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.