Divine Landscaping

On a whim the other evening, I hiked the Big Four Ice Caves trail. It's only a mile or so long, making it perfect for an evening hike. I ended up having the evening free, saw that it was not going to start raining until at least a few hours after dark...and off I went!

This is probably my favorite composition of the evening. Yes, this scene was just in the forest, even though it appears to be part of a garden. This is what I love about bunchberry flowers - they form these gorgeous carpets of perfect little flowers on top of perfect little clusters of leaves, often looking like an intentional botanical arrangement.

Up at the top of the trail, near the snowfields, there are some meadows that are chock full of valerian and lupine, and other flowers (including partridgefoot, a new one!) forming beautiful little rock gardens:

There were some snowmelt waterfalls cascading down the mountainside. I found one that I was able to photograph along with some snowfields up above and some trees down below.

Judging from the shape of the trees, there must be some strong winds here during the winter or something. Check it out:

Regarding this next one, I like the composition but am not pleased with how the depth of field turned out. I had wanted sharpness from the flowers in the foreground all the way back to the mountain (hence shooting at f/25). But I think the flowers were so close to the lens that the background still ended up a bit blurry. In my next post, I'll talk about a depth of field tactic that I learned more recently that maybe I'll attempt in scenes like this. I also tried a narrow depth of field on some loosely similar compositions. Unfortunately, I continued using my wide-angle lens, which doesn't have a very wide maximum aperture. I should have switched to my macro lens.

On the drive in, I had seen a couple of scenes along the road that I wanted to photograph on my way back. One was a pretty little creek flowing through a grove of alder trees, the other was a stand of blooming fireweed next to a grove of alders overlooking another creek. My pictures of the first scene did not turn out well, unfortunately. My pictures of the second scene were not fantastic either - partially due to my own haste (darkness was gathering) and partially due to the slight breeze and the fact that the scene was not as photogenic as it had looked from the car coming the other way. Still, one of the pictures was acceptable, if not "good":

Lastly, here is one that I had debated about whether to post, but here it is: some sort of penstemon with trees and the mountain in the background. The filtered sunshine helped make the flowers luminous, but was almost too strong/contrasty.