Sauk It To Me!

Although I wouldn't consider myself a believer in astrology, I sometimes look at my horoscope online - it shows up automatically when I open up Yahoo. It's funny to see whether it comes true - and even funnier, when it gives advice, to see how my mind bends and twists that advice to reinforce whatever I was going to do in a given day anyway. For instance, this morning, it told me to "hunker down with [my] favorite entertainment," and suggested "binge-watching" a television show or going to a movie theater.

Binge-watch a TV show? Really? On a Saturday morning? And one that, by the way, was forecast to be dry? I don't think so! In my characteristic fashion, I chose to interpret the astrological advice broadly enough to include hiking. After all, that's how I like to entertain myself!

And a funny thing happened to me on my way to the Old Sauk River Trail - and again on the way back: I stopped at a conveniently located city park in Darrington to take pictures of Whitehorse Mountain, which was partially shrouded in clouds. I don't usually do straight-on mountain shots; I like to have something framing the mountain or otherwise providing a foreground. But Whitehorse is interesting on its own, and the clouds helped provide some depth and contrast. I experimented with several different focal lengths; the one you see below, the one I liked the best, was zoomed the farthest in of any of them. (This image is also from the morning. When I stopped to take a second stab at it on my way back in the afternoon, the clouds were still interesting but the lighting was not as good.)

The scenic highlight of the trail was probably the ice-coated boulders in the Sauk River, so I'll start with those images. I tried two different apertures with this first angle, so I'm going to post them both. The first is f/18 at 1/3 second; the second is f/7.1 at 1/8 second. (The shutter speeds are relatively similar because I wanted to keep the level of blur somewhat consistent; I changed ISO settings to keep them close). I'm not sure whether I like the wide or narrow depth of field better, which is why I posted both.

The next image looks at an ice-covered boulder in isolation. I originally tried using a shutter speed of 2 seconds - my usual approach with set-ups like this is to get as long of a shutter speed as I can and maximize the blur of the water. But in this case, the waves were so rapid and choppy that 2 seconds created too much blur, and the water was basically a formless gray area. So I opened up the aperture to f/7.1 and used a shutter speed of 1/4 second. The upshot was a narrower depth of field, which I actually like as well.

For this next image, I used a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds to smoothly blur the motion of the water (in contrast to the approach I used above).

The second scenic highlight of the trail was the moss that covered most of the trees and their branches. The attracting feature of this first moss shot was the backlighting; the camera is pointing toward a clearing, hence the light coming from behind the subjects. I used f/5.6 to blur the background and emphasize the front clump of moss.

Here is a broader view of the mossy forest. This gives you more of an idea of what the more thickly forested portions of the trail looked like. I used f/16 to get everything in focus. Compositions like this are always difficult to pull off, because they tend to get a bit busy. This one isn't too bad, though, because I managed to capture a lot of branches that were going the same way.

This next one has an epiphyte-covered snag in the foreground with alders in the background. I think the snag is of a cottonwood tree, although I could easily be wrong. I used f/5.6 to blur the background and emphasize the fern-covered trunk.

Finally, one more view of the river. This shot isn't terribly interesting, although I like the perspective. I used a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds to smoothly blur the water's motion.