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!