Discovery Sunshine

Saturday's rainy trek to Gold Creek was redeemed last night by some sunshine at Discovery Park. When I arrived, the parking lot was almost completely full, and I was worried about the park itself being discouragingly crowded. In fact, I felt as though I had the park to myself for most of the evening. I guess it's big enough to absorb the throngs that visit it.

In the first image, I wanted to incorporate some of the dandelion seed heads into different perspective. I used my ultrawide lens, with a closeup filter attached, to get as close as I was while still having an expansive background. My original thought was to have one of the historic buildings in the background, but I never ended up finding an angle that both did that and presented the dandelions in an attractive way. Below is my second choice; I like the way the tree shapes fill up the upper part of the image. I settled on an aperture of f/7.1 to put the background of focus but not lose too much detail in the foremost seed head.

This second one is of lupine plants, gone to seed. I hadn't originally intended to do a square crop with this image, but upon viewing it on my computer, decided that wider crops didn't serve it as well. There was too much dark detail on the sides, which distracted from the sunset and from the less jumbled stalks in the middle. I used the narrow aperture of f/25, because I wanted all the lupine seeds to be in focus. An upshot of this aperture was the rays that are visible coming out of the sun.

For me, what was attractive about the next scene was the color. I wanted to work the yellow-green backlit leaves, shaded dark green maples, and beige grass into a single composition. Below is my best result. I wanted everything to be in focus so I used f/18. Ultimately, I'm not sure how interesting of an image it is, but it was an interesting idea, so I thought I'd go ahead and post it.

Finally, a wide-angle perspective of the historic buildings area. The contrast ended up less than satisfactory; it was pretty late in the evening, but I was shooting toward the sun; that and the filmy high clouds conspired to make me overexpose some of the sky. Post-processing would perhaps partially alleviate this problem. Even so, I like the composition, and how the foreground tree frames everything. F/18 was sufficient to get everything into focus.