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.