2014: Year in Review and New Year's Resolutions

Here it is - New Year's Eve! I've thought about doing a post like this other years, but I'm finally going through with it this time. So, first, I'll go through some of the artistic and technical highlights of the year - some qualitative improvements over previous years. These highlights are in addition to the gradual work of accumulating experience, finding new locations, discovering new wildflowers, and other such ongoing endeavors. Then, I'll discuss some of my "New Year's Resolutions" for photography in 2015.

BUT! Before we begin, a plug for my other websites!

• My Zhibit, which functions as an online portfolio for the images I've edited:
• My Facebook page! Give it a "like" if you haven't! 

I. 2014 Highlights

Better compositions: I've been pleased by the improvement in my compositions over 2014 (as well as the latter part of 2013), in the cases of both landscapes and closeups. Rather than a documentary impulse - trying to record "the scene" generally - I've worked on crafting my photographs around a specific aspect of a scene, or telling a certain story about it. This mentality, for me at least, keeps compositions focused and more accessible. Additionally, my technical skills have improved through experience, which also contributes to good compositions. For instance, in the case of closeups, I've gotten better at choosing exposure settings and camera placement in order to minimize background distractions. In the case of landscapes, I've gotten better at using exposure settings and focus point to maximize depth of field.

Near Winthrop, WA

Pacific coralroot along the Gold Creek Trail

New landscapes and environments: In August, I moved to the eastern side of the state. Although my situation presented some challenges that prevented me from doing as much photography as I would have liked, I did enjoy the opportunity to explore some new natural environments, with a new suite of artistic challenges and possibilities. Asotin, Whitman, and Spokane counties are not as lush as western Washington, nor do they boast much in the way of wildflowers by August or September. I have, however, found some first-class views, dramatic topography, and fall colors. Eastern Washington is sometimes stereotyped as a desert by west-siders, but I've been finding it to be a fascinatingly diverse and dynamic landscape.

From Puffer Butte

North Fork Asotin Creek

Riverside State Park

Forest landscapes: Forests are difficult to photograph for a number of reasons that I've covered on previous blogs. The sheer amount of "stuff" makes it difficult to isolate a subject or specific elements of a scene and form a unified composition. Lighting is difficult, too - sunny days are practically useless for landscape shots in the forest. The reduced lighting under tree cover can necessitate long shutter speeds, a problem in even a slight breeze if you want leaves and branches to be sharp. This year, for the first time, I felt as though I made some headway in creating some decent landscape compositions in forest settings. I was also blessed with good weather conditions for forest photography, particularly in June - overcast skies, no breeze.

From the Elliot Creek trail (to Goat Lake)

Near Heather Lake

In the Teanaway area

Better use of winter: Winter has always been a challenging season; my photography is biased toward colorful things, particularly flowers and fall colors, which are difficult to come by in the depths of winter. I've gotten better, though, at finding things to photograph during this season: More "meteorological" phenomena such as snow, frost, and ice; and subjects that remain colorful in the lowlands all year such as moss and epiphytes.

From the Lake Twenty-Two trail

From the Lake Twenty-Two trail

From Boeing Creek Park in Shoreline, WA

Skies and meteorology: Skies are also difficult to photograph well. Contrast can be high, especially if the foreground includes elements of the terrestrial landscape. I have particular problems with blue skies - getting the shade I want and avoiding distracting differences throughout the sky due to unequal polarization. While my progress in compositions involving the sky has been rather halting, I did have a few successes:

From Kamiak Butte

From the Hannegan Pass trail

Sunsets and Sunrises: While I maybe don't rely as much on sunsets and sunrises as I used to, I had some fun with them in 2014, continuing my usual technique of focusing on some element of the foreground and throwing the sunset or sunrise itself out of focus. For the first time, as you'll see, I successfully accomplished this in a forest setting.

Through the forest of Saint Edward State Park

Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA

More extensive trips: I might term 2014 the "Year of Camping." In 2013, I made three photography camping trips. In 2014, I made eight. These trips, as opposed to limiting myself solely to day hikes, enhanced my photography in 2014 for a variety of reasons. Distance: It is not really feasible to make a three- or four-hour drive twice in one day. Staying at such a faraway destination for one or more nights, however, makes it accessible.  A more reasonable schedule: This is related to "distance." It is much less exhausting to only have to make a long drive once in a day. Additionally, particularly if I am camping near or at my photographic destinations, the 4:00am wakeup times that I set for day hikes are not necessary. With more time at a location, I don't have to push myself quite as hard generally - allowing me to spend a reasonable 8-12 hours in the field and spend the evening relaxing and eating chocolate. A different sort of experience: This last reason is hard to nail down, but I find that the act of camping increases my intimacy with the landscape. Maybe it's simply because spending more time outside allows me to get "in the zone" and stay there, or maybe there is a spiritual connection. Either way, I think it helps.

I did learn one important lesson - generally speaking, camping is not a way for me to increase artistic flexibility. Places where your campsite is located at your photographic destination - such as Kamiak Butte - are perhaps the exception. Generally speaking, though, the same difficulties of reaching a photographic destination during the best hours of daylight remain. In a way, these constraints are even greater on a camping trip, due to camp chores and preparations for bedtime that are best done during daylight. When your sleeping base is a house, it is easier to stay out until dark, because you can eat and get ready for bed indoors with electric lights. Thus, while camping is a great way to access distant destinations, it is not an excuse to forget proper planning within the individual days.

Here were a few of the best camping trips:

• Deception Pass: This trip was "only" one night, and I ended up leaving earlier than planned on the second day because I had left most of my food at home, except for granola bars, crackers, and chocolate. Still, I managed to eke out some nice images, particularly of the wildflowers.
  
  
  
  
  
• Kamiak Butte: For the second time, I visited Kamiak Butte in the spring, mostly for wildflowers. As always, they were amazing. And as always, the weather was cold and intermittently rainy. Having camped there once before, I knew where to look for certain wildflowers and where to go for certain times of day (e.g. sunrise). But the wildflowers were a bit different - some of the earlier flowers (shooting star and even a few grass widow) were still blooming.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Methow Valley: In addition to the holy trinity of east-side wildflowers - balsamroot, paintbrush, and lupine - I also discovered the beauty of blooming antelope-brush, a sagebrush-like plant of the state's dry areas. This, I think, was the highlight of this trip - and completely unexpected!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Mountain Loop Highway: I photographed several locations, including Heather Lake, the Big Four Ice Caves trail, the Youth-on-Age Nature Trail, and part of the Lake Twenty-Two trail. I was blessed with still, overcast weather conditions for nearly the entire trip.
  
  

  

  Near Heather Lake

  
  

  

  From the Big Four Ice Caves trail

  
  
• Kamiak Butte: I returned to Kamiak Butte in early September. There were a few instances of nice autumn color, but the real highlight was sunset on the Butte. I usually don't like risking making a hike back to a campsite or trailhead at or after sunset, but this time it was worth it.
  
  

  

  From the summit of Kamiak Butte

Smarter day trips: I've done better this year at choosing day trip locations to match the weather and lighting conditions, and at staying focused on my goals once I get to those locations. Part of this involves thinking like a photographer and not like a hiker. Of course, the best information generally comes from hiking-oriented sources of information - trail guides, online trip reports, and the like. But the photographer needs to use these critically, orienting trips around photographic destinations rather than defined hikes. For instance, a straight-through 10- or 12-mile hike on a sunny day might not be the best use of a photographer's time. Instead, the photographer should plan to be at certain points along trails (or roads) at certain times of the day, depending on the lighting possibilities for each location. Not completing an entire hike and/or spending several hours along a short stretch of trail is perfectly acceptable as an artistic choice. Here are some examples of smart hiking:

• Goat Lake: My annual (at minimum) photography trip to Goat Lake was one such example of a "smart trip." Conditions were perfect: A slight breeze, and bright overcast cloud cover. More importantly, I put them to good use: now being relatively familiar with the trail, I had locations and subjects already in mind, and was thus able to efficiently combine careful photographic stops with the ability to hike the trail's entire length. Unlike some other trips I've taken, I managed to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, neither wasting a fatal amount of hiking time at certain spots nor neglecting photography in favor of completing the journey.
  
  

  

  Goat Lake, from a planned photo stop

  
  
• Coal Creek: I hiked this trail, near Bellevue, under the shadow of an imminent rainstorm. I knew, however, exactly what I was looking for, and where: Vine maple flowers, in the thick groves of those trees on the western end of the trail. Starting at the eastern end (by necessity due to construction etc) and keeping my eyes on the prize, I hiked straight through and ignored all other distractions until I reached the flowers. It was fortunate that I did so, because shortly after I had finished photographing them, steady rain arrived, ahead of schedule. 
  
  
  
  
  
• Seattle parks: I don't through-hike Seattle parks at all, even the ones with established hiking routes and trails like Discovery Park. This would be a rather inefficient use of my time. Instead, I go with precise locations and subjects in mind. Sometimes, I'll stick exclusively to these. Other times, I'll allow myself wander around a park after having achieved my objectives.

A grove of fireweed in Discovery Park. Thankfully, I knew
exactly where to find it, as well as what the lighting conditions would be.

Better editing: Through sheer experience and trial-and-error process, I have improved at processing and editing photographs from RAW to JPEGs in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Some consider editing in this way to be "cheating." I disagree. The finished image is a created representation of the scene, in which decisions have to be made about parameters like white balance, saturation, sharpness, and others. Editing a photograph is simply making those decisions one's self and taking creative control, rather than entrusting them entirely to the camera's brain. These decisions must be made regardless. And, additionally, where does one draw the line between "correction" and "manipulation" when, say, correcting overexposure, or using a graduated filter in Lightroom to brighten an underexposed portion of the image or saturate a washed-out sky?

Anyway...I still have a long way to go, but I've gotten better at editing, and have had a few success stories of using the tools available in Lightroom to process contrasty, challenging RAW images.

This image looks up Sulphide Creek at Mount Shuksan.
It was difficult to edit due to the high contrast between the sunlit mountain
and the more shadowed parts of the foreground.
Editing for these while keeping a reasonably attractive color in the blue
sky took some time and quite a bit of wizardry
with highlight recovery and graduated filters in Lightroom.

Achievements: One of the year's highlights was two opportunities to show art that went above those of previous years.

• From December 2013 through July of 2014, I had nine pieces of framed art at a local Starbucks. While they were not for sale through the shop, it was fun to have a public venue.
• From August through October, I showed art at the Gallery at Towne Centre in Lake Forest Park, under the auspices of the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Arts Council. I had a number of framed pieces up, even managing to sell one - the first piece of framed art that I have ever sold!

"Mazama Ridge Wildflowers," the image that sold at the gallery!

II. New Year's Resolutions: First and foremost, of course, is the general desire to keep on keeping on, to continue photographing, editing, and gradually building my skills and body of work. Wildflowers, landscapes, and fall colors will continue to be my mainstays. Also, while I hope to have some more "achievements", it is uncertain at this point where I will be for certain parts of the year, or what I will have the time to attempt.

Skies: I would like to continue trying to photograph more skies, especially near sunrise and sunset. The best seasons to try more of this will be spring and summer, when the sky is populated with photogenic cumuliform clouds.
Winter: I want to continue finding color in the winter, or finding interesting snowy/icy subjects (without dying either on the drive or the hike!). Now, I am armed with Microspikes and winter tires, which will help. Living on the east side of the state may offer some new winter opportunities. The late fall, though, was rather busy for me, as well as abnormally warm, so I haven't had the chance to try this out yet. We'll see.

Image Quality: The sharpness/detail and noise levels of my finished images are still not where I would like them to be, and this is one area on which I would like to focus in 2015. Part of this will involve greater skill in the field (choosing proper exposure and ISO settings, setting the focus point), as well as greater skill with Lightroom. Ultimately, however, I would like to buy a new standard-length zoom lens (my macro and ultra-wide are adequate for my needs), as it would help with these issues as well as some others I've been chasing, such as edge and perspective distortion and chromatic aberration. This, obviously, will depend on a variety of financial contingencies.

More Trips: I suppose that I am ending here on a rather obvious note. More than merely increasing the quantity of my photography trips, however - although this is a worthy goal in and of itself - I want to increase their quality. This will involve improving my ability to determine locations and subjects to visit along a trail or in a park, as well as my ability to stay focused on my objectives.

I have some specific destination plans, of course, but much of 2015 exists in a haze of uncertainty, so it's hard to know what I'd actually be able to do. I'd like to go on more camping trips, of course, and perhaps even a photography backpacking trip - at least overnight. I'm still working out the kinks in my gear management, but I think I could make it work.

Stay tuned! Hopefully 2015 will be a productive as 2014!

Mt. Shuksan and Ruth Creek

Snowy Lake

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to hike the Lake Twenty-Two trail, off the Mountain Loop Highway. I say "good fortune" particularly because of quite favorable conditions - most of the trail was clear, with a few inches of picturesque and easily hikeable snow around the lake. I did not even end up needing the traction devices I brought. It's not often that you can visit a mountain lake in those conditions in late December!

Lighting is tough in snowy weather conditions. Snow is very bright, increasing contrast and making it harder to expose many compositions properly. Moreover, the snow plays havoc with the camera's metering - it wants to read the snow as a neutral tone, when in fact it should be brighter than neutral. Since I generally set exposure settings manually, the solution was to stop up and just be prepared for my camera to yell at me for "overexposing" the scene.

The first photographic highlight of the trip was the views along the way. About two-thirds or three-quarters of the way up (don't ask me the distance, I'm terrible at estimating distances), the trail breaks out into an open rocky slope with great views to the north and northeast, including various peaks and the South Fork Stillaguamish River Valley. I liked the rugged trees growing on the slope as well as the views, and tried to include both in my composition. The patchy fog in the valley was really the magic ingredient here, making these compositions much more interesting than they otherwise would have been.

At the lake, there were lots of huge boulders lining it, especially on the south side. Lined with snow, I thought they were quite picturesque, particularly with snowy trees and cliffs in the background. I am unsure which of these next two compositions is the best, so I will post both. In both cases, I used a narrow aperture because I wanted the boulders, trees, and cliffs to all be in focus.

Finally, two views of the lake itself. In the case of the first image, I had to get out the heavy artillery - my ultra-wide lens - to include more of the peaks above. I tried including all of the peaks, but that made them seem too small. Cutting off the top of one of them helped achieve the sense of scale that I wanted. In both cases, I used narrow apertures for a wide depth of field.

The Epic Return

And we're back! Yesterday I paid a little visit to the Robe Canyon Historic Park near Granite Falls. Winter is a tough season photographically speaking, especially on a day without interesting weather phenomena (snow, frost, fog, etc.). Also I am out of shape, both artistically and physically. But it was a nice walk, and here are my results:

The first image looks down the South Fork Stillaguamish River from a little beach at the end of the trail. The trees in the background are a bit dark, but not so dark that they couldn't be salvaged in editing - I had to split the difference between underexposing them and overexposing the water. Speaking of exposure, you probably noticed that I used a long shutter speed to blur the water. True enough - although I didn't want to blur it too much. I originally tried 1 or 2 seconds (I can't remember exactly), but that blurred the water too much and made it looked too smooth and tranquil. I wanted to convey a different feeling and communicate the choppiness of the rapids there. 1/3 of a second did the trick.

Next is a closeup of some moss on a branch. I tried a variety of compositions; this one, the closest, ended up being the best. I am not sure what kind of moss is featured in the image; perhaps I will look it up later, although identifying moss can be tricky for an amateur like yours truly. I used f/4.2 to isolate areas of focus on the moss.

Speaking of moss, here is a landscape of mossy trees along the trail. Winter is a double-edged sword when it comes to landscapes of mossy trees. Since the leaves are gone from branches and bushes, the mossy shapes beneath are easier to see. On the other hand, however, the dead leaves and bare salmonberry twigs on the forest floor and in the understory can be a distracting element. I had to crop this images to eliminate as much of that as possible. F/16 to put all of the tree trunks in focus.

And, lastly, two images of the old lime kiln itself. The kiln was used to fire limestone into lime, which was used to build the Everett & Monte Cristo Railroad. I wanted to highlight, with both compositions, the mossy growth that has emerged both on and around the kiln.