Spring Break, Pt. 1: Jungle Flowers

Yesterday morning, I set my sights on Bellevue's Coal Creek Park with only one objective in mind: vine maple (Acer circinatum) flowers. These trees' autumn foliage gets all the glory, but their spring flowers, while small, are very pretty. I'd photographed them once before, but not very well, so I resolved to visit some vine maple thickets that I knew are on the west end of Bellevue's Coal Creek Park.

Annoyingly, I discovered upon arrival that the trailhead was closed for the replacement of a culvert or something. Not to be deterred, I made a wide detour around the park and started my hike at the Redtown trailhead for the Cougar Mountain park, which is adjacent to the east end of Coal Creek. Anyway, after a much-longer initial hike than initially planned, I made it to the vine maple thickets. Most of the trees did not have any flowers at tripod level - but it only takes one to make things work, and one such tree is what I found.

I'll start with my close-ups of the vine maple flowers. For the first, I used f/3.8 to blur the background and focus attention on the flowers. I think using leaves at different distances, and on either side of the flowers, adds depth.

I went slightly narrower for the next one - f/5 - because opening up all the way didn't give me enough foreground detail. An oblong, slow-moving, not particularly attractive or picturesque bug was on the foremost flower and I had to stand there and wait until it decided it was done feasting and could move. I didn't have the heart to remove the bug - after all, it was just eating breakfast.

The next image looks at vine maple flowers a bit differently, putting them into their forest context. I used f/18 to make the mossy trees in the background discernible. On second thought, going a bit wider with the aperture would probably have improved the image. Still.

Next is a group of unfurling sword ferns (Polystichum munitum); I used f/3.5 to blur the background and isolate the ferns. The new leaves of the maple trees in the background lend an interesting yellowish-green color, I think, a good contrast to the purer green of the sword fern leaves.

Here is the same group of ferns looked at differently, with a more clearly defined context. I used f/9 to show the mossy branches in the background.

Below are large-leaved avens flowers with Pacific bleeding heart in the background. I used f/11; using a wider aperture would have blurred the bleeding heart flowers too much, making them look like pink blobs.

Finally, the flowers of a currant bush (genus Ribes) - probably trailing black currant, although I didn't look at the leaves very closely. I used f/18 to put the flowers in their lush forest context. I think this image is my weakest of the bunch, somehow, but I still think it's interesting enough to post - for a look at the flowers if nothing else.

Thanks for reading!