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.