Brushing Off the Dust

Photography, like music, or indeed any art, requires practice. There have been times when, after an extended period away from the keyboard, I've sat down to play piano and found myself clumsy and my muscles more easily fatigued. Similarly, I went out to do some photography yesterday morning for the first time in almost two weeks and absolutely felt the effects of a lack of practice. I struggled to devise compositions and forgot standard techniques and habits such as taking off polarizing filters when shooting at the sun (to reduce glare), wearing kneepads to reduce the discomfort involved in low-angled shots, and others.

The reason for this hiatus was, among other things, a 10-day backpacking trip in the North Cascades. While the trip was a neat opportunity to see some places I might never have otherwise had the means  or the time to visit, I was unable to bring any photography equipment and definitely missed having that way of relating to the natural world available to me.

These first two images are of backlit yarrow flowers. I like how the colors turned out in both of them; particularly, the pinkish tint of the flowers shows up well. This was partially because I used my hand to shield the lens from the sun; this had the effect of reflecting the pinkish color of my palms onto the flowers! A poor man's reflector.

This third picture features aster flowers and the sunrise. What I like about this one is that there's still a bit of discernible color in the flowers, despite the inclusion of the sun in the composition. I should have removed the polarizing filter, but didn't think to, so I had some flare problems. For the image you see below, I was able to crop some of it out, and was able to use Picasa's relatively primitive "Retouch" tool to take care of the rest. If you look closely, you might see the little circular area that I modified.

The final composition attracted me because of the opportunity to contrast the purple of flowers against the blue sky and the yellow-green leaves in the background. The leaves ended up looking more yellow than I had intended, but it's kind of interesting. I'm not totally satisfied with this composition, though, due to the large amount of dead space in the lower left. If I were to "use" this, a logo or quotation could go there...but anything related to the "use" of any of my images is a laughably hypothetical prospect at this point. I tried out a few different apertures but settled on the widest the lens would give me, f/3.2. Anything narrower gave too much distracting splotchy detail in the background.

An Animal-Free Adventure

Yesterday, before my aforementioned visit to Picture Lake, I hiked partway down the Lake Ann trail (off the Mt. Baker highway). The title refers to the fact that I've had some interesting scrapes with large mammals during my photo trips and other journeys - including the bear on the Baker River, and a deer in the road on the way to the Maple Pass trail (by far the more dangerous incident). The largest animal I saw yesterday, however, was a chipmunk. That's just the way I like it. Other people have said I am "lucky" to have seen bears, deer, etc. They can have them! Personally, I'd much prefer that our paths did not cross, and that I stayed free of all animal danger.

The first picture of of Sitka valerian and a mountain - maybe Shuksan, although I'm not quite sure. I used f/29 to get the flowers and the mountain both in focus, and got down so that the foreground flowers were above eye level. Even though the lighting is a bit harsh, I still like it compositionally; I think the wispy clouds also add interest.

Let's continue with the valerian theme! This one came a bit later in the evening, as you can probably tell from the lighting. As with the last image, I used a narrow aperture (f/25 this time) to keep everything in focus. I liked the shadows the light was creating on the cliff faces, and wanted to put this and the flower fields below together. I tried a variety of slightly different angles and this ended up being my favorite. The clouds are a bit bright, but other than that, the exposure actually turned out fairly well for such a contrasty situation.

This one features spiraea of some sort, with valerian in the background. Despite the selective focus appearance, I stopped down to f/18; I wanted the valerian flowers to be discernible forms. At wider apertures, the background was basically a mottled white blob, which is so much less cool. I liked the opportunity, in this image, to juxtapose the pink against the white in definite areas of the frame.

This one juxtaposes lupine against a mountain in the background; I used f/10 to keep some detail in the mountain while still isolating the lupine. The placement of the lupine is not very strong, in my opinion, but I couldn't really concentrate because there were about 1000 flies swarming on my body! Still, it's so vivid that I though I'd post it.

Lastly, more lupine with a little falling stream in the background. I'm not sure how well it comes through but I think it was a cool idea. Since I was relatively far away from the plants, I used f/4 to achieve maximum selective focus. Even so, the right half of the image is a bit busy. So, again, I don't know if I'm convinced by the image, but it was worth a try.

Picture Lake

There are some things that you just have to do, things that you know everyone does but that you end up doing anyway. For me, this involved a trip to Picture Lake at sunset last night. I was one of three photographers present, which is rather rare - much more often, I don't see anyone else with a camera on my travels.

I realized that I'm not really quite good enough to do the whole Mt-Shuksan-reflected-in-the-lake thing, at least in a way that doesn't look flat and conventional. So instead of straight shots of the lake, I tried other perspectives. The first one was actually the last I took; as you can see from the angle of sunlight on the mountain, it was just before sunset. I thought about using a narrow aperture to get everything in focus, but I decided that something wider (f/5.6) was in order. I made this decision because I wanted to isolate the two flowers and draw attention to them. I think it reinforces a feeling of scale, in this case, with the sharper flowers feeling close and the out-of-focus mountain feeling large and distant.

This one's a bit abstract, but I think it actually works. I zoomed in to the face of Mount Shuksan as late evening light was hitting it. I liked the color of the light and the shadows; I think that putting trees in the foreground creates a sense of scale (Galen Rowell called this sort of thing "visual sea level"). The diagonal lines of the rock faces help unify the composition, and contrast with the vertical lines of the forest.

The final one is probably the least impressive of the bunch, but I still think it's a nice composition; the forked tree in the foreground stands out well. This particular image needs some color work; the actual light falling on the mountains was much warmer, more akin to the color in the images above.