If You Can't Beat Them, Include Them

I’ll begin by apologizing, mostly in advance, for the sporadic nature of my posts this summer. My living situation currently does not include Internet access, so there will sometimes be a bit of a delay between a given photo shoot and my subsequent blog post.

Anyway, this post comes to you from Woodstock Farm and the adjacent Interurban Trail near Bellingham. I was hoping the Farm would be perhaps analogous to Discovery Park, at least in terms of floral diversity and views. Alas, it was small, with few flowery areas, few views, and no good views toward the sunset in the northwest (which was blocked a hill or spit or something anyway).

I went out on a bit of a limb for the first picture (actually, the last I took...as usual, I'm going out of order) because I disregarded a rule that I usually follow – I included the sky in a forest composition. I did so mostly because there was no way to exclude it and still position the other elements (i.e. the berries) the way I wanted them. The result was better than I expected – the golden hue of the sunset clouds actually appears, rather than appearing as washed-out splotches of white. Since my camera was metering for the green, I had to respectfully ask my camera to underexpose the image to preserve more golden sky color; the image you see below was the most overexposed of the bunch (which is unusual; I usually don't post extremes). I'm sure the Zone System would have made my exposure of this scene more efficient. I am not yet proficient with the Zone System, mostly because my camera's metering system is pretty good, and where it has failed I have squeezed by on intuition and luck. Soon, though, I will endeavor to learn the Zone System.

The second represents an early attempt to fulfill a New Year's resolution I made - to experiment with including the sky in more of my compositions. There are a few things to like about the image below: the filtered sunlight coming from the right illuminates the blooming ocean spray nicely, and I like the horizontal and diagonal lines provided by the clouds. Overall, though, the image is a bit "flat" in terms of contrast. This is an easy fix, though. The clouds also looked "bluer" and a bit more dramatic to the naked eye; editing from RAW could help with this problem as well.

Back To Square One

Normally, the photos you see here are presented either at their original ratio (about 2x3) or cropped a bit to 8x10. Yesterday, though, I took a trip to Discovery Park, and upon returning, I realized that some of the images were compositionally better suited to being cropped to a square shape.

Also, in other exciting news, fireweed are beginning to bloom in and around Seattle! Careful followers of this blog will remember that this is my favorite type of flower. Most of the plants have not bloomed yet, but in gardens and parks a few pioneering flowers can be seen. One such specimen is featured in the first image of this post.

Back on topic, the first image is also one of the ones that I am presenting in a square aspect ratio. This is because the square crop suits the shape of the flower; other than it and the adjacent sun peeking out from behind it, there is little of interest in the image. So why include it?

I used an aperture of f/14 - although I would have liked to blur the background even more than I did, you need to narrow the aperture in order to produce the sun rats that you see here; at wider apertures, the sun looks like more of a roundish blob (which is fine in some compositions, but not how this one needed to turn out). The sun was already partially obscured by the trees in the background, and I obscured it even more with the the flower and leaves in the foreground. Thus only a quite small bit of the sun was actually directly shining on the camera. This was good (1) because this cut down on lens flare, of which there are only a couple small spots; and (2) because this enabled me to expose for the flower without blowing out the sun or the background highlights. There is still lens flare, but the areas are small enough that I might be able to deal with at least some of them with a bit of Lightroom wizardry.

Here's another one; in this case, the square crop was due to the arrangement of buds on the stalk. The original photo was vertically oriented; a different crop (e.g. 8x10) would have created too much dead space above and below the foreground buds.

I used an aperture of f/16 to show some detail in the fireweed flowers in the background; I wanted to juxtapose the foreground buds against them. This choice ran the risk of making the image to busy; I don't think that it did, though. In editing, some brightening of the foreground buds, since they are all mostly shadowed, might help the image.

The next two pictures are presented at more standard aspect ratios. The first is of a yarrow flower. The background is very grassy, and I initially experimented with narrow apertures in an attempt to incorporate their vertical lines into the composition. None of these attempts was very convincing, however, so I tried a wider aperture instead. I liked this much better, and liked the soft color gradient that the grass and intermittently visible blue sky produced. I also liked the soft lighting, filtered by grass out of frame, that was falling on the flower.

The last image is also of yarrow; I wanted a picture that juxtaposed it against the Puget Sound and the Olympics. This image did not quite live up to my hopes; even at f/40, the Olympics are only somewhat discernible. Still, I like the way the grass and the Sound fill in the background. I'm posting at a basic 8x10 crop, but I'm thinking that a crop closer to the original 2x3 might serve the image well - I would shrink it a bit, eliminating the out-of-focus yarrow flowers at the bottom and make the image more aligned with the rule of thirds. Perhaps.

A Good Old-Fashioned, Honest-To-Goodness Sunrise Trip

Recently I went on a sunrise trip to Magnuson Park, and while I didn't necessarily walk away with any fabulous images, I found some interesting ideas to work with.

When I shot the sunrise itself, I tried two angles. I'm actually going to go out of order, and present the best first, as is my custom. What this one really needs is some contrast work to cut some of the golden glare - not completely, but enough to enhance the green and purple colors in the foreground. The top of the frame is a bit overexposed as well. This was somewhat intentional, as I wanted to sacrifice some detail in the highlights in order to bring out the flowers. I'll have to play with the contrast in post-processing and, ultimately, make the judgment from a print rather than from a computer display.

Also, there were a couple of lens flares in the image. I used Picasa's retouching feature to edit them out. It is rather clumsy compared to Lightroom's options, so if you look closely you might find the edits.

The second one, which I had taken perhaps a minute earlier, is a mixed bag. I like the lighting a lot better - the lower sun created less glare, and facilitated a relatively more even exposure of the foreground and the sunrise.  I don't like the composition, though - the in-focus flowers are too close to dead center. This wouldn't be a problem if the composition were more symmetrical, but it's not. There's too much dead space on the right.

Next is one of my better vetch images to date; it is hard to photograph these flowers in a way that isn't busy. The immediately-after-sunrise lighting adds a rich color to the flower. I shot this at f/14; in retrospect, it might have helped the image to go a little wider than that and blur the background just a bit more.

Finally, an experimental grass shot. I like the idea, but wish I had shown the two grass heads in the lower foreground more prominently. The contrast is also a bit high; the foreground detail doesn't show well. Still, I like this perspective, and will have to play with this idea in the future.

Fiery Angels

Some photographers will say that, on a sunny day, it is only worth photographing within about an hour of sunset or sunrise. While the light is indeed best at this time, this is an unnecessarily restrictive rule. A more useful rule of thumb that I've encountered - I can't remember where - is that is your shadow is as long as or longer than you are tall, the light is good enough to make photography worthwhile. Even this   isn't a hard and fast rule, but it's proved the most useful guideline for sunny-day photography in my experience.


Hence my trip to Magnuson Park on a recent evening to experiment with the light. The first pictures I took - of backlit clover flowers - were what inspired this post's title. It was earlier in the evening when I took this image, so the sunlight was still a little harsh. Fortunately, a tree between the flower and the sun diffused the light a bit. I was attracted to the way the backlighting was illuminating the flower's outline. The backlighting gives the flower a kind of ethereal aura, but the flower - with the lighting and the shape of the petals - also looks a bit fiery. Hence the title of the post.

The next flower kept throbbing violently in the breeze (another pitfall of close-up photography in the late afternoon/evening). The flower is a vetch of some kind. By the time I got a shot that worked, the attractive lighting that had been falling on it was mostly gone. Still, I like the shot. In retrospect, I could have used a wider depth of field than f/4.5 gave me, but I didn't want to give up any more shutter speed.

With this flower, it was a similar story. My only sharp shots were after the lighting had disappeared - this time, my sharpness difficulties were due to the fact that I was using my mini-tripod as a monopod (a role that it is not designed to do), with the legs bunched together. But it's a nice shot. I could not find this in my flower book; I'll continue to search.

The rose below was the last image I took yesterday; I was attracted to the soft, speckled sunlight falling on the flower. I included leaves on all sides of the flower to try to incorporate them into the composition (rather than eliminate them as a distraction, which would have been difficult given their abundance here). A square crop of this image would probably reinforce this further. The out-of-focus leaves in the upper right add depth.

This last one comes from one of the park's wooded paths. I tried this both with and without a graduated ND filter; the one you see here was the one without. I tried using the filter so that I could rescue some of the highlights in the upper half of the frame from overexposure. Ultimately, though, the cottonwood trunks ended up too dark relative to the lower half of the frame, and the filter's presence was both obvious and distracting. Besides, in a photo like this, some blown highlights aren't the end of the world, I suppose. I used an aperture on the narrower side (f/14) to keep everything in focus and star the sun. I would have gone even narrower, but the grass was moving in the wind and I didn't want to have to use any longer of a shutter speed than I did (1/20 sec).

Felix Culpa

This weekend finally gave me an opportunity to venture into the Cascades proper. Much preferring lush, green forests over sloppy, mottled snow, I did so via the Goat Lake trail. My results weren't as spectacular as I would have hoped, but I got some nice shots.

Photographically speaking, long hikes are challenging for a variety of reasons. (1) You have to budget time for movement. In a place like Discovery Park, it doesn't take too long to move between different areas, and you can stay until sunset and have plenty of light to hike out. At a place like Goat Lake, you have to leave time to hike different sections of the trail, and then leave time to hike out before dark! I lost track of the time a few times yesterday early on in the hike, which forced me to hurry later on. (2) You don't have as much flexibility with conditions. In a city park, if conditions aren't ideal, you can either leave and come back (because the park is more accessible), or wait until they improve (it's harder to do this on a long hike due to #1). (3) Destinations at the end of the trail are hard to reach at a time other than midday, so you can't pick and choose lighting conditions.

Incidentally, yesterday was the first time I've ever gone on a major hike and seen other people doing nature photography (I've seen photographers frequently in places like Discovery Park, the Arboretum, etc.). It was nice to see them enjoying nature. Amusingly, I found that I was carrying the most gear of anyone. There were a few with nice cameras who didn't even have a tripod! While I would certainly never expect anyone to carry as much stuff as I do, a tripod is indispensable, especially in a forest situation (although I find that I now use a tripod almost everywhere, all the time, only handholding as a last resort).

I'll start with a couple close-up sort of shots and move on later to images that tend to have more of a landscape feel. The first one features the new growth ("fiddlehead") of some sort of fern. The background is a bit splotchy, but as I've explained before, background management is quite difficult when you're working with the forest floor. F/6.3 is as wide as I wanted to open up the aperture without losing too much detail on the fiddlehead in the foreground.

The next image took forever to get; even so, it isn't totally sharp, but it wast the best I was going to get. I wanted to juxtapose this budding plant against the small waterfalls in the background, and used f/18 to do so. There was a slight breeze, however, and even at ISO 800 I was only able to get a shutter speed of 1/4 a second, which is not much if you're trying to stop a breeze. I like the result, but am not sure if the waterfalls show up clearly enough. I'll have to revisit it and decide.

One of the trail's most impressive features is an area of old-growth trees just before the trail enters the wilderness. I'll get to that later. Ironically, though, I owe one of my absolute favorite spots on the trail to earlier logging. On the lower trail, a short distance before it rejoins the upper trail, there is a grove of red alder (often the first species to regrow following logging) that are beautifully coated with white lichen. So much so, in fact, that many - including a fellow hiker that passed me as I was taking pictures - mistake them for other trees with naturally white bark, such as birch or aspen. I didn't have the heart to correct the hiker, but careful observation will reveal the trees to be red alder. The bark is naturally gray, but lichen can color it white.

Even in this photo below, you can see splotchy gray areas on the trunks. Birch and aspen wouldn't really show this. I like the photo below because I think it presents some depth, with the trees at differing distances. I also like the side lighting, which was somewhat filtered by clouds at the time. I didn't need to overdo it with the aperture, but I did stop down to f/16 to get everything sharply in focus.

A variety of flowers were blooming in this area. The flowers below are Pacific bleeding heart, which I have photographed before, with alder trunks in the background. I used f/18 to bring out the trunks. This is actually pretty similar in concept to one I took back in April; this one differs, though, due to the whiter trunks and the higher placement of the flowers in the frame. I think I like the one from April better; the background is smoother and more unified. But this one is interesting too.

Some shrubs - red elderberry, I think - were also blooming. The first one shows them adorning the forest; I used f/32 to keep everything in focus. Perhaps I could have gotten away with a wider aperture like f/22 (for better sharpness).

There are some magnificent areas of old growth, mostly between the wilderness boundary and the spot where the upper and lower trails rejoin. They are interspersed with second-growth, so the behemoth trunks always came as a pleasant surprise. I like the image below because the branches swooping down give the image some visual energy that straight shots of trunks can sometimes lack. If I had my way, there would be less splotchy white in the background...but I could move neither the tree nor the moss!

This image came from another old-growth area, and although it's a bit busy, I like the color contrast between the young tree in the foreground and the moss in the background. I used f/6.3 - I tried narrower apertures, to simplify the background, but that resulted in too little of the foreground tree being in focus.

Finally, my pictures from the lake didn't end up being fantastic. I'm going to post them anyway, partly to prove that I did in fact hike all the way to the lake. Lakes are tough because on a sunny day, you obviously have contrast problems, but on a cloudy day, the water is just not an interesting color at all. The obvious solution would be to visit during early morning or late evening on a sunny day, which is easy for some lakes but not for Goat Lake (unless you're backpacking, of course),

This image actually did present a contrast problem, despite the overcast lighting. As you can see, the snow on the mountain in the background is overexposed. But a graduated ND filter didn't work, because the upper corners of the image ended up being too dark. Editing in Lightroom might save those highlights, though, and I like this composition. It presents a good contrast between the lush new growth on the lakeshore with the wintry world of the hills and mountain in the background. The only thing that would have made this composition better, as suggested before, would have been some color in the lake itself.

The next image came while I was just fiddling around. It's a bit busy, but I like the idea, and the filtered sunlight actually serves it pretty well. At this point, I had an aperture of f/18; I wish I had stopped down a bit further to get the mountain in focus. (By the time I had gotten a clue and adjusted my camera settings, this nice lighting was gone.)