A Flurry of Excitement

Today, I took advantage of some snow flurries and a slightly lesser workload (or perhaps more a lesser desire to work) and went on a little jaunt up to Kamiak Butte. While the snow remained on the trees and ground on the summit and the north side of the Butte, the surrounding Palouse had lost all of its snow as the day warmed. This made for an interesting contrast, and the first two images are along those lines. Both were taken at f/29 to get everything in focus.

Below is a view of the forest near the trailhead. I realized that this was a very similar vantage point to one I used this spring; I put that image below for comparison. It's quite a different place in the winter! The snowy one was at f/29.

Here's another snowy forest shot. Have you begun to notice a pattern in my compositions? I have. I like to use snowy branches as a framing device, it seems. Not an inherently bad thing, but it will require some vigilance to make sure that this technique doesn't turn into a creative rut. Anyway, this one was from the West End Primitive Trail, which is very lovely and, as the name hints, the wildest part of the park.

I thought that the snowy clumps of pine needles looked a bit like fireworks, and I wanted to use them in the composition. Below was my best result, taken at f.29 to try to get the needles as well as the trees in the background all in focus.

Below is the trunk of one of the bigger trees I've seen in the park, a Ponderosa pine on the West End Primitive Trail. I usually don't use the crop you see below, but it ended up suiting the image better than the camera's standard aspect ratio. F/25.

Another forest shot from that trail, with aspen in the background:

Finally, a closeup from the afternoon. I made this image at f/3.2 to maximize the selective focus effect.