Round Two

As promised, the rest of the day's adventures, after I photographed the sunrise at the Boulder Creek overpass. I visited portions of the Baker River and East Bank Baker Lake trail.

There were bits and pieces of mist that hung around the Baker River valley all day, depending on where the sun was at a given time. As I started down the East Bank trail, I noticed that the view down the valley, with the mist and all, was particularly nice. I forged my way to a better viewpoint and this first image was the result.

It all comes together pretty well, I think; it helps that the mist layer was sunlit, bringing it out. And if you look closely (it's hard to see at this small size), you can see a setting crescent moon just over the mountain. I hadn't noticed it at first; that was an added benefit once I began setting up the composition. The image makes it look like early morning; in actuality, this was closer to noon than dawn, but the low winter sunlight makes it look early.

I was surprised that this second image worked; given the high contrast involved, I didn't expect it to be successful at all. It's looking through an old burnt snag on the East Bank trail (the historic fire, signs told me, was due to volcanic activity courtesy of Mt. Baker sometime in the past) through to living forest. I used f/22 to get both the snag and the background forest in focus.

The next two images feature the mossy forest on the Baker River trail. There is an area where there are some thick stands of mossy vine maples; I wanted to go there in particular. This closeup uses an aperture of f/4; I wanted as narrow of a depth of field as I could get, in order to direct attention to the drops that were in focus.

The second mossy image was a bit of an experiment. I wanted to create a composition looking between mossy branches through to more mossy forest. The best way to achieve this was with my wide-angle lens. This particular image uses an aperture of f/8. I would have gone wider, to blur more of the background, but I was having issues with focus - wider apertures were not getting enough of the foreground moss sharp. F/8 gave that extra boos to the depth of field that I needed in the foreground; I had to sacrifice background blur as the lesser evil.

The next set of two feature the old-growth trees of the Baker River Trail. The first one was a bit tricky; with photos looking up through a forest like that, you always run the risk of incorporating too much sky into the composition (which will overexpose if you want good detail in the forest itself). After a bit of experimentation, I arrived at the composition below. It's not too bad, although that blotch in the upper right is a bit of a nuisance.

This second one is more straightforward. It's always tricky to get a generic "forest shot" that isn't busy and uninteresting; this one, I think, does fairly well, with three distinct and different trunks.

This last one isn't much of a photographic composition, but I just wanted to say: Check out the roots on that sucker! That tree is determined to live on top of that rock!

Good Morning, Sleeping Giant

It had been a tough week at work, so I decided: What better way to recover than to get up early on Saturday and catch a sunrise in the North Cascades? My destination was the Boulder Creek overpass, on the Baker Lake road; this overpass has a pedestrian walkway and a terrific view of Mount Baker.

A few parts of the drive were a bit dicey - not because of ice or anything, mind you, but because of thick fog, especially on I-5 near Everett and on SR 20 through the Skagit Valley. Add to that the "Elk Crossing" signs (which I believe now, since one almost killed me this summer), and you've got all the ingredients for a stressful commute.

Thankfully, I had left my self enough time to make sunrise, even driving slowly through the fog. The Baker Lake Road itself was frosty but generally not foggy, so not much of a problem at all.

I took a variety of compositions just as the sun was beginning to hit the mountaintop; the one below was my best.

I then had the idea of a composition that would include Boulder Creek and its rocky flood plain. As you can see, lighting was a problem, even at this early hour, with a large contrast between the sunlit part of the mountain and the still-shadowed foreground. Using a graduated neutral density filter would have been impractical, I decided, since it would have darkened the tops of the trees to the left of Mount Baker, which would have looked a bit awkward. Those filters are best when when the boundary between the light and dark areas of the image is more linear. (I did use a polarizing filter to help with the sky).

Still, I got it to the point where, with editing, I think there'd be a tolerable amount of detail in each area. The foreground doesn't need to be super bright; it's sunrise, after all. The water blurred at an exposure time of 1/2 second; the aperture I chose was f/18 to keep everything in focus.

Stay tuned for a post with photos from my second destination yesterday (the Baker River and East Bank Baker Lake trails).

Ghost Post!

Ghost towns and other freestanding historical structures and relics are hard to come by in Western Washington. I am not sure why this is, but I would hypothesize that this is due to extensive development in settled areas; and, in areas allowed to revert to a more natural state, the wet climate, relatively rapid rate of plant regeneration, and, in many areas, events like landslides and washouts. But, with that said, there are a few things here and there remaining from bygone days; usually, it seems, associated with some sort of extractive activity (e.g. logging/mining equipment).

Faithful followers of this blog will note that I usually post pictures of exclusively natural subjects. This post is unique, then, in that I am posting some photographs that show evidence of a couple of natural areas' human past. All but one of the images in this post, which is separately noted, come from the Lime Kiln Trail in Robe Canyon Historical Park.

The first two feature the Lime Kiln itself, which, according to this website, was used to fire limestone (quarried nearby) into lime, which was used in mortar and plaster for the construction of the adjacent Everett & Monte Cristo Railroad. With the first image, I wanted to definitively place the kiln in its natural setting and framed it between two mossy trees. I used a wide aperture of f/5.6 to blur the trees as much as I could and direct attention to the kiln. The second uses a wider angle and a wide depth of field (aperture of f/22) for a different approach.

This…is a thing. From the looks of it, I'd like to say it's a saw blade, but I really couldn't say definitively. I was intrigued by how it was broken and the way moss was growing on it.

The next set of two images comes from Meadowdale Beach Park in Edmonds. As I understand it, the notches in these stumps held boards that loggers would use to stand on while they cut the trees; that way, they wouldn't have to cut it at the much thicker base.

Of course, I would be remiss to omit any of my standard landscapes. They were a bit experimental; such is winter. These first two feature the South Fork Stillaguamish River; I was intrigued by the way the river itself was shaded but reflecting colors from sunlit slopes and trees above it. For both of these images, I used long shutter speeds (5 seconds and 3 seconds, respectively) to blur the motion in the water. I don't like the tiny overexposed spot at the top of the first; otherwise, these turned out reasonably well.

This last image looks down a slope to the aforementioned river. I used an aperture of f/29 because I wanted to get the licorice ferns in the foreground as well as the background trees in focus. The trickiest aspect of this image was the lighting; the contrast between the shadowy foreground trunk and the bright background (particularly the river) was high. I tried using a flash but at a shutter speed of 4 seconds, it wasn't making much difference (I would have needed a floodlight!). Still, the end result wasn't too bad.

I Tolt You So

A funny thing happened the other morning. I was all set for a forest hike in the foothills and, upon checking the weather one last time, decided that conditions were going to be too sunny for that. So I thought I would try my hand at a sunrise from the hills behind Tolt-MacDonald Park on the Snoqualmie River.

Well, I found no sunrise. As I ascended the hill, I could see that the view eastward over the valley, just above a layer of fog, would have been gorgeous. But I could not find a viewpoint in time. I know there is one up there somewhere - I've seen pictures - and I could have kept searching on the trails and gravel roads on the hill, but time was running out and, without a map, I was starting to wander in circles.

My Plan B was to see if I could do anything with the shafts of sunlight that would be coming through the trees at the elevation where fog's edge stood. I managed to make it to that point in time for the cool lighting; this time, the problem was subject matter. The forest at that level was not very scenic or inspiring; it was the less attractive kind of second growth where there are a lot of coniferous trees the same age and there is not much of an understory. I only got one decent picture, and I still didn't really like it, so I'm not going to post it.

More interesting, in my opinion, were a couple images I took in the park's lower elevations along the river. The forest here was also second-growth but much wetter (due to its position on moist flats near the river) and thus dominated by more interesting maple, alder, cottonwood, and cedar trees, complete with lots of moss.

Both of these images were taken with a narrow aperture to achieve a wide depth of field. In the first, I like the color contrast between the green foreground and the yellows and reds in the background. This one needs a bit of contrast and lighting work to bring out the green moss in the foreground, but it could be done.

For the second, the fog was beginning to break up and thus had a very warm quality to it. I wanted to make an image that captured the mossy trunks at varying distances.