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!