Fireweed Time

Hello! Last week I celebrated the first morning of official summer with a sunrise trip to Discovery Park. Not very many of my pictures turned out well, so this will be a short post.

First, we'll begin with my favorite annual event, the blooming of fireweed! They're at the beginning of their cycle, with some stands not having bloomed at all yet. Below is one of the blooming stands with just a bit of sunlight. I used f/22 to get the flowers and trees all in focus.

Below is a wide-angle perspective of the same stand of flowers. I like this composition; I overpolarized, though. You have to be careful with a polarized sky when using a wide-angle lens. If you polarize too thoroughly, the sky will have an obvious gradient like you see below. It's a bummer, because it's a good picture otherwise. I used f/22 to get the flowers and trees all in focus; background blur would have obscured this image's feeling of depth.

Next, I found some black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) growing along the North Beach trail. In these images, I used f/5 and f/4.2, respectively. I think I may have talked about this before, but photographing shiny things can be tricky because of the possibility of showing up in the reflections. I crouched on the ground and took these images with my cable release. That prevented these closeups from becoming self-portraits!