Drizzle, Drizzle, Toil and Trouble

This morning, I wanted to continue on yesterday's theme of buds and new growth. The skies, unfortunately, had other plans. A few raindrops began to hit my windshield as I drove to Carkeek Park this morning. As I walked and photograph, the drizzle steadily increased to a light/moderate rain (which became snow on higher terrain, I found out later). Anyway, I stayed until there was enough water coming down from the sky and the trees to preclude productive photography.

Below is a budding flower I found along the Piper's Creek trail. I don't even know what it is or whether its native; I've never seen it before. But there it was! They're very tiny, and sometimes I have trouble with tiny subject matter, because the forest floor can make for kind of an ugly background. In this case, however, the dead leaves etc. were colorful enough that I think they actually add to the image. I used f/4 to blur the background as much as I could; I didn't need any distracting shapes.

The next image is one that I took as it really started to rain. These are new red elderberry leaves, and the image isn't as sharp as I would have liked, because raindrops kept hitting the leaves and jiggling them around. It's close - quite close - but not up to my usual standards. Still, I like how the composition turned out, and I like the grayish color that suffuses the background. It suggests a rainy day. I used f/6.3 to boost my detail in the in-focus leaf.

The next two are images of elderberry leaves, again. I used f/3.2 and f/4, respectively, to maximize selective focus. The converging lines in the first one were striking to me and inspired me to take that particular photograph.

A Budding Interest

It's been too long since I last posted. Since then, winter has turned into spring! It has become the time of year when I begin hunting for flowers. This morning, naturally, I wanted to fulfill my early-spring ritual of photographing Indian Plum, a shrub with lots of little white flowers that bloom in February and March. It was everything you'd want in an early spring day - overcast skies, occasional filtered sunshine to perk you up, and occasional rainfall to remind you that, yes, it is still February.

The Indian Plum have indeed begun to bloom, although most of the plants are still just beginning to leaf out or produce buds. Below is one such bud. The filtered sunshine you see was not planned. I was working on this composition under overcast lighting and the filtered sunshine appeared suddenly as a bonus. That was the only time I saw it all day! What luck! I used f/5.6 to achieve selective focus on the bud.

Nearby another Indian Plum bush that I was attempting to photograph stood a leaning tree with some exceptionally picturesque moss growing on it. I tried a variety of compositions and the two below are my best. I used f/5 and f/4, respectively, to get strong selective focus. In the first, I used f/5 and not f/4 because f/4 didn't give me quite enough detail in the out-of-focus moss to make the image make sense.

Below are emerging leaves of what I think is a red elderberry shrub - although I'm not quite sure. Its branches seemed rather low for a red elderberry, but the emerging leaves looked like those of other shrubs that I already knew to be red elderberry. There was a lot of light coming through the trees in front of me, so this image has a bit of a backlit feel. F/6.3 to compromise between selective focus and increasing detail on the leaves in the foreground.

Below is a branch of Indian Plum that is beginning to leaf out. F/5.6. The compositional challenge associated with this image is one that I often face when photographing leaves, branches, items on branches, and other very linear subject matter - it can be hard to fill up the whole frame. In the image below, for instance, there is a lot of "dead space" on the top left. I'll hopefully be experimenting with this challenge this spring.

Another bud, this one belonging to a red-flowering currant. F/5.6. This image and cropped and there's still some dead space on the sides; see above.

One final bud, this one belonging to a salmonberry bush. F/5…you know the drill. The exposure for this one was tricky because, despite the overcast lighting, there was a lot of contrast between the dark areas of the branch and the brightest spots on the bud.

Hidden Worlds of Deception Pass

Spring has yet to spring in the lowlands - maybe another week or two - but I'm continuing to discover that, even during the winter, there are all sorts of interesting plant scenes in the Puget lowlands if you look carefully. I stumbled upon some such scenes recently at Deception Pass State Park.

The first one here is probably my favorite; it is of lichens on the trunk of what I believe is a Douglas fir. I used f/6.3 because I wanted a narrow depth of field (but not so narrow as to obscure the bark in the background). I was originally going to do a straight-on photograph of the lichen, but decided that looking at the trunk from the side a bit would be more visually interesting.

This second image looks at a lichen-festooned forest near West Beach. I found images like this surprisingly hard to make work, because the forest there is so comparatively open - and particularly so in the winter - that too many compositions would have ended up including too much splotchy sky. This one, I think, gets the job done. The shutter speed I had to use, 1/3 second, ended up blurring some of the lichen and fir needles in the breeze. I don't think the final result is too bad, though.

For the final image, it wasn't the subject matter that attracted me as much as the color and the lighting - I really liked the bright yellow-green of the sunlit trees against the deep blue of the water and shaded background. In person, it was even bluer than it looks in this photograph - a task for editing. I used f/22 to keep my depth of field nice and wide, because I wanted detail in both the foreground trees and the forested coastline in the background. This view is from the trail to Lighthouse Point.