I was hardly able to believe my luck - two days of good lighting in a row! Sunday afternoon saw lightly filtered sunshine. And although there was a light breeze, I fortunately wasn't focusing on closeups. I ambled down to Boeing Creek Park, one of my favorites, to see what was going on.
For this first image, I was attracted by the backlit Indian Plum leaves, and I wanted to find a way to incorporate them with the mossy trees in the background. My first composition from this spot actually set the leaves all around the frame, with the trees showing up in the center. Theoretically, this would have worked. In practice, though, two factors conspired against it: A splotchy patch of white sky showed up at the top of the frame, and the composition included a big ugly dead maple leaf hanging in the bush (and there was no way I could remove it without killing about a hundred plants).
So I brought the camera higher and chose this composition. There was still a problem: at f/9, not all of the background was in focus! I didn't want to stop down past f/9 because I didn't want any more deetail in the foreground. I tried a few different focus points; my most pleasing results came from focusing on the tree on the right, which is the most prominent.
This second image is not quite as striking as I had envisioned but I thought I would post it anyway. I think the bush opening up is a red elderberry, with a big old Douglas fir in the background (one of the park's remnant giants). I used f/5 to achieve as much selective focus as I could. The trunk doesn't show up as vividly as I had imagined it would...but I still think it's an interesting shot.
Toodle-oo!
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