A Splendid Summer Saunter

Happy Summer!

Today, I decided to beat the heat by doing some photography during the early morning hours. I arrived at the Big Four Ice Caves picnic area/trailhead at about sunrise. There was a pair of picnickers already getting set up there when I arrived. Who gets up that early? Weird.

Anyway. The first is my favorite, with a meadow of Sitka valerian in the foreground. The mountain behind me was already sunlit at this point, providing some nice illumination onto the flowers and weathered trees. F/22.

Second, Big Four and its reflection in a pond near the picnic area. Contrast is a bit high but probably workable. F/18.

Third, a view over the South Fork Stillaguamish from the bridge. I don't know the name of the mountain in the distance. This one will be a challenge to edit due to the high contrast, but I kind of like this composition. F/18.

Third, a view with some columbine in the foreground. The lighting is a bit harsh but I think this one still works. F/22.

Finally, a flower closeup on a twinberry bush. I will have to deal with the yellowish-green color cast reflected from the surrounding sunlit leaves. F/5.

Spring on the Sauk

Yesterday morning, I made a jaunt to the Old Sauk Trail near Darrington. I'd been there before, but only in the late autumn/early winter, and wanted to check out photographic possibilities this time of year. Turns out the forest and river views offer plenty of potential, and if I were to go back, there would also be some nice forest wildflowers to photograph (which I didn't focus on this time).

First is my favorite composition of the day; I'm particularly pleased because I don't get a lot of vertical compositions. F/18.

Next, two compositions involving the Sauk River itself. I used long-ish shutter speeds (1/3 second and 0.8 seconds, respectively) to blur the water's motion a bit. In the case of the first image of this pair, it made it difficult to freeze the motion of the willow leaves, so I had to sacrifice a bit of sharpness.

Finally, an image of some salmonberries in the foreground with an alder grove in the background. I used f/25 to get everything in focus. An aperture this narrow sacrifices a bit of image quality, but the result actually wasn't as bad as I had expected.

Memorial Weekend part 2

Here are the pictures from the second half of my trip to Fields Spring State Park last weekend. The landscape images here, as in the last post, will generally need some careful editing to get the sky colors and contrast right. Nevertheless, I was pretty pleased with how they turned out.

But first, a flower closeup. This is Brown's peony (Paeonia brownii), one of only two species of peony native to the U.S. F/4.5.

Next are two early-morning meadow views. The first uses a wide aperture, F/4, for a blurred background. The second uses a narrow aperture, F/22, for an opposite effect.

Next, an afternoon view from near the summit of Puffer Butte. I was attracted to the way the paintbrush at bottom right and the cloud at top left balanced each other. F/22. I was worried that I'd need to use a graduated neutral density filter, but it turned out not to be necessary.

Next, a landscape with some balsamroot flowers in the foreground (bottom right), with a flowery slope behind them and the Wallowa Mountains visible in the distance.

Next, two early morning canyon views, both at F/18. If you look closely at the first one, you can see a bend in the Grande Ronde river at center left.

Finally, another afternoon view with cumulus clouds. The white flowers in the foreground are prairie star. F/22.