Epiphytes Never Sleep, Ep. 2

Winter in the Puget Sound forests is hardly worthy of the name, at least compared to so many winters elsewhere, and even nearby in the mountains. It would be more accurate to say that the growing season just takes a short nap, and the woods exchange one green garment for another. Whereas in spring and summer, leaves and bright new needles steal the show, epiphytes - such as moss and licorice ferns - are the green attraction in the winter. In Saint Edward State Park, epiphytes light up groves of deciduous trees that would otherwise be bare and dreary.

This first image is of a bigleaf maple trunk thus festooned. I tried it at two different apertures: f/5.6 (pictured) and f/22. I decided to post the wider of the two because the selective focus helps to simplify the image, keeping attention on the trunk and the mossy branches by eliminating distracting detail from the background. (The Picasa uploading process, with its automatic adjustments, has changed the contrast and saturation a bit. The air was a bit foggy, and if I were to fully process this image, that would come out more clearly, adding to the isolation of the foreground elements.)

This second image involves more maple (and I think some alder) trunks. I set the aperture to f/16 to get everything in focus; all the elements were too far away to effectively try anything involving selective focus. I like the way the trunks all converge; a thicker fog would have made this image more effective, but I only have so much control over weather conditions. I also like the contrast between the greens on the trees and the reddish dormant shrub cover toward the bottom.