Return of the Salmonberry

Today, while not quite as paradoxical as its immediate predecessor, was close. The morning dawned with the underside of high clouds aflame with red and pink. Soon the color faded, however, and what remained was an overcast and unusually frigid March morning. Frost hung on the grass. Even a few patches of snow remained from yesterday morning's snowstorm, which had ended as oddly and abruptly as it had begun, giving way to a cheery spring sun still not warm, high, or long-lasting enough to reach all of shadow's cold refuges.

I returned to Meadowdale Beach Park to finish last week's unfinished business. The salmonberry flowers were undaunted by the cold. Indeed, I got one of my best salmonberry portraits to date. Flower portraits are tricky; you want to have some sort of unique context or perspective without distracting from the flower itself - but you need that extra component, otherwise the photograph is pretty but relatively uninspiring. I think this first image does the trick by incorporating a second flower and a bud in the background. They give the image some context while not compromising the centrality of the foreground flower. I used f/6.3 to keep the aforementioned background objects from becoming formless blobs.

This second image is a different angle of the same flowers, also at f/6.3. It's less perfect, but it has a different feel to it, due to the vertical perspective and the inclusion of a bit of sky in the background.

The next photograph puts salmonberry flowers in a bit more context. I wanted a flower shot with some mossy trunks and branches in the background. I actually tried this shot on two occasions during my hike. The first time, the air was a bit breezy and I had to use a quite high ISO to get a reasonable shutter speed at f/20, the aperture I needed to get adequate background detail (I actually would have liked more, but that would have been even more difficult). My results were still not very sharp and the noise was high. On my way back, I was able to use "only" ISO 500. It's not as awesome as it was in my mind's eye; I'll have to come back to it eventually to decide whether it was worth all the trouble.

The next one I rather like. The morning sunlight was beginning to burn through the clouds, although it was still diffused a bit; it was also still angled. All this made for some very interesting lighting. I wanted to put the salmonberry flowers out of focus to emphasize the idea of the forest. I stopped down to f/9, though, so they would retain something of a discernible form. They give the forest a cheery aesthetic. I don't like the half-trunk on the right side. This partially has to do with the crop; I cropped it to a standard 8x10 dimension. It would obviously look different at other sizes. In a final edit, I might crop a bit more out from an 8x10; the bottom could afford to lose a bit. Other than that, I think this one turned out well.

Next is a shot of the same plant and the same background, from a slightly different angle and with the flowers in focus this time. The filtered sunshine brings out the salmonberry plant more than overcast lighting would have. I used f/9 to keep some detail in the background trunks, thus preserving the image's context.

Finally, a shot of a broadleaf maple overlooking the alder and salmonberry forest. A bit of slight, filtered backlighting made the mossy maple branches stand out.

Eventually, the filtered, angled sunlight changed into overhead, direct sunlight, rendering the forests a contrasty mess to a camera's sensor. I was fortunate to have been outside with my camera during such choice conditions!