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.)
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