I'd like to start with some shots that I actually tried twice during my trip. The first I had tried once during midday, with acceptable results. I wanted to try it again, though, with more dramatic lighting, so the following dawn I huffed and puffed back up the hill to the same balsamroot plant. The sunrise lighting wasn't as amazing as I'd hoped, but even the little stripe of pinkish sky in the background livens things up. I used f/25 to maximize my depth of field; a trick to help is to set the focus point behind the foreground rather than directly on it. This helps keep the background sharp.
For the next image, my original results had actually been satisfactory, but not quite good enough. I took the original during the late afternoon, and while the light was starting to get attractive, it was still a bit splotchy and distracting. The next morning, which was overcast after a brief few minutes of sunshine at sunrise, provided more ideal lighting conditions. In post-processing, I would definitely adjust the contrast in the top half of the image to accentuate the Palouse landforms. I used f/32 and set my focus point on the rearmost flowers to keep everything in focus.
The next image, framing desert parsley against the Palouse farmland, was similarly originally taken during too-sunny lighting conditions. Although it took some doing, I was able to locate the exact same group of flowers the next morning. Although this image isn't as striking as the ones above, I still like it. The only problem is that all of the vertical lines are tilted - the flower stems and the tree all point to the left. This gives the picture a bit of a crooked feel, even though I was actually quite careful to keep it level with the horizon. I used f/14 to preserve some detail in the background.
For now, we'll stick with the theme of juxtaposing the Palouse against flowers. I actually really like this image; I think it has a good sense of depth. This would have been better with sunrise lighting, perhaps, but it's still nice. By now, if you've been reading this and other posts carefully, you can predict what I did to keep everything in focus: stopped down to f/29, set my focus point slightly behind the foreground.
The next one actually came from midday, while the sun was shining! Rare, I know. But the sunshine was filtered a bit by high clouds, and illuminated these balsamroot flowers in a surprisingly attractive way. I had to stop down all the way to f/22 to keep some detail in the distant farmland.
The next one captures the vibrancy of the balsamroot flowers. I tried this shot at several different apertures, and the one you see below is at f/13. Even though I actually would have preferred a wider depth of field, my results with a narrower aperture lost so much sharpness to both diffraction and motion blur (the flowers moved ever so slightly in a breeze) that I ended up preferring the (relatively) wider aperture.
Now I'll move on to some more intimate wildflower images. This first one is probably my least conventional composition of the bunch. I stopped down to f/18 so that I could retain some detail in the paintbrush in the background. I don't like the splotchy white areas in the background, but otherwise, I think this was a neat idea. You'll see more compositions with a similar concept in future posts...
More paintbrush and desert parsley, this time in a more conventional format. This time, I used f/3.3, since the objects were all much closer to each other and because I was much less concerned with preserving background detail.
Another nice portrait follows below, this one of a larkspur of some sort. This one was actually a bit of a challenge, if only because a lot of these plants looked rather motley, and it took a while to spot one that both looked nice and was at a good height given my tripod coverage. I like this composition because the background flowers on either side provide a bit of symmetry.
This one captures some paintbrush that had just begun to bloom. The first time I tried to photograph these flowers, it didn't work - it was sunny and about noon at the time, and the only way to manage the lighting well was to shade them with my body. I was unable to do both that and actually compose the shot (I had to set the camera up on my baby tripod, and thus needed my body to be rather low to the ground). The second time I passed the flowers, though, they were shaded. I used f/3.3, and even at that wide aperture the background is still a bit distracting. I think the diagonal color change is also distracting in and of itself.
Finally, I'll close with the theme on which this post began: sunrise lighting. I'm posting this one last because, even though I like it, it needs quite a bit of work. Even using a graduated neutral density filter, the trees are too dark. They aren't so far gone that some work in Lightroom couldn't bring them out, though. And the skies and meadows aren't too bad. I used an aperture of f/16 to keep everything in focus; I was far enough away from the meadow that I didn't need to use anything narrower.
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