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.