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.