Drizzle Fun

I went on Thursday morning's photo adventure with a bit of trepidation because a rather hard drizzle was coming down at first ("hard drizzle"…would one use that term anywhere else? Here in the Puget Sound area we have not only drizzle but levels of drizzle).

The first two compositions use a concept that I actually dreamed up as I was driving toward Boeing Creek Park - I thought of photographing Indian plum leaves and juxtaposing them against their forest surroundings; the drizzle would leave lots of nice, attractive raindrops to sweeten the deal. Below are my results; I used f/9 and f/13, respectively, to preserve recognizable detail in the background while still blurring it. My sense is that the first composition is the more interesting of the two, but I posted both.

The next one features some wet leaves; I am not aware of what kind. When and if they produce flowers I might be able to figure it out. But I am surprisingly lazy about making specific IDs of plants, particularly plants that do not happen to be flowering when I photograph them. Maybe that's something I should change. Anyway, I used f/3.2 to maximize background blur.

The next two images feature a view across Boeing Creek's ravine toward some rather large Douglas fir trunks. Among other things, the large Douglas fir scattered throughout Boeing Creek Park make the park a rare gem in an urban area. The first looks at the two trees through hemlock branches; I used f/7.1 to blur the branches somewhat. The second looks at them straight on.

Can't See the Sunset for the Trees

On Saturday, I found myself at Saint Edward State Park, a forested park which surrounds a Catholic seminary. I was on my way back to the trailhead as the sun was setting. The sunset was very colorful, but unfortunately I had no way to enjoy it or photograph it, since I was stuck in the forest - right?

Wrong! The trees were still bare enough that a lot of the sunset color - and occasionally Mr. Golden Sun himself - was visible through them. Often I don't find it fruitful to try to photograph the sunrise or sunset from within the forest, simply because the trees and foliage block any view of it. Saturday's open forest of bare alders and maples, though, let some light in.

To do photographs, I had to hurry. The sun, particularly at sunset, darts quickly between and behind trees, so quickly that if I'm slow in getting a composition set up, the light I saw can disappear by the time I have everything in position. This is another reason that I haven't often tried this kind of sunrise/sunset photography in the forest. This time, I managed to work quickly enough to get two interesting compositions. The sharpness isn't quite what I'd like it to be, primarily because there was a bit of a slight breeze. I didn't have much time for experimentation with exposure settings and such, though.

Both of the images were at f/3.5, both to maximize shutter speed and blur the background as much as possible - I wanted the setting sun to show up as a large circle, and didn't want any tree shapes showing up. The background blur focuses attention on the foreground leaves and the sunset colors.

Of course, I had been photographing for the entire afternoon, not just at sunset. Here is an opening fern;  I used f/3.3 because I wanted to isolate the very tip of the opening frond, and smooth out the background, as much as possible. Narrower apertures would have preserved too much forest-floor clutter.

Next, some opening salmonberry leaves. I wanted to save some foreground detail, but didn't want any shapes in the background. F/5.6 ended up being the narrowest aperture I could muster without getting anything distracting in the background.

The next one is an Indian plum flower, with the park's lush forest in the background. In this case, I used f/6.3, because I actually wanted some background detail - I wanted to put the flowers and foreground leaves in context.

Finally, some Indian plum leaves surround a cottonwood trunk. I used f/6.3 to blur the leaves somewhat. (Wider apertures lost too much detail on the cottonwood trunk on the top and bottom of the frame).

Skunk Cabbage Patch Kid

Yesterday morning, I went to Discovery Park, with a relatively singular motivation: skunk cabbage. There are a couple patches of skunk cabbage along the Wolf Tree Nature Trail, and I figured they would be blooming right about now. I was right! Their tall flower clusters and bright yellow bracts are brightening up the mud (skunk cabbage likes wet environments).

This post's title notwithstanding, I'm not going to start with these pictures of skunk cabbage. Instead, I'm going to start with what ended up being probably my most interesting images of the morning, some closeups of horsetail, with raindrops on them. They're still quite small, it being early in the season, and are not frequently sought out for their beauty, so I almost missed them. But after photographing the skunk cabbage, I saw them just as I had packed up my gear. I unpacked again and decided to give them a try.

(Yes, it was raining, as usual, but thankfully not enough to force me to close up shop - just a thirty-second spurt of it every ten minutes or so. It was actually surprisingly regular, but never heavy or steady.)

Anyway. My favorite horsetail closeup was this one, in which I focused on some of the water droplets. I used the aperture of f/5.6. I could have opened up a bit wider to get a narrower depth of field, but I wanted to boost the amount of foreground that was in focus just a bit. Besides, I was so close to the subject that even f/5.6 didn't increase background distractions (i.e. things behind the horsetail). The background stayed solid.

In the next two images, I used the main stem as the point of focus. Still f/5.6, for the same reasons as above.

In my last post from Discovery Park, I posted some images of red-flowering currant buds. Well, those bushes are now blooming. The image below was my best composition with these plants. I was fortunate to find a cluster with only one flower blooming; this reinforces the idea of the plant just beginning to bloom. F/5.6.

Next is some new growth on some sort of wild rose bush. I used f/4.5 for a narrower depth of field; even at F/4.5, unfortunately, there's still a bit of background clutter, although it's not too bad, particularly given the fact that I was shooting toward the bush. I thought putting the closest leaves out of focus would give an interesting perspective.

And now, as promised, the skunk cabbage. Today was the first time I've ever loitered in a whole field of skunk cabbage, rather than seeing a mere few specimens, enabling me to experience first-hand why they are referred to as "skunk" cabbage. They are indeed rather malodorous. Apparently, despite the name, the indigenous peoples of the Northwest coast only ate skunk cabbage in times of famine, according to my guidebook. But they used the leaves for lining baskets and other non-edible uses.

This image was probably the most interesting of all my skunk cabbage compositions. I used f/5.6, the widest aperture my zoom lens will do when zoomed all the way, because I wanted to isolate the flower stalks as much as possible and throw the leaves a bit out of focus, making them appear smoother and less distracting.

This shows a somewhat broader view of the skunk cabbage area. I originally shot this at f/22 for a wider depth of field, but tried it at f/5.6 on a whim and ended up liking that better.

Thanks for reading!

Third Time's a Charm

The last two times I've visited Carkeek Park, my photography was truncated by the arrival of rainfall. Dogged determination, and the prospect of finding some early-blooming salmonberry bushes, drove me to visit the park again yesterday.

This time, happily, the weather was quite dry, intermittently sunny, and rather mild. High clouds danced around the sun, giving me constantly changing gradations of diffused sunlight. Being a weekday morning, Carkeek Park was practically empty except a few trail runners, dog-walkers, and a gaggle of youth being led through some sort of nature education.

In my photography, I am starting to have more "spring problems" than "winter problems," which is a good thing. "Winter problems" include cold, tingly fingers; my water bottle turning to ice; and other such struggles. "Spring problems" include sunshine on the camera viewfinder, making it hard to gauge the lighting without use of a histogram; forgetting my filters because I predominantly use my macro lens (on which I keep the filter attached); and other issues related to sunlight and the appearance of flowers. Whoopee! And it isn't even officially spring yet.

You may have noticed that, lately, I've been sticking to the Seattle area rather than roaming the foothills or the Cascades. This is for a number of reasons. First, there have been a lot of weekends recently with nasty weather in the mountains and foothills. Second, flowers are blooming in city parks, making it more worthwhile to visit them. As spring progresses I'll definitely get back into the hills. Right now, though, the flower show is right at my doorstep!

The first one looks up toward the sky. I set this composition up with a bit of trepidation, because including the sky when shooting in the forest is typically risky - it easily becomes blotchy or overexposed. In this case, though, my polarizing filter darkened the sky a bit, and the filtered sunshine helped brighten the foreground, bringing everything into line. F/4. (Originally, I had tried it at F/6.3 to keep more of the flower in focus, but there was too much distraction from the background. F/4 proved a more compositionally appropriate choice, despite the relative loss of foreground detail.)

The next one captures a salmonberry bud. The pale green background comes from a slope of solid Oregon grape; backgrounds are challenging with salmonberry shots because they too often involve a lot of distracting thorny branches. In this case, though, I was able to isolate the bud against a more distant background made up of a different plant. F/4.

The third image is of a just-beginning-to-open salmonberry flower. I really liked the shape of the leaves. This was another one where I braved the risks of forest sky; the same factors helped me bring the image into balance. F/4.5.

Finally, some backlit Indian Plum flowers. The high clouds filtering the sunshine kept the contrast from becoming too harsh, despite the fact that I took this image around midday. F/4.5.

I Come to the Garden Alone, While the Dew is Still on the Crocus

I've been plagued by a nasty virus lately, but I've still found a few opportunities to do some photography. For instance, a few mornings ago I wandered around my parents' garden and did some photography there.

This first one is a closeup of what I am told is an andromeda bush. I wanted to split the composition into thirds vertically, with the middle third taken up by the buds and the outer two by the wet leaves. I didn't open up as wide as I could have, using f/5.6. I wanted to preserve a bit of background detail so that the leaves - and the water on them - would be perceptible.

Now some buds. Crocus buds? I'm really very poor at identifying garden flowers. This one was particularly tricky because there was no way to set up my tripod for this shot, which means I had to handhold it. I didn't use the widest possible aperture, instead using f/5, because I wanted a decent area of the foreground bud to be in focus.

Another bud composition. F/3.5 to maximize isolation. It's always hard at that wide of an aperture to get the focus point exactly where I want it. With practice, I've gotten better, but it still took a bit of trial and error in this case.

And, just for fun, here are some images from last year - I did some shooting in our garden in June last year, but somehow never got around to sorting and posting any of the images (I wonder why. Perhaps I was busy with something at the beginning of last summer.)

The first images is of columbine. I tried this composition several times, with the focus point on each of the flowers. I think it looked best with the focus point on the central flower, as you see here. I used f/4.0 to achieve maximum isolation.

This next one - okay, I don't know what it is. It looks cool, though, and when I shot this last June, I thought that the clusters of hanging flowers resembled fireworks. I used f/3.5 to maximize isolation - any extra background detail would have been fatal to the composition, because the background was a fence, and would thus have created a lot of distracting vertical lines.

Discovering Spring

Spring has sprung in Discovery Park!

It was a bit breezy, and intermittently sunny (it was midday, so the sunlight wasn't very helpful), but I was still able to squeeze out a few decent images in my limited time there yesterday. The first is of some opening leaves on a shrub of some kind - red elderberry, probably. I also tried setting the focus point on the tip of the leaf closest to the lens; I liked the focus point better, however, at the point where it is in the image below. I opened up the lens as wide as I could at that focusing distance - f/4.2 - to achieve maximum isolation, and also to minimize my shutter speed, as the subject matter kept quivering in the wind.

The next two images are of Indian plum flowers. For the first one, I selected a bush that had leafed out enough to make the background green rather than brown or splotchy. I was attracted to the way the two leaves framed the flower in the center. F/5.

This one is okay; I'm a bit bothered by the obtrusiveness of the circles in the background. Still, it's a decent realization of a tricky concept - photographing Indian Plum flowers looking up at an almost inevitably busy forest background. F/5; I could have gone a bit narrower, but I didn't want to lose too much detail on the flower in the foreground.

In addition to Indian plum, a favorite spring event of mine is the budding and blooming of red-flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum). This image was taken at f/3.8 to achieve maximum isolation of the front in-focus buds.

Below are the same buds from a different angle. In this case, I used f/6.3 to preserve some of the top leaves' shape.

These buds, I think, are on a willow of some kind. The colors aren't very saturated, which is unusual for a JPEG from my camera. Hmm. I used f/13 to increase detail in the blurred buds on the second branch.

Rainy Carkeek, Again

For the umpteenth time, I found myself photographing in Carkeek Park under rainfall. I wasn't about to let a mundane matter like precipitation stop me, however.

The first two images are of Indian plum (Oemleria cerasiformis).

For the first, I used an upward-facing angle, putting bare trees and cloudy sky in the background. I did this because, once all blurred together by a relatively wide aperture (f/5), it made for a light, dreamy color that I think helps connote the rainy-day aesthetic that I wanted to evoke. This is probably my best of the set.

For the second Indian plum image, I am facing downward. The droplets of water that were on the leaves and petals here and there ended up not showing up as prominently as I had intended. Still, I think it's kind of an interesting composition.

Lastly, some leaves juxtaposed against a mossy log. I think the leaves may belong to Pacific bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa), although I'm not sure on that. Anyway, I thought it was a cool scene and was only able to photograph it by lowering my tripod to its furthest extent. It's a bit busy, but I still think it's a nice forest-floor scene. F/5.

Well, that's all for now. You can only do so much when tormented by frequent rainfall. Oh, well. Until next time!