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!