one of the following images focuses on the petals, the second on the pollen behind them:

Now, the other stuff. First, the creek. As I mentioned, there's one spot where the trail drops right down to the creek (and supposedly a couple others beyond the extent of my travels). In the following two pictures I used a graduated ND filter (see earlier posts) to darken the sky and trees so I could bring out the shaded river. The third picture is of a small tributary creek's waterfall. In all three pictures, I used a long exposure to blur the water.

There were also some nice views from the trail. In this next picture, I used a graduated ND filter, because the valley was shaded but I wanted the vegetation to still show up against the sunny mountains. I'm not sure if I'm pleased with the end result. It looks almost artificial, like an HDR photograph - the shadows and highlights are almost too harmonized. Nevertheless, it's not bad, and it gives you an idea of the view from the trail:

The forests were almost exclusively western hemlock, with a few Douglas firs and other trees thrown in there. I'm not always the biggest fan of hemlock forests - they aren't the most photogenic tree species - but I might be changing my mind. The forests on the Gold Creek trail, especially the older ones as you get into the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, were very lovely.

Finally, the place where I quit was a wide basin that had been hollowed out some time ago by an avalanche. Vegetation is already recovering, but it still made for some dramatic scenery:

Hopefully I'll get back to this trail in a couple weeks, when the fireweed are blooming (they were just budding on Saturday). Maybe then I'll have more time and will press farther down the trail. I like hiking/picturing in higher elevations, because it makes me feel like it's earlier in the summer. It's still June in the mountains!