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.