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).