A Few Recent Adventures

Sadly, for a variety of reasons related to graduate education, the pace of my photography has been positively glacial lately, and for that I apologize. Also, getting used to a new landscape and being busy, I think the quality of my work has fallen a bit in the direction of mediocrity. But anyway, here goes.

The first one shows the sun peeking through a forest of quaking aspen, taken during a visit I made to the James T. Slavin Conservation Area near Spokane. The technique I used should be familiar to frequent visitors of this blog - narrow aperture (f/22), focal length on the wider side, having the sun peek out from behind branches. This reduces the sun to a point source of light and makes for those nice rays.

While wandering around the fields later that evening looking for a good sunset vantage (which I ultimately didn't find in time - to make a long story short, too many obstructions to the west), I noticed that the almost-full moon was starting to rise above the trees.

In hindsight, I wish I had tried a composition with a closer, more clearly defined foreground. The reason I didn't at the time was because I wanted to zoom up enough to make the moon prominent. That said, I like the warm color of the sunlight. F/20 to get everything in focus.

Now, a few photos from some parks around Pullman. The first is from Conservation Park, just before sunset. The weedy plant in the foreground is teasel. I used f/22 to get both the dried heads and the rolling hills in focus.

Finally, a few closeups of rose hips from Sunnyside Park. Apertures of f/4.2 and f/5, respectively.

Labor Day Extravaganza

For Labor Day and the following night, I made a nice little visit to Kamiak Butte County Park. My main objective was to photograph both sunset and sunrise on the Butte.

By now, I've sufficiently described on this blog the benefits of shooting early or late in the day on sunny days. In the Palouse, however, this is not just beneficial, but practically essential, providing even an advantage over cloudy days. In the low-angled sunlight, the low hills of the Palouse cast shadows. These shadows do a lot to accentuate the contours of the land in an image.

The first image comes from just before sunset - maybe twenty minutes or so - and clearly demonstrates the effect I described above. F/18 get everything in focus. Notice how the horizon is curved inward a bit - pincushion distortion. You can actually fix that in Lightroom!

Below is a landscape from just a few minutes after sunrise. The bush in the foreground is a ninebark. Many of the ninebark bushes in the park, especially those out in the open, have already turned color. A polarizing filter helped to deepen the blue of the sky at the top. F/18 was sufficient to get everything in focus.

Below are two ponderosa pines with the Palouse in the background. This image, like the first, came shortly before sunset. F/18 to get both the trees and the rolling fields in focus.

The next few landscapes come from other times of day. Below is an image taken at sunrise, before the sun had emerged from the clouds enough to light up the landscape. The red bushes in the foreground are ninebark - they are so red and withered that I think they give the impression that this photograph came later in the year. Still, I like it, and it's a good autumnal shot. F/18 to get everything in focus.

Below are some ponderosa pine branches in the foreground, with the view from the Butte in the background. The rusty red color comes, again, mostly from ninebark. In this case, I needed f/29 to get everything into focus.

Below are some ponderosa trunks and ninebark leaves. This image actually came from right next to my campsite. I used f/22 to have everything in focus.

Now for a few closeups. The berries in this first image belong to false solomon's seal. I used f/3.3 to isolate the berries as much as I could, and blur the yellowing leaves in the background.

Below are the dried-up flowers of an oceanspray bush. I used f/3.5 to blur the background as much as I could, and isolate the flowers that I had in focus.

Below are the spent flowers and seeds of ninebark. I picked this particular group because I liked the reddening leaf in the background. I used f/5 - a wider aperture would have blurred the far background even more, which would have been good, but I wanted more of the flowers and seeds in focus.

Finally, some dried-up flowers. I think these might belong to pearly everlasting. For this one, I actually used f/20, because I wanted the contours of the Palouse in the background to be at least somewhat discernible.