Leapin' Lupine

As the post's title suggests, Discovery Park is awash with lupine right now. Lupine and other flowers. Discovery Park, in point of fact, is probably one of my favorite floral destinations, and certainly my favorite within the Seattle metro area. From February through August - and especially from May through July - the park provides a kaleidoscopic floral display.

This post's first image actually features a subject other than lupine: oxeye daisy, which also litter Discovery Park's beach-area trails with late spring blooms. It is my most adventurous composition from the afternoon. I tried something like this last year, but wanted to take another stab at it: I wanted to have a daisy flower in the foreground with perceptible lupine in the background. In this case, to keep the lupine perceptible, I stopped down all the way to f/18. The result is not quite as amazing as I'd hoped, but I still like it. I want to play with the lighting and contrast in the top part of the image - to see if I can bring out the greens and purples a bit more vividly.

Next, as advertised, is an actual picture of lupine. While most of the flowers were a solid purple, a handful of plants featured flowers that were partially a darker purple and partially white. I think that the image below nicely captures the vibrant color of these plants, while juxtaposing them against the solid purple flowers in the background. Since I was backed up a bit away from the large plants, I opened up to f/3 to minimize background detail. The image's biggest flaw is the visible spider web strands in the top half of the frame. Otherwise, I like it.

This one gives you an idea of what Discovery Park looks like now, at least near the beaches. I only needed to stop down to f/13 to get the whole shebang in focus. I think the meadow's slight slope adds interest to the image, as does the tall grass in the foreground.

And finally, this image of some sort of vetch in bloom. Although it's an improvement over my vetch images from last year, I still don't really know if it's all that captivating. I used f/6.3 to accentuate the contour of the leaves in the background. I have yet to take a picture of vetch that I really like. We'll keep trying!