My First PCT Foray

On Saturday, I visited the Pacific Crest Trail going north from Snoqualmie Pass toward the Kendall Katwalk (I didn't make it all the way to the Katwalk...I had other objectives in mind). This post is a bit bittersweet because it probably marks my last long summer hike. The next two weekends are busy; after that, if I have time to hike, summer may well be gone from the mountains. This is not to say that I don't enjoy or appreciate autumn. I do. But summer has always been and will always be my favorite, and I'll miss long, warm days and wildflowers.

The weather and scenery were echoed this sentiment on Saturday. Skies were crystal clear but the air was very chilly early on, and there was a stiff breeze; it definitely felt a bit like autumn. Some of the wildflowers along the upper slopes were still blooming, but most had begun going to seed, or were at least looking old and disheveled.

...I say most because the numerous fireweed stands all along the trail were in full bloom, and thus very impressive. This first picture, made early along during the hike, was my favorite of the whole trip. The polarization of the sky is a bit uneven, but it's not too striking. Mostly, I am pleased that the lighting turned out well, with good tonal definition in both the foreground and the sunlit mountain. I tried a wide variety of apertures, and ended up choosing f/6.3, the widest (I didn't go any narrower because I wanted the whole front flower stalk to be in focus). Narrower apertures created too much detail in the mountains, taking the focus off the fireweed stalk and making the image too busy.

That early lighting on the mountains afforded me two other opportunities. I really liked the way the sun was streaking onto the mountain from the side. On the second of this set, I wanted to juxtapose the sunny mountain against the shaded valley; I don't think the valley has enough depth or contour but I thought I'd post the picture. Maybe some color and lighting work would bring out the concept I had in mind when I shot the photograph.

The next two are some wide-angle perspectives of the rocky mountainsides. It was still relatively early, but already the lighting was a bit harsh. I still like the looks of them, though. You will notice the uneven sky polarization. I scaled back the polarizing filter a bit, in anticipation of this effect, but obviously not enough. I used relatively narrow apertures (f/16 I think) to make sure everything from the foreground rocks to the background peaks was in focus.

Finally, a few floral shots. The first two are Indian hellebore, the third some sort of penstemon, the fourth a scarlet painbrush. In all of these pictures I sought out natural diffusion - i.e. an area where the harsh, close-to-midday sunlight was partially diffused by leaves, softening its effects a bit. None of these images is fantastic, but they're alright. Even with the natural diffusion, though, the picture of the penstemon is inordinately contrasty.

More Magnuson Mornings!

This week, I returned to Magnuson twice. I am starting to recognize people who walk there every morning...and I am also starting to recognize some of their annoying dogs who always try to steal filters out of my backpack and get water all over my stuff (of course, they visit me after just having gone swimming). Honestly, if a park has an "off leash" area, that does not make the rest of the park a "let your dogs run around out of control and allow them to harass other park users" area.

Anyway, to business. This first one is far and away my favorite from either morning. It is the interior of a chicory flower, just beginning to open, with morning sunlight shafting through it. It took me a couple of attempts to find a flower facing the right way - I could not get this shot from flowers directly facing the sun, because I would have to get directly in front of the flower, thus blocking the low-angled sunlight (this was just a few minutes after sunrise). Since it was such a warm morning, the chicory flowers began opening very quickly, much to my benefit.

This next one is from the second morning - on a previous morning, I had done a bit of scouting and noticed that there was some early lighting in a more interior part of the park where there were some aster plants. This was one of my favorites. I used my flash, albeit dialed down to its lowest intensity (although it still made a big difference). This shot was essentially backlit, and without flash the flowers were too dark, almost silhouettes, which was definitely not what I wanted.

It needs some work - the white balance is a bit too warm, I think, and the flowers could use some additional lightening. But it's a good start, I think, and the editing fixes definitely doable.

Here is a closeup from the same spot. I used a narrower aperture than I usually do for closeups - f/14. I did this to get some definition in the dew droplets on the petals while still being able to focus on the flower head. At wider apertures, the dew drops (especially the brighter ones) would have just been splotches.

Next, inspired by my thistle pictures, I decided to try other subjects against the sunrise, again still trying to keep color definition (i.e. not a true silhouette). This was the best. Although it is harder to tell at this small size, there is some definition in the flower. Editing could bring this out further. This picture was from the first morning; I tried to take another on the second, but when I got home I saw that a stem had been in the way and blocked part of the flower...rats!

This backlit chicory flower turned out pretty nicely; some contrast adjustments would certainly be in order, as would color adjustments (the flower looked a bit bluer than this). In general, though, it's okay.

Next, a Queen Anne's lace with sunlight coming from behind it. I don't like the light splotch in the bottom left; otherwise, it's not bad. An aperture of 6.3 made the flower fade out of focus into the background more gradually than a wider aperture would have, giving a better feeling of depth in this case.

Finally, an experimental picture I took with a chicory flower very close up against the sunrise. I don't think it's very compelling (which is why it's last), but I thought I'd show you anyway.

Too Bad It's All Second Growth!

...Well, not all of it is. But much of the Goat Lake trail runs through areas that were logged at one point. Even though the term "second-growth" is sometimes used derisively, these regenerating forests have their own special attributes - pretty groves of alders, meadow flowers, and other scenic things.

Since I was there with my mom, it was more of a hike hike than a photo hike. Because of this, I was unable to finely match lighting conditions and location like I usually do, and found myself in the forest with harsh sunlight. Still, I got a few halfway decent pictures...but they definitely don't represent my best output, so please keep that in mind.

This first one comes from one of the historically logged areas, looking up among some alders. I used my wide-angle lens and tipped my wide-angle lens up; I even retracted the back legs of the tripod so that it was all just barely balancing. The lighting's a bit harsh, as I said, but I think it's okay. The sky doesn't seem too horribly blown out.

This one looks up at a big ol' tree that comes during one of the old-growth sections of the trail. I had to hold my lens in place since gravity kept causing the heavy thing to zoom out!!

Again from one of the second-growth alder glades (the leaves are devil's club, or as Noah puts it, "dinosaur plant"). Since the foreground leaves were shadowed and the lighting in the background was coming from the side, I was able to minimize the consequences of the harsh forest lighting.

This one was a bit risky, but I think it's kind of interesting. I think the bright splotches in the background maintain enough blue definition to keep this picture from looking too gross. But I couldn't get a very narrow depth of field, so the background looks too cluttered, I think.

And from the lake itself. The problem with lake hikes of any length is that it's difficult to avoid arriving at the lake near midday if you don't want to hike in the dark - unless you're unbelievably focused and don't stop anywhere along the way on at least one of the directions. I didn't manage to do this. Still, the upcoming shot of the leaves was all right. I don't like the bare branch in the top third - but that could possibly be cloned out in Lightroom with a bit of effort.

Maybe I'll have to start backpacking. I could start at a lake like this right at dawn. But solo backpacking would be basically out of the question - there'd be too much stuff to carry if I had my photo gear along! So who knows if it'll ever happen.

A New Spiritual Discipline

...And no, the title does not actually refer to photography. Ample words have been written by much smarter people about the spiritual connotations of artistic creation. I am referring to driving on rough gravel roads in a low-clearance passenger car. It is a great way to practice patience and, in some cases, prayer. It certainly requires more of both of these things than sitting on a pillow meditating. (DISCLAIMER: I am kidding. I am in no way trying to denigrate meditation. Don't judge!) But I do think that the long, bumpy road to the Summit Lake trail brought me closer to God.

The trail itself is very nice. Not too long, almost always uphill but never too steep or rocky. The first couple miles are through nice but scenically uneventful forest. The payoff, though, is a few tenths of a mile of sheer bliss at the top. The trail passes through a few meadows jammed with flowers, then descends to a flowery little lake.

A side trail continues along the ridge to a gorgeous view of Mount Rainier. This is where I took my best picture. I had to break a few of my rules to make it possible. First, I upped the ISO to 800 (higher ISOs are more sensitive to light, thus enabling a faster shutter speed, but degrade image quality a bit). Since I needed a rather wide depth of field (f/25), the fastest shutter speed I could get even at ISO 800 was 1/25 sec. I usually don't handhold at this speed but I was at a relatively wide angle and decided to see if I could get away with it. And it worked! Even at a smaller size, you can tell that the picture picked up a few weird splotches - probably dust on my image sensor (these show up more at wider depths of field). Those aren't too difficult to edit out from the sky, though. But other than that...!

Another rule I broke was compositional. I said on this blog last year that positioning small foreground elements above a mountain was a bad idea because it could make the mountain look like just a dirt clump or something. I said that, though, in response to a picture that put a snow-less mountain out of focus behind flowers. In this one, the mountain is snowy and in-focus (not to mention very recognizable as Rainier), so positioning the two valerian flowers above the mountain did not de-contextualize the picture.

The second really good one was from one of the meadows slightly below the summit. There were a lot of blooming magenta paintbrush, and I noticed that one had a nice backdrop of blooming lupine behind it. It had taken me a while to find a single flower of that type in a photogenic context.

Also near the lake some avalanche lilies were blooming. I'm not convinced that I like the background (i.e. the trees up top...the lighting is a bit contrasty and thus perhaps distracting).

As I said, the forests were not terribly scenic, but I actually like this picture. I think it captures the gnarly, snaky branches well.

And this last one was a bit of an experiment. If Julian ever read this blog, he'd be disappointed because he hates flash and I used flash, albeit low-intensity, for this shot. Is it too obvious that I used flash? Would it still be too obvious if I brightened the shadows in the bottom left-hand quarter?

Thistle Man, He Played One, He Took Pictures Of The Sun

I've been to Magnuson Park a couple times recently for sunrises, and I intend to do this a few times again next week. For this, I will practice my planning skills! I'm rolling the two trips into one post because the results of my first trip were so poor.

My brother, Julian, never reads this. If you read this within a week of posting, Julian, I'll buy you a milkshake!

Indeed, this was my only worthwhile picture of the morning; this is a chicory flower as it is opening (they close up at night). It's not quite as sharp as I'd have liked, but it's pretty striking. It looks like I used a pretty narrow depth of field - in fact, I used an aperture of f/5, which was not as far as I could go. I was so close to the flower, however, that f/5 provided me sufficient blur in the background while still keeping adequate definition in the flower. If there isn't enough depth of field in a flower, the eye has nothing to latch on to. Something has to be in focus.

My next visit was more fruitful. I'll start things out with some sunrise pictures, with thistles in the foreground. The cool thing is that there's still definition in the flowers, particularly in the first picture. Further editing would bring out the color even more. And the water reflections in the third turned out well.

This one, just after sunrise:

And here is a shot of some yarrow. With some touching up, I think the lighting would be really interesting.

Editing Success Stories: Part 2

This is a continuation of my last post, explorations of pictures rescued through Lightroom editing. The first was from RAW; the second from a JPEG because I took it before I started using RAW.

#3) Secret View

This one obviously went horribly wrong. It was almost unsalveagable. As you can see, everything except the mountain in the background is far too dark; the sky and the snow on the mountain are almost too bright. What to do?

I had to edit this one in two phases, because the first ended up not being enough.

Round 1: I boosted the Brightness beyond its default settings, also using Fill Light to create more light. I used the Curves tool to brighten the Darks and Shadows. To keep the sky and mountain from getting too bright, I used Highlight Recovery, darkened the Light tones through Curves, and turned down the Aqua and Blue luminance a bit. I upped the contrast slightly, and added a bit of saturation, to compensate for the underexposed portions' lack of these attributes. I also adjusted the White Balance in a similar fashion as I did the waterfall picture in the last post - I moved the sliders toward the blue and magenta positions, to both accentuate the blue sky and to bring out the contrasts between greens as before.

Round 2: I used some Graduated Filters to move the lighting along further. I used one along each edge except the top, and adjusted the Exposure sliders up until the picture looked nice. I didn't want to make them too bright - this was early morning, after all - but I also wanted them and the branch shapes to stand out. As a final touch, I did some Highlight Recovery because the mountain and the sky seemed a bit too bright.

Here it is. It actually looks a bit better in Lightroom, but it's pretty good here:

#4) Foggy Mountain

This one is probably the least overtly problematic of the four I have reviewed thus far. Still, it needed work before it could be useable.

Using the curves tool, I boosted all the levels of lighting except the highlights. I boosted the blue luminance to get the fog and sky brighter. Then, I used three graduated filters (see previous post). One slightly darkened the top half and added some contrast to keep the mountains from getting washed out. The second I put just in the right-hand corner to brighten that part of the sky and bring it in line with the rest of the sky. The third I used to brighten the dark foliage at the bottom; in this third graduated filter, I also added some saturation and sharpness to replaced for that which was lost due to underexposure.

Here is the finished product. There's still a bit of unevenness in the sky, but it's a lot less noticeable; with a little more work I could get even that taken care of perhaps. The greens don't come out as saturated here as they do in Lightroom. There are a few other little imperfections, but I generally like the result.

Editing Success Stories: Part 1

This post is a story of pictures rescued from death - or, more accurately, from perpetual hard-drive limbo without ever being really used or cherished. I am going to narrate the editing process behind four pictures; I edited all but one of them from RAW. In each case, I will show the camera's JPEG and compare it with my edited picture.

But I'll start with a little disclaimer: Not all these pictures will look exactly as I intended. I'm beginning to question the integrity of some of the clients I use to view pictures. The same picture will look a bit different depending on whether I am viewing it in Lightroom, Preview, Picasa (the program), Picasa (on the Internet), or Blogger. I am trusting Lightroom for now. But just bear in mind that my edits won't always show up quite perfectly on Blogger...so don't judge me!

This will be the first post in a series of two or three, probably.

#1) Waterfall through Leaves

For this first example, the subject matter was so striking that the picture cried out for editing. Check it out. I like the composition, with the waterfall viewed through the leaves...but the colors are boring. It's almost monochromatic in a way. Really, the only visually captivating aspect of this photograph is the waterfall, which really doesn't fill much of the frame.

What is more, the lack of color reduces the feeling of depth. Most good nature photographs (if not all) will have some feeling of depth. This composition gives a bit of this; as you shall see, however, it holds the potential for much more.

Now look at my edited version. As you will probably notice, I did brighten things up a bit. I used the "Exposure" and "Fill Light" sliders to brighten the whole thing (I didn't adjust the "Brightness" slider beyond its default setting for RAW conversion). I also brightened the Dark Tones and Light Tones using the Curves tool. I darkened the Shadows a bit to keep some contrast; I used the "Highlight Recovery" feature to avoid overbrightening the white waterfall.  I also boosted the Contrast slider quite a bit. We're part of the way there!

More importantly, creatively speaking, I changed the white balance. There are two sliders in Lightroom. One controls "color temperature" (basically, from more bluish to more yellowish) and the other controls "tint" (basically, from more greenish to more magenta-ish).

I changed both. On the first, I chose a cooler color temperature. That did not have a striking effect, although it did make the picture more accurate - the subtle blue shift connoted that the picture was taken in the evening rather than on an overcast day. This wasn't a very consequential change, though.

On the second slider, I moved the tint toward the magenta-ish side, away from the green side. This might seem counterintuitive due to the predominantly green colors. In fact, doing this just a moderate amount greatly accentuated the contrast between greens - particularly, between the leaves in the foreground and the forests in the background.

Check out the results. The color contrast creates a much better feeling of depth, and generally a more compelling image.

#2) Daisies and Orchard

This was the one for which I did not actually use RAW. I had too difficult of a time with the lighting, so I ultimately traded a bit of the image quality in exchange for building on some of the lighting correction that a JPEG file has already done. The whole picture is rather dark, the upper right hand especially so. All this happened for two reasons: I needed to keep a quick shutter speed due to this picture's being handheld, and I didn't want to overexpose the daisies. In hindsight I could have boosted the exposure a notch in the field. Too late for that, though!

First of all, I cranked up the "Exposure" slider to make the whole thing brighter. I did this to a considerable degree, so I had to make some other changes to mitigate its effects. I used the "Black Clipping" feature to slightly darken the darkest areas of the picture, so things wouldn't look washed out. I used "Highlight Recovery" to keep the white daisy petals from becoming overexposed. I took down yellow luminance a few points as well, to keep the daisy pollen from becoming overexposed.

Then, I used a nifty Lightroom feature called the Graduated Filter. It works similarly to a real graduated filter, except you can set up gradients of different attributes - brightness, contrast, exposure, saturation, sharpness, and others. Or combinations of these. I set it up to brighten the top right corner of the picture (with the effect fading as it approached the other parts of the picture). I finally upped the contrast and played around a bit with the color settings. I thought the picture was a bit too yellowish so I moved the white balance slider a few points toward a cooler temperature and the tint slider a few points toward green. I couldn't do much, though - when you're starting with a JPEG, it's a good idea to be a lot more subtle about color changes.

Give Peas a Chance

The weedy pea flowers (not sure what species) are in full bloom at Discovery Park. I arrived in time for sunrise this morning. This photo was my best. I'd rather have the sun off-center, but I tried cropping the picture in a few different ways and keeping it the sun in the middle resulted in the most pleasing composition along with the other elements (the positions of the trees and flowers especially).

The next shot looks a bit fisheye-ish, an effect that was actually not intentional. I think it was a combination of some distortion on the part of my lens and the graceful slopes that the flowers were actually on. You can actually fix that, at least a bit, in Lightroom. At any rate, the colors and lighitng turned out fairly well, although I'd want to boost the sky colors a tad.

The next picture came shortly after the aforeposted sunrise shot. The soft sunrise lighting came through well.

I also found some thistles blooming (not sure what kind yet). By this point in the morning, the sunlight was getting a bit bright and harsh for my tastes, but I still found interesting interplays of sunshine and shadow:

And finally, some shots of the same type of plant gone to seed (a different stand). The first one was a bit of a Hail Mary in that I wasn't actually looking through the camera when I took the picture. I zoomed the lens all the way out, pointed the camera where I thought it would need to go, and took the picture. It turned out better than it could have, although it's certainly not perfect. A wider depth of field would have been nice...but that would have required a longer shutter speed, and thus a tripod; my small tripod was not practical in the thick grass.