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).