Sunset trip!

Last night, I found some time after dinner to go find a sunset. My destination was Point Whitehorn Marine Park, which is west of Ferndale and south of Birch Bay State Park. My best image was of the sunset itself, as seen below. I put my tripod down very low to take advantage of the rocky beach itself and use it in the composition. I used f/18 to put everything in focus. As you see, it was a very hazy and colorful sunset; in fact, the sun itself was much redder than even this image portrays.

Below is another shot involving that rocky beach. Even at f/25, I had trouble getting everything in focus; the background islands in particular are a bit soft for my preferences. I will still be interested to see what this image looks like after editing, but I'd call it a mixed success.

Goldenhat and the Three (or Four) Bears

Yesterday I had the pleasure of making a visit to the Baker River Trail, in the national forest and terminating within the national park. Some intermittent rainfall in the morning was rather annoying, but the overcast lighting made up for it - and continued in the afternoon even after the rain had stopped. Some people lament "June Gloom" in western Washington, or the persistent cloud cover we get in the lowlands in late spring. It's great for photography, though, especially closeups and in forests. Unfortunately, the low clouds meant that were no views of mountains to be had - either of Shuksan from Sulphide Creek or of Baker from the Baker Lake Road. But the old-growth forests, waterways, and lush greenery were plenty to keep me occupied.

The most memorable characteristic of the day, however, was the abundant black bear activity in the area. At the end of the trail, I saw two bears foraging for berries on the other side of Sulphide Creek. Later, I discovered that some rustling noises I had heard while taking pictures were in fact caused by a bear, whose ears and top of head I saw poking up at me through the shrubbery. There may have been a fourth - while I was walking, I heard some twigs snapping and what I am fairly certain was a pant or breath.

Thankfully, all of these encounters passed without incident, and without any displays of aggression or defensiveness on the part of the bears. While bear encounters certainly are enough to give me a start (particularly when alone), it was nice to see healthy wildlife activity, and that the bears didn't seem to be posing any particular problems to humans or campsites. But, if you're in low/mid elevation mountain forests, keep a close watch on your food and stay aware. Berries are ripening and the bears are out there!

(*Tip: If anyone reading this is into wildlife photography, consider the Baker River Trail. I have seen bears, ungulates, birds, and amphibians here at various times).

First, an image looking up an old-growth cedar near the trailhead. I usually don't go for shots with really obvious perspective distortion, but I think it works with this one, and helps give some scale and depth to the tree.

Next, an image looking downstream at Sulphide Creek (before I saw the bears, of course). I experimented with a few different shutter speeds and liked 1/5 of a second the best - long enough to blur the water's motion but short enough to keep it looking choppy and give some shape to the waves.

The next one captures the deciduous forest, with bigleaf maple trunks in the foreground and red alder in the background. I photographed from this vantage point in November once, and the scene had a distinctly different look. This photograph, I think, really captures the lushness of these forests in the spring, and the strong shapes of the maple trunks help prevent it from getting too busy.

Now, a look up a side channel of the Baker River. This one also is a similar view to a shot from July 2013. In this one, the overcast lighting and the lower angle change the mood a lot, and focus more attention on the river channel.

This one looks out at the Baker River itself and the foggy forests and hills on the other side. I used f/25 to get both the willow in the foreground and the trees in the background in focus. In hindsight, I wish the river at the bottom were a bit more prominent. Otherwise, I think this shot really highlights the lushness of the valley, as well as the foggy/rainy nature of the day.

The next image is similar to the previous, with salmonberry in the foreground.

Last, an image looking up a tunnel of vine maple and bigleaf maple. The green here is a bit overwhelming, and too yellowish, but that's partially due to how the JPEGs saturate and the white balance settings on my camera. Edited from RAW, with more control over saturation and white balance, this will look better.

Until next time! Hopefully I won't run into as many bears next time I hike, but hey, I have to share the  forest with its actual residents...!

River Sunset

Last night, I had the opportunity to visit the trail along the Nooksack River between Slater Rd and Marine Dr, technically part of the Nooksack Unit of the Whatcom Wildlife Area. It has some nice views of the river, but large portions of the trail are rather weedy and not particularly scenic. I was especially hoping for some more scenic forest than the trail had to offer. Still, it was a nice walk, and after all, you really go to a trail like that for the river.

I only had one image really turn out well, but thankfully, it was the one I was really after - a sunset over the Nooksack River itself. While I was trying other landscapes and such, I was also scouting out locations along the trail to which I could return at sunset. This spot, with some low-hanging alder leaves that offered nice framing possibilities, was the best, at least for last night. I used f/25 to get both those leaves and the background trees in focus. I had hoped that the narrow aperture might also produce a star effect in the sun. It was not to be. Nevertheless, I like this image overall.

Thanks for reading, and until next time...!

Discovery Trip

I was recently in Seattle and made a morning trip to Discovery Park. Conditions were excellent - overcast lighting and not much breeze, even along the beaches.

First, we'll begin with a wild rose. I wanted to depict it in its beach environment, so I stopped down to F/9 to make the beach and Sound in the background vaguely perceptible.

Next are the flowers on a black twinberry bush (Lonicera involucrata). I think this is my best image of that bush in flower.

Next is a closeup of a pine - I think shore pine (Pinus contorta var. contorta). I did a similar image last year of shore pine, but I like this better due to the inclusion of the red bits. Are those the beginnings of new cones? I am going to assume that for now.

The next two images depict the lush greenery in Discovery Park this time of year. I did a bit of color tweaking on these in Picasa, but Picasa's tool are obviously limited compared with RAW editing in Lightroom. I've found that images with a lot of green usually need quite a bit of work on white balance and contrast to bring out the different shades of green, and these are no exception. The first one in particular needs some work to differentiate between the sword fern in the foreground and the forest in the background.

Next, some lupine shots from the meadows near the South Beach.

Lastly, I wanted to try a shot juxtaposing some alder trees with the cliff faces as viewed from the South Beach. This one was the best, and while it didn't quite have the depth that I might have desired, it's still interesting, and captures a cool aspect of the park.

Fields Spring Strikes Again

My most recent adventure took me to Fields Spring State Park in Asotin County. It's pretty far out of the way, but it's quite lovely. The highlight of the park is the meadows on the top of Puffer Butte and a few other spots, where you can see out to the canyon of the Grand Ronde River. The forests are also pleasant, and you stand a decent chance of seeing wildlife - especially birds or, if you're lucky, something larger. I've seen bear poo along the trail, so I know they're out there. Don't leave any honey lying around! What's more, the park is quiet - there is very little road noise apart from the occasional truck that tumbles along the gravel road; there os no river or stream to make noise; and there are few other hikers, particularly on a Monday. A person can be alone with one's thoughts there - or with the bears!

We'll start with four images into which I tried to incorporate the canyon views. Two challenges faced me in doing so. First, despite the even overcast lighting, the air was quite hazy, making the distant canyon contours hard to discern in some shots. For all of the images in this set, I will need to adjust contrast and other tools in Lightroom to get the distant terrain to render properly

Second, the canyons were a bit more difficult to use as a prominent part of a wildflower composition than, say, mountains. This is because, instead of looking up as one does at mountains, the canyons were visible by looking across and down. The compositional challenge, then, was to get adequately close to the wildflowers without rendering the canyon walls so insignificant that they looked like little piles of dirt. I think these images do all right in that regard. In the first three cases, I used narrow apertures to get the depth of field to cover everything. In the last, I still used a rather narrow setting - f/18 - but still achieved a bit of a selective focus effect to accentuate the lupine flowers.

Now on to some closeups. I found a number of wildflowers that were new to me - Fields Spring is at the edge of the Blue Mountains, and this is not an ecosystem that I've visited before in the spring. In all cases, I used as wide of an aperture as possible - with the exception of the image of sticky currant; I stopped down a bit to f/6.3 for that one because I needed a bit of extra definition in the background flowers.

First, we have something in the daisy or fleabane family - my best guess is that it's thread-leaved daisy (Erigeron filifolius).

Next is sticky geranium (Geranium viscosissimum).

Below is something that I would guess is roughly in the saxifrage family. I found it growing in the forest near the summit.

Next is sticky currant (Ribes viscosissimum).

This one is a mariposa lily (genus Calochortus). My best guess is elegant mariposa lily (Calochortus elegans).

The next two are of old man's whiskers (Geum triflorum). I've photographed these flowers before but I think I like yesterday's images better.

Finally, a forest shot with some blooming serviceberry bushes and ponderosa pine trunks.

It hasn't exactly been a banner year for wildflowers, simply because it's been so snowless and dry this winter and spring. Even so, I found plenty of good stuff at Fields Spring. I'd love to visit the place in a wetter spring, particularly one after a winter with a more healthy snowpack, and see what the meadows look like in that case.

Happy trails!

Happy as a Larkspur, pt. 2

Now for the second post from my trip to Kamiak Butte, this one focusing on wildflower closeups. This was a tricky prospect, due not only to breezes but also the abundant sunshine during my visit. Sunlight, unless it's right at sunrise or sunset, can make closeups quite difficult by creating unattractive contrast. I experimented with natural shading or diffusing provided by trees, as well as a bit of backlighting. In all cases, I used the widest aperture that my lens would allow me at a given focusing distance, to maximize selective focus effect.

We'll start out with this post series's namesake, larkspur - I think Nuttall's larkspur (Delphinium nutallianum). Sunlight was coming very faintly through some tree branches, helping to accentuate the foreground flower a bit.

Next is small-flowered woodland star (or prairie star), (Lithophragma parviflorum).

Below is Gray's desert parsley (Lomatium grayi), faintly lit by diffused sunlight.

Next is phlox (genus Phlox); I'm not positive about the precise species identification. I was particularly attracted to the interesting patterns the sunlight was making on the flowers, diffused as it was by some grass and tree branches.

Below is a flower that was new to me, clustered frasera (Frasera fastigiata).

Below are two more or less backlit shots of paintbrush flowers (genus Castilleja). For the first, I was able to use a high contrast situation to my advantage, darkening the shaded background and isolating the flowers.

While most were not blooming yet, I found that a few of the mallow ninebark shrubs (Physocarpus malvaceus) on the ridgetop had begun to do so. Ninebark is one of the predominant plants in the understory of Kamiak Butte's forests, so it'll be a pretty sight when they are all in flower.

Next is ballhead waterleaf (Hydrophyllum capitatum). I've photographed this particular flower before, but never this close. It's a bit of an odd-looking flower cluster, really, but I like it.

Finally, long-flowered bluebell (Mertensia longiflora).

Happy as a Larkspur, pt 1

Hello all! It was high time for my first large-scale trip of the spring! Naturally, I headed to Kamiak Butte to look for some wildflowers. I am looking forward to more opportunities to do photography this summer than I've had over the past few months, so stay tuned!

This is the first of two posts about the Kamiak Butte trip; this one focuses on landscapes and other wider images. The second will feature flower closeups. The wildflower display was actually not as impressive as it has been other years; I think I was later in the bloom cycle than I usually have been at this time of year, thanks to a winter with very little snow and an exceptionally warm and dry spring. Still, there were more than enough wildflowers to make for some interesting photographic possibilities! It's worth remembering that, in all of these images (and all of those in the next post), I used a polarizing filter. Even without a blue sky to deepen, polarizing filters go a long way in reducing the glare from leaves and other objects, thus accentuating their colors.

First, an image from just after sunrise. The flowers in the foreground are arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata). The color and lighting can use a bit of work - but that's why I shoot in RAW! I always like the way early morning or late evening sunlight casts shadows that really highlight the contours of the Palouse's rolling hills. F/20.

Below is a meadow along the West End Primitive Trail. I was contemplating making an image of it when the band of light you see below emerged from between some trees. This, I thought, added interest to the scene; since the light was diffused by trees and still relatively early, the contrast wasn't too high. The flowers are again arrowleaf balsamroot; I used an aperture of f/20 for depth of field.

Next is an evening view from the Butte's summit, with paintbrush in the foreground (genus Castilleja). This shot was rather difficult to accomplish; I stopped down all the way to f/29 to maximize depth of field. Unfortunately, even at ISO 500, the shutter speed was 1/6 of a second - an eternity in breezy conditions. There was no alternative but to wait for opportune lulls in the breeze; below is the best result.

Below is an image that I think captures the meeting of worlds that occurs at Kamiak Butte - the lush forest of the north slope with the drier Palouse lowlands, as well as nature and agriculture. Upon reflection, I think this vantage point, with the rocks, trees, and rolling hills, might also be interesting under snow cover...noted. I shot this image at f/18.

Below is an image with a similar concept; I really liked the flowering trees and wanted to juxtapose them against the view in some way. I'd have to play with the contrast and white balance a bit to better bring out the faint morning sunlight that was hitting the fields. To get all of this in focus, I went all the way down to F/32.

Below are our friend the paintbrush again, just after sunrise. I got them to look big in the frame due to my use of my wide-angle lens and positioning of the lens rather close to the paintbrush; that approach tends to accentuate the foreground and make background objects appear smaller in the frame. Again, I would want to play with the color and contrast to bring out the sunlight hitting the fields. F/32 for maximum depth of field.

And, finally, some aspen along the trail that parallels the road, at f/14.

A Glimpse of Spring

Hello everyone! It's been a while, but believe me, I've been itching to get out an do some photography! Since my last post, when I got up to Kamiak Butte in snowy weather, I've only been out once. In late March, I took some homework to Kamiak Butte on a particularly nice day, and also brought my camera and went up on the ridge for about an hour to look for some early wildflowers. Below is the one good image that came out of that effort - the flower is grass widow (Olsynium douglasii). You can find it in Washington's grassy meadows on either side of the Cascades. It's one of the earliest native flowers to bloom; in certain spots such as the Columbia Gorge, I've heard that it can bloom as early as late January or early February.

So, even though there's been a relative dearth of photography opportunities thus far this spring, I did accomplish one of my life goals by photographing the grass widow - I'd tried before on the west side but without luck. For this one, I used f/4.5 to blur the background. This particular perspective appealed to me due to the contrast with the reddish rock colors in the background.

Ultimately, I don't think it's too bad for being incredibly out of practice - both artistically and physically. As I (hopefully) get out more in the next few months, my aesthetic sensibilities and cardiovascular system will have a bit of catching up to do. Until then!