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!

Gold Creek, Round 2

I wanted to take another crack at the Gold Creek trail, partially to get some more fireweed pictures in this season and partially just because I liked the trail. To my surprise, a lot of the fireweed on the trail still haven't bloomed yet! Still, a few were blooming, and I found some other things along the way too.

The highlight of the hike was probably the fog.The nights are long enough now that when it is clear and not too warm, the cool air - especially when it collects in wind-sheltered valleys - has time to cool to its saturation point and create fog. I noticed this on my drive that morning; hilltops were usually clear but a thin mist often hung over valleys. The Gold Creek valley was in a thick fog when I arrived.

The sun was warm that day, though, and didn't take long to burn off the fog. I made it to a viewpoint at just the right time, and got some sweet pictures of the fog lifting:

I found a new kind of flower! I'd seen it before in some parks around here, but I'd never taken pictures of it. It's called Cooley's Hedge Nettle (stachys cooleyae). You can find them here and there in Seattle-area parks, but they were everywhere on the Gold Creek trail.

Most of the wooded areas along the trail look pretty dry, but there are a few moister areas with some devil's club growing. Devil's club always makes me think of a jungle.

Now the fireweed pictures. I was not altogether very pleased with how they turned out. A lot of them just looked a bit to midday-ish (i.e. too high of contrast, with the rich color of the blossoms not coming through too well). Nevertheless, here are the more tolerable ones.

Finally, I took this interesting picture from Gold Creek Pond, which lies at the beginning of the trail (strictly speaking, before - you pass the Pond and then walk a mile along a residential road before actually getting to the Gold Creek Trail). There are those who might say that I overpolarized this one (i.e. cut too much glare from the surface of the water), but  I like how the rocks at the bottom of the pond are visible in the foreground. I think the blue of both water and sky are spoken for well enough in other parts of the picture.