Leapin' Lupine, 2nd Edition

Despite this morning's rain - whose onset came much earlier than advertised - I did manage to steal a bit of time this morning to photograph. This morning's destination was Magnuson Park. Its trails, while admittedly not as extensive as Discovery Park, feature many of the same meadow flowers, such as lupine, daisies, vetch, wild rose, and others.

The first photograph is not of lupine at all, the post's title notwithstanding. It is of a wild rose. I'm not confident on whether it's a nootka rose or a baldhip rose...or what. Last year I did a closeup of a rose as well. While it's lighting was cool, the angle was straight on, and so the image didn't have any depth to it. This morning's image improves on the perspective by looking at the flower from an angle. Including the out-of-focus petals in the foreground adds depth. I used f/14 to keep a lot of the flower's center in focus and to keep some definition in the petals (I wanted them to be discernible and not blobs).

Here's another cool perspective of a wild rose. It doesn't really observe the rule of thirds, but I still think it's compelling. I used f/14 again to keep the flower in the background discernible; it adds necessary context to this photograph. The close side view of the foreground flower produces a strong feeling of intimacy, I think.

Now we'll begin the transition from roses to the post's namesake. The image below was actually the last of a variety of perspectives and apertures of this scene. First, I preferred a vertical perspective over a horizontal one, first of all, because it included more lupine and reinforced their vertical lines. Second, I preferred a narrower aperture (f/6.3 in this case over, say, f/32, which I believe was the one that I tried) because it simplified the background enough to make the rose at the top of the image stand out.

For this one, despite its selective-focus appearance, I used f/22. I wanted to set these lupine flowers in the context of the blooming rose bush in the background, and I needed a narrow aperture to maintain some discernible detail in the rose blossoms. I tried f/14 as well, and even though the foreground was sharper, the composition was not as convincing. I also tried a variety of compositions around this spot; this one was the most compelling and did the best job of minimizing the brownish, withered petals low on some of the lupine plants.

The final image is the earliest, taken immediately after sunrise. I think with some contrast adjustment, the sunrise lighting would come through very well. The sky looks blue, but it was not blue at all - it was in fact almost entirely clouded over, save a thin clear strip on the eastern horizon through which the sun was shining. I tried experimenting with the sunrise lighting against the clouds, but in every case it just looked like a blue-sky background. Still, this one is pleasant. I don't like how the in-focus portion of the photograph is all jammed into the right side, but there's enough going on in the background that this doesn't kill the image. I used f/8 to keep some detail in the background lupine flowers.

It started raining at about 8am...well before I wanted it to, and before when the NWS predicted it would. There were other flowers there that I'd been hoping to photograph. Hopefully there'll be a round 2 in the near future.