Plan B

Well, yesterday was interesting. I made a photography trip to Kamiak Butte, which was a second choice. My first choice would have been the Colfax Trail, but the little access road was rather muddy from the weekend's rain. It was tricky to drive as it was, and I was nervous about the possibility of afternoon showers (they didn't amount to much, but I'm generally a cautious fellow). Once I had extricated my car, regained traction, and dug the mud out from around the wheels, I decided that this was a divine sign to seek another destination. Kamiak it was.

The first image, which I think is the best of the lot, looks over the Palouse at an approaching rain shower, with some mallow ninebark (Physocarpus malvaceus) in the foreground. I used a graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky a bit; that way, I could recover the darkness of the sky from the actual scene while still exposing the foreground properly. F/22 for a wide depth of field.

It needs some work. There's a dust spot visible in the cloud; moreover, if you look at the horizon line you can see some barrel distortion from the lens itself. Those are fairly easy to deal with, however - Lightroom has nifty tools to correct for perspective distortion. I'll lose a bit of the corners, but I think this composition can handle that.

This image is similar to this image from 2014, which I took mere yards away. I think they're satisfactorily different enough - different flowers in the foreground, different orientation, and this latter image is greener.

Next is a detail of some mallow ninebark flowers and buds, with part of a leaf visible at bottom. F/5.

The next two are images in which I experimented with a flower or bud in the foreground and the colors of Kamiak Butte and the Palouse in the background. In the first are mallow ninebark flowers, in the second the buds of a rose bush (probably Nootka rose). I used f/16 and f/11, respectively, to preserve some shape in the background. In both cases, the contrast could use enhancing - but that's easy. It's getting rid of excessive contrast that's hard...

Finally, Cynoglossum officinale, or hound's-tongue. I learned to my dismay that this is an introduced weed in the U.S., and a relatively troublesome one at that. An image like this brings up interesting philosophical questions. What would it say if, for instance, I included it in an exhibit themed around the plants of Kamiak Butte? Could I in good conscience celebrate the aesthetic value of a flower that the Butte would be better without? Anyway, here it is. F/5.