Pattycake, Pattycake, Baker's Stream

As if to make amends for last week's debacle, I was granted the rare November gift of a dry, sunny Saturday. Cold? Yes, quite - icicles hung from boulders, ice adorned tree branches, and a thick layer of ice adorned streamside rocks. I visited the Baker River trail, to make up for last week's fiasco. This time, no snow on the road. A bit of frost here and there, particularly on the bridges, but all manageable. There was some crusty snow on the trail, but not too much - just enough to make things fun. I love stepping in snow. Additionally, I was able to hike the entire length of the trail! There were no bears to stop me this time, and the little streams were all bridged or manageable. The view of Shuksan from Sulphide Creek was such a nice treat at journey's end.

We'll begin with the morning's salient feature: frost. The first image looks through some icy branches across the Baker River valley. I had to hurry to take this image while that bit of mist was still in the frame; it wasn't there long. In addition to being cool-looking, it brings out the trees on the opposite side of the river.

Additionally, the moss was icy. I've done icy/snowy moss pictures before, but not as close as this time. The main technical challenge was tripod placement. The first image came from the side of a tree, I think; the second, I believe, from a boulder. Or they might have both been from boulders. I don't actually remember. But anyway, when taking a closeup of an object at eye-level, it's hard to get the tripod as close as it needs to be without the tripod legs running into the tree/boulder/adjacent bush, going down the slope beyond the trail into a tangled quagmire of moss and branches, or otherwise getting into trouble. It takes some creative tripod adjustment and physical posture.

It's interesting - one of the things I'm realizing this year is that, as the wildflowers are long gone and trees' leaves have fallen, I'm noticing the less obtrusive plants in the forest, such as mosses, lichens, and fungi (although I haven't done photography of any fungi yet - maybe later). Their presence was particularly striking yesterday, as a coating of ice crystals decorated their contours.

I used apertures of f/8 and f/4.5, respectively. I particularly like how vividly the ice crystals show up in the second image.

Speaking of ice crystals, I noticed how, on a log, ice crystals had formed in little lines or rows. I am not sure why this was the case, but I found it an intriguing subject for photography. The challenge here was to get the rows to be discernible from one another, rather than have the image be a uniform jumble of ice crystals. I had to carefully choose which spot I was going to photograph, so that the gaps between the lines would be large enough to stand out in the image, and then make sure my camera was at a height that the gaps would appear (rather than being obscured behind other rows of crystals).

I used f/7.1 in both of these images, because I wanted surrounding ice crystals to fade out of focus a bit gradually. I thought this might help emphasize all the different depths. They're both a bit underexposed - camera meters don't like snow and ice; they try to read them as a neutral light value, which underexposes everything else. I even compensated a bit, and they're still dark. Not irreparably so, though. Just something to continue to be careful about.

As mentioned, there were lots of icicles on the boulders. I originally tried this image at a narrower aperture to keep everything in focus; the exposure ended up being so long, however, that the ferns moved in the breeze and blurred. So I decided to make this image with a wider aperture (f/6.3) and narrow depth of field.

This second was more difficult because, as the perspective suggests, the camera was tilted pretty far up. This was the best image that ended up being focused in anywhere close to the right place. I used f/5.6, because this got me background blur while saving just a bit of foreground detail - I didn't want the area of the icicle in focus to be too small.

Now, we'll shift gears from ice formations and look at a forest scene. Now that this bigleaf maple's green leaves have fallen (as have those of the alders in the background), the tangled contours of the green mossy branches appear much more distinctly. I liked the contrast between the moss and the bare forest in the background; I think including a bit of the forest-floor snow at bottom adds interest.

We'll conclude the post with a couple of views. The next set of two images are looking up at what I believe to be Hagan Mountain, up the Blum Creek valley, if I'm reading my map correctly. I took these images as I was hiking back to the trailhead; I liked the way the light was hitting the mountain, and the trees in the foreground, accentuating them against the shadowed valley. I tried a variety of focal lengths, and the two below were my favorites. The first, by including foreground trees on both sides of the frame, has some balance/symmetry. The second is not as balanced but emphasizes the mountain's presence a bit more.

Finally, the Baker River itself, looking upstream. This was a tricky one to expose, due to the high contrast between the dark foreground and the sunlit ridge in the background. but the result isn't bad. An exposure of 1/4 second blurred the water's motion.