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?