The Other Spring

Spring around most of western Washington brings sensations that should be familiar to all of us. The constant sound - sometimes a gentle murmur, sometimes a thundering roar - of cascading water. Falling from the sky onto leaves, from leaves onto the ground, down the hills and along ravines. The feeling of water, from the sky or the trees, falling on one's head. The sight of the luminescent green of moss, young leaves, and unfurling ferns, punctuated occasionally by a white, pink, or yellow forest flower. Mud, sticky mud, everywhere beneath one's feet.

In a few hidden pockets of Western Washington, though, a different spring exists - one characterized by sweeping views of the sky and open, grassy meadows bursting with a kaleidescope of wildflowers. One such place is Deception Pass State Park; this past weekend, I visited the Goose Rock and Lighthouse Point trails. They pass through a variety of ecosystems, including rocky meadows. Ultimately, I didn't escape the rain, but it was still an experience radically different from this year's spring photo trips to date.

According to signs at Goose Rock, its meadows exist because retreating glaciers scraped the hills down to bedrock, and plants grew as soil gradually accumulated.  I have read in other places that thin, rocky soil precludes the growth of trees and large, woody plants due to the lack of water retention throughout the year (very little rain falls during the summer); I would assume that the same principle holds true here. This, in addition to the northward direction of glacial retreat, helps explain why these meadows particularly exist on sunny southern slopes. You can see this on Google Earth - check out Goose Rock, Rosario Head, Burrows Island, and Fidalgo Head to see this phenomenon at work.

Let's move on to some pictures! As usual, I'm going to start with my favorites. This first one features some variety of desert parsley, a flower that I saw several times last year but never photographed in its own right. This first composition ran the risk of being too busy, but at f/4 I was able to eliminate enough background detail to keep the composition harmonious. I like the vertical lines of the grass against the horizontal lines created by the flower clusters.

Next, a few camas shots that I like. Camas are native and grow in spring-wet, summer-dry meadows in the region; their bulbs are not only edible but were a staple for the diets of many First Nations in the Pacific Northwest. They were so valuable, in fact, that some groups periodically burned meadows to prevent forest encroachment and maintain a favorable habitat for the camas.

The first images comes from the Lighthouse Point trail; the yellow flowers in the background are buttercups and desert parsley. I used f/5.6 - not quite the widest aperture, because I didn't want to lose quite that much detail in the foreground flower. In this case, f/5.6 still provided satisfactory background blur.

The second comes from the summit of Goose Rock. I like the simplicity of the composition and the loneliness of the flower; I only wish I had used a wider aperture (f/5.6, what I used, is pretty wide, but I could have used even a bit less detail in the background). Still, I like how it turned out.

This final camas shot also came from the Lighthouse Point area; one of its large rock faces is in the background. As in an earlier shot, I like the contrasting line directions; the camas stem is straight up, but the grass and rock slope are diagonal, as are the desert parsley flower clusters. I think this adds depth to the composition. I actually stopped down all the way to f/10, so that the flowers and rocks in the background wouldn't be totally formless; I had tried a wider aperture but didn't like it.

...And then there was this plant, which I don't think I've seen before. I'm thinking it's a meadow death camas. It's called "death camas" because its poisonous bulbs closely resemble the edible bulbs of the camas. I like this picture because the out-of-focus yellow flowers in the background give it an interesting texture, I think. I stopped down to f/9 to maintain plenty of detail in the flower cluster itself, and to keep the background flowers a bit more distinct.

There were also some paintbrush blooming around Goose Rock (I think these are harsh paintbrush). For this picture, I used f/7.1. In hindsight, I wish I had used a wider aperture to reduce the background splotchiness. It doesn't kill the composition, but it makes it less compelling than it should be. Still, I like it, and the diffuse backlighting makes the flowers seem luminescent against the shaded background.

This shot of desert parsley isn't as captivating as the first, but I thought I'd post it. I think the aperture of f/5 that I chose serves it well.

Although most of my photographs came from the meadows, I did take a few in Deception Pass's forests. The first features the flowers of what I believe to be red elderberry, with a Douglas fir trunk in the background. I used f/9 to keep the trunk and flowers in the background discernible.

The next one features a blooming madrone (arbutus) tree. I have never seen one of these trees with such picturesque blossoms. They usually look pretty scraggly, even in the spring. I would have liked to try out some pictures closer to the tree, but alas, I could not have done so without trampling the meadows.  The picture was more difficult to take than it looks - to get both the madrone and the firs in the background in focus, I had to stop all the way down to f/20 and set the focus point between them (intentionally rendering them both blurry in the viewfinder, which is always an interesting experience).

Finally, some shoots of new growth on a salal plant. This picture uses f/4; I had one with a slightly wider aperture that I liked better but in it the foreground didn't end up sharp for some reason. Still, kind of a cool scene, even if the background gets a bit distracting.

Before I sign off, I'll just say a word about a couple pieces of equipment (besides camera and lenses, of course) without which many of today's pictures would have been painful and/or impossible to take. The first was my small tripod, whose legs are only a few inches long and can be spread out so that the camera's point of few is only a few inches above the ground. The second was a viewfinder attachment that allows me to look through the viewfinder at right angles to my camera. Thus, if I have my camera flat close to the ground, I can point this attachment straight up and look through the viewfinder through this attachment rather than having to get my eyes down to the camera's level. This saves my body a lot of wear and tear on the trail!

Alright, we're done! Bonus points to anyone who actually read the entire post...!

Stillaguamish Spring

There are different ways to enjoy rivers on foot in the Puget Sound. One is more classic hiking trails that feature big rocks, narrow canyons, big trees and crashing rapids. Another is via walking trails, sometimes in parks and sometimes not, in a more pastoral setting. The rivers are broad and pass through majestic colonnades of cottonwood and alder. River Meadows County Park, in Snohomish County near Arlington, fits into the latter scenario.

The park adjoins the South Fork Stillaguamish River, with broad lawns, grassy meadows, and cheery deciduous forests. The morning featured frequent rain showers - not downpours, but enough to be a nuisance. But, happily, the rain cleared up for a few hours, and there were even a few minutes of "sunshine" (brighter clouds) before they darkened again and rain resumed.

I'll start things off with my most interesting two shots. The first is of Pacific bleeding heart. The selective focus of the image belies the aperture I used - no less than f/18! I didn't want the trees in the background to be a formless blur; I wanted to put the flowers in some context. Since I was already so close to them, I needed to stop that far down to get it.

This second combines salmonberry flowers with a nice view of the river. As in the last picture, for similar reasons (even though I was not quite as close to the subject), I used an aperture of f/18 to make the river and trees in the background discernible.

The rest of the images are experiments, the results of which I consider to be less than stellar but still worth posting.

Bleeding heart, once again f/18 (this seems to have been the aperture of the day!). I want to capture the sweep of a large cluster of the flowers.

In the next two, I attempted to capture the contrast between alder leaves, which are green, and cottonwood leaves, which are much more yellowish early in the spring. I used very narrow apertures for both (f/22 and f/32, respectively) to maximize depth of field. I'm not sure how compelling the compositions are, but the color contrast comes through. I took a vertical version of the last picture, to conform more to the contour of the alder in the foreground, but liked the horizontal version better.

That's all for now, folks. Perhaps the advertised nice weather this week will provide some sunrise/sunset opportunities; otherwise, next weekend will bring more adventures. Cheers!

The Trouble With Trillium

This past weekend, I made an early morning trip to Cougar Mountain, the Wilderness Creek trail in particular (I explored a couple others, ultimately, but all of my pictures came from the former). Spring has sprung, with even some trillium flowers beginning to pop up! The majority have not, but a few are brightening the forest. They were joined in a few places by some sort of yellow violet, with maroon lines on the petals (unfortunately, no pictures turned out).

I actually found it quite difficult to take satisfactory pictures of the trillium flowers, despite their seemingly very picturesque qualities. The troubles were twofold as follows.

• Technical: The trillium flowers all fell in my tripod coverage's gap. I have a small tripod that's only a few inches high, and a large tripod that ranges from about six feet down to about one foot. The trillium flowers were taller than my small tripod, and too short to photograph with my large tripod (at least with the compositions I had in mind - none of the flowers that morning lent themselves well to a birds-eye-view perspective). The first shot I am posting I took with my small tripod, but with the legs bunched together to add height. The second shot  was handheld. In both cases, I lost the tripod stability that I prefer, thus losing some sharpness. To bump up shutter speed, had to boot up the ISO to 500, which adds some noise, and underexpose slightly, which worsens that problem.

• Compositional: Careful readers of this blog will remember my discussion of the difficulties with flower portraits. How do you place the flower either in an interesting context or present it in a compelling way, that's not just a flat picture of the flower? Context was hard with the trilliums, as the forest floor was still rather brown and cluttered, and the trees were sunlit and thus too contrasty. Also, trillium flowers are so perfectly shaped - with three nearly identical petals immediately above three nearly identical leaves - that they are hard to present in a manner more interesting than a straight-on, top-down shot.

By far my most interesting composition of the morning was of an opening trillium, with the two leaves in the background cradling the bud (this was the only flower I saw that morning that had its leaves arranged in this way). It's not as sharp as I prefer, but I think it might be adequate, and anyway, it's an interesting composition. Dost ask which aperture I used? F/4.5. I started with a narrower aperture, because I wanted more detail in the bud, but this cluttered up the background too much.

This next was the best of my trillium portraits, both compositionally and technically in terms of sharpness. Since I wasn't directly in front of the plant, and since the flower came out diagonally a bit relative to the leaves, the photograph has a side perspective and off-center subject placement that I've found difficult to do convincingly with other trillium shots.

Happy April! Until next time...