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!