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.