Fiery Angels

Some photographers will say that, on a sunny day, it is only worth photographing within about an hour of sunset or sunrise. While the light is indeed best at this time, this is an unnecessarily restrictive rule. A more useful rule of thumb that I've encountered - I can't remember where - is that is your shadow is as long as or longer than you are tall, the light is good enough to make photography worthwhile. Even this   isn't a hard and fast rule, but it's proved the most useful guideline for sunny-day photography in my experience.


Hence my trip to Magnuson Park on a recent evening to experiment with the light. The first pictures I took - of backlit clover flowers - were what inspired this post's title. It was earlier in the evening when I took this image, so the sunlight was still a little harsh. Fortunately, a tree between the flower and the sun diffused the light a bit. I was attracted to the way the backlighting was illuminating the flower's outline. The backlighting gives the flower a kind of ethereal aura, but the flower - with the lighting and the shape of the petals - also looks a bit fiery. Hence the title of the post.

The next flower kept throbbing violently in the breeze (another pitfall of close-up photography in the late afternoon/evening). The flower is a vetch of some kind. By the time I got a shot that worked, the attractive lighting that had been falling on it was mostly gone. Still, I like the shot. In retrospect, I could have used a wider depth of field than f/4.5 gave me, but I didn't want to give up any more shutter speed.

With this flower, it was a similar story. My only sharp shots were after the lighting had disappeared - this time, my sharpness difficulties were due to the fact that I was using my mini-tripod as a monopod (a role that it is not designed to do), with the legs bunched together. But it's a nice shot. I could not find this in my flower book; I'll continue to search.

The rose below was the last image I took yesterday; I was attracted to the soft, speckled sunlight falling on the flower. I included leaves on all sides of the flower to try to incorporate them into the composition (rather than eliminate them as a distraction, which would have been difficult given their abundance here). A square crop of this image would probably reinforce this further. The out-of-focus leaves in the upper right add depth.

This last one comes from one of the park's wooded paths. I tried this both with and without a graduated ND filter; the one you see here was the one without. I tried using the filter so that I could rescue some of the highlights in the upper half of the frame from overexposure. Ultimately, though, the cottonwood trunks ended up too dark relative to the lower half of the frame, and the filter's presence was both obvious and distracting. Besides, in a photo like this, some blown highlights aren't the end of the world, I suppose. I used an aperture on the narrower side (f/14) to keep everything in focus and star the sun. I would have gone even narrower, but the grass was moving in the wind and I didn't want to have to use any longer of a shutter speed than I did (1/20 sec).

Felix Culpa

This weekend finally gave me an opportunity to venture into the Cascades proper. Much preferring lush, green forests over sloppy, mottled snow, I did so via the Goat Lake trail. My results weren't as spectacular as I would have hoped, but I got some nice shots.

Photographically speaking, long hikes are challenging for a variety of reasons. (1) You have to budget time for movement. In a place like Discovery Park, it doesn't take too long to move between different areas, and you can stay until sunset and have plenty of light to hike out. At a place like Goat Lake, you have to leave time to hike different sections of the trail, and then leave time to hike out before dark! I lost track of the time a few times yesterday early on in the hike, which forced me to hurry later on. (2) You don't have as much flexibility with conditions. In a city park, if conditions aren't ideal, you can either leave and come back (because the park is more accessible), or wait until they improve (it's harder to do this on a long hike due to #1). (3) Destinations at the end of the trail are hard to reach at a time other than midday, so you can't pick and choose lighting conditions.

Incidentally, yesterday was the first time I've ever gone on a major hike and seen other people doing nature photography (I've seen photographers frequently in places like Discovery Park, the Arboretum, etc.). It was nice to see them enjoying nature. Amusingly, I found that I was carrying the most gear of anyone. There were a few with nice cameras who didn't even have a tripod! While I would certainly never expect anyone to carry as much stuff as I do, a tripod is indispensable, especially in a forest situation (although I find that I now use a tripod almost everywhere, all the time, only handholding as a last resort).

I'll start with a couple close-up sort of shots and move on later to images that tend to have more of a landscape feel. The first one features the new growth ("fiddlehead") of some sort of fern. The background is a bit splotchy, but as I've explained before, background management is quite difficult when you're working with the forest floor. F/6.3 is as wide as I wanted to open up the aperture without losing too much detail on the fiddlehead in the foreground.

The next image took forever to get; even so, it isn't totally sharp, but it wast the best I was going to get. I wanted to juxtapose this budding plant against the small waterfalls in the background, and used f/18 to do so. There was a slight breeze, however, and even at ISO 800 I was only able to get a shutter speed of 1/4 a second, which is not much if you're trying to stop a breeze. I like the result, but am not sure if the waterfalls show up clearly enough. I'll have to revisit it and decide.

One of the trail's most impressive features is an area of old-growth trees just before the trail enters the wilderness. I'll get to that later. Ironically, though, I owe one of my absolute favorite spots on the trail to earlier logging. On the lower trail, a short distance before it rejoins the upper trail, there is a grove of red alder (often the first species to regrow following logging) that are beautifully coated with white lichen. So much so, in fact, that many - including a fellow hiker that passed me as I was taking pictures - mistake them for other trees with naturally white bark, such as birch or aspen. I didn't have the heart to correct the hiker, but careful observation will reveal the trees to be red alder. The bark is naturally gray, but lichen can color it white.

Even in this photo below, you can see splotchy gray areas on the trunks. Birch and aspen wouldn't really show this. I like the photo below because I think it presents some depth, with the trees at differing distances. I also like the side lighting, which was somewhat filtered by clouds at the time. I didn't need to overdo it with the aperture, but I did stop down to f/16 to get everything sharply in focus.

A variety of flowers were blooming in this area. The flowers below are Pacific bleeding heart, which I have photographed before, with alder trunks in the background. I used f/18 to bring out the trunks. This is actually pretty similar in concept to one I took back in April; this one differs, though, due to the whiter trunks and the higher placement of the flowers in the frame. I think I like the one from April better; the background is smoother and more unified. But this one is interesting too.

Some shrubs - red elderberry, I think - were also blooming. The first one shows them adorning the forest; I used f/32 to keep everything in focus. Perhaps I could have gotten away with a wider aperture like f/22 (for better sharpness).

There are some magnificent areas of old growth, mostly between the wilderness boundary and the spot where the upper and lower trails rejoin. They are interspersed with second-growth, so the behemoth trunks always came as a pleasant surprise. I like the image below because the branches swooping down give the image some visual energy that straight shots of trunks can sometimes lack. If I had my way, there would be less splotchy white in the background...but I could move neither the tree nor the moss!

This image came from another old-growth area, and although it's a bit busy, I like the color contrast between the young tree in the foreground and the moss in the background. I used f/6.3 - I tried narrower apertures, to simplify the background, but that resulted in too little of the foreground tree being in focus.

Finally, my pictures from the lake didn't end up being fantastic. I'm going to post them anyway, partly to prove that I did in fact hike all the way to the lake. Lakes are tough because on a sunny day, you obviously have contrast problems, but on a cloudy day, the water is just not an interesting color at all. The obvious solution would be to visit during early morning or late evening on a sunny day, which is easy for some lakes but not for Goat Lake (unless you're backpacking, of course),

This image actually did present a contrast problem, despite the overcast lighting. As you can see, the snow on the mountain in the background is overexposed. But a graduated ND filter didn't work, because the upper corners of the image ended up being too dark. Editing in Lightroom might save those highlights, though, and I like this composition. It presents a good contrast between the lush new growth on the lakeshore with the wintry world of the hills and mountain in the background. The only thing that would have made this composition better, as suggested before, would have been some color in the lake itself.

The next image came while I was just fiddling around. It's a bit busy, but I like the idea, and the filtered sunlight actually serves it pretty well. At this point, I had an aperture of f/18; I wish I had stopped down a bit further to get the mountain in focus. (By the time I had gotten a clue and adjusted my camera settings, this nice lighting was gone.)

Leapin' Lupine, 2nd Edition

Despite this morning's rain - whose onset came much earlier than advertised - I did manage to steal a bit of time this morning to photograph. This morning's destination was Magnuson Park. Its trails, while admittedly not as extensive as Discovery Park, feature many of the same meadow flowers, such as lupine, daisies, vetch, wild rose, and others.

The first photograph is not of lupine at all, the post's title notwithstanding. It is of a wild rose. I'm not confident on whether it's a nootka rose or a baldhip rose...or what. Last year I did a closeup of a rose as well. While it's lighting was cool, the angle was straight on, and so the image didn't have any depth to it. This morning's image improves on the perspective by looking at the flower from an angle. Including the out-of-focus petals in the foreground adds depth. I used f/14 to keep a lot of the flower's center in focus and to keep some definition in the petals (I wanted them to be discernible and not blobs).

Here's another cool perspective of a wild rose. It doesn't really observe the rule of thirds, but I still think it's compelling. I used f/14 again to keep the flower in the background discernible; it adds necessary context to this photograph. The close side view of the foreground flower produces a strong feeling of intimacy, I think.

Now we'll begin the transition from roses to the post's namesake. The image below was actually the last of a variety of perspectives and apertures of this scene. First, I preferred a vertical perspective over a horizontal one, first of all, because it included more lupine and reinforced their vertical lines. Second, I preferred a narrower aperture (f/6.3 in this case over, say, f/32, which I believe was the one that I tried) because it simplified the background enough to make the rose at the top of the image stand out.

For this one, despite its selective-focus appearance, I used f/22. I wanted to set these lupine flowers in the context of the blooming rose bush in the background, and I needed a narrow aperture to maintain some discernible detail in the rose blossoms. I tried f/14 as well, and even though the foreground was sharper, the composition was not as convincing. I also tried a variety of compositions around this spot; this one was the most compelling and did the best job of minimizing the brownish, withered petals low on some of the lupine plants.

The final image is the earliest, taken immediately after sunrise. I think with some contrast adjustment, the sunrise lighting would come through very well. The sky looks blue, but it was not blue at all - it was in fact almost entirely clouded over, save a thin clear strip on the eastern horizon through which the sun was shining. I tried experimenting with the sunrise lighting against the clouds, but in every case it just looked like a blue-sky background. Still, this one is pleasant. I don't like how the in-focus portion of the photograph is all jammed into the right side, but there's enough going on in the background that this doesn't kill the image. I used f/8 to keep some detail in the background lupine flowers.

It started raining at about 8am...well before I wanted it to, and before when the NWS predicted it would. There were other flowers there that I'd been hoping to photograph. Hopefully there'll be a round 2 in the near future.

Leapin' Lupine

As the post's title suggests, Discovery Park is awash with lupine right now. Lupine and other flowers. Discovery Park, in point of fact, is probably one of my favorite floral destinations, and certainly my favorite within the Seattle metro area. From February through August - and especially from May through July - the park provides a kaleidoscopic floral display.

This post's first image actually features a subject other than lupine: oxeye daisy, which also litter Discovery Park's beach-area trails with late spring blooms. It is my most adventurous composition from the afternoon. I tried something like this last year, but wanted to take another stab at it: I wanted to have a daisy flower in the foreground with perceptible lupine in the background. In this case, to keep the lupine perceptible, I stopped down all the way to f/18. The result is not quite as amazing as I'd hoped, but I still like it. I want to play with the lighting and contrast in the top part of the image - to see if I can bring out the greens and purples a bit more vividly.

Next, as advertised, is an actual picture of lupine. While most of the flowers were a solid purple, a handful of plants featured flowers that were partially a darker purple and partially white. I think that the image below nicely captures the vibrant color of these plants, while juxtaposing them against the solid purple flowers in the background. Since I was backed up a bit away from the large plants, I opened up to f/3 to minimize background detail. The image's biggest flaw is the visible spider web strands in the top half of the frame. Otherwise, I like it.

This one gives you an idea of what Discovery Park looks like now, at least near the beaches. I only needed to stop down to f/13 to get the whole shebang in focus. I think the meadow's slight slope adds interest to the image, as does the tall grass in the foreground.

And finally, this image of some sort of vetch in bloom. Although it's an improvement over my vetch images from last year, I still don't really know if it's all that captivating. I used f/6.3 to accentuate the contour of the leaves in the background. I have yet to take a picture of vetch that I really like. We'll keep trying!

Kamiak Butte, Part 2: The Meadow

Now we move on to what, for most, is the main attraction of Kamiak Butte: the south face, resplendent with wildflowers and gazing down upon the gentle undulations of the Palouse.

I'd like to start with some shots that I actually tried twice during my trip. The first I had tried once during midday, with acceptable results. I wanted to try it again, though, with more dramatic lighting, so the following dawn I huffed and puffed back up the hill to the same balsamroot plant. The sunrise lighting wasn't as amazing as I'd hoped, but even the little stripe of pinkish sky in the background livens things up. I used f/25 to maximize my depth of field; a trick to help is to set the focus point behind the foreground rather than directly on it. This helps keep the background sharp.

For the next image, my original results had actually been satisfactory, but not quite good enough. I took the original during the late afternoon, and while the light was starting to get attractive, it was still a bit splotchy and distracting. The next morning, which was overcast after a brief few minutes of sunshine at sunrise, provided more ideal lighting conditions. In post-processing, I would definitely adjust the contrast in the top half of the image to accentuate the Palouse landforms. I used f/32 and set my focus point on the rearmost flowers to keep everything in focus.

The next image, framing desert parsley against the Palouse farmland, was similarly originally taken during too-sunny lighting conditions. Although it took some doing, I was able to locate the exact same group of flowers the next morning. Although this image isn't as striking as the ones above, I still like it. The only problem is that all of the vertical lines are tilted - the flower stems and the tree all point to the left. This gives the picture a bit of a crooked feel, even though I was actually quite careful to keep it level with the horizon. I used f/14 to preserve some detail in the background.

For now, we'll stick with the theme of juxtaposing the Palouse against flowers. I actually really like this image; I think it has a good sense of depth. This would have been better with sunrise lighting, perhaps, but it's still nice. By now, if you've been reading this and other posts carefully, you can predict what I did to keep everything in focus: stopped down to f/29, set my focus point slightly behind the foreground.

The next one actually came from midday, while the sun was shining! Rare, I know. But the sunshine was filtered a bit by high clouds, and illuminated these balsamroot flowers in a surprisingly attractive way. I had to stop down all the way to f/22 to keep some detail in the distant farmland.

The next one captures the vibrancy of the balsamroot flowers. I tried this shot at several different apertures, and the one you see below is at f/13. Even though I actually would have preferred a wider depth of field, my results with a narrower aperture lost so much sharpness to both diffraction and motion blur (the flowers moved ever so slightly in a breeze) that I ended up preferring the (relatively) wider aperture.

Now I'll move on to some more intimate wildflower images. This first one is probably my least conventional composition of the bunch. I stopped down to f/18 so that I could retain some detail in the paintbrush in the background. I don't like the splotchy white areas in the background, but otherwise, I think this was a neat idea. You'll see more compositions with a similar concept in future posts...

More paintbrush and desert parsley, this time in a more conventional format. This time, I used f/3.3, since the objects were all much closer to each other and because I was much less concerned with preserving background detail.

Another nice portrait follows below, this one of a larkspur of some sort. This one was actually a bit of a challenge, if only because a lot of these plants looked rather motley, and it took a while to spot one that both looked nice and was at a good height given my tripod coverage. I like this composition because the background flowers on either side provide a bit of symmetry.

This one captures some paintbrush that had just begun to bloom. The first time I tried to photograph these flowers, it didn't work - it was sunny and about noon at the time, and the only way to manage the lighting well was to shade them with my body. I was unable to do both that and actually compose the shot (I had to set the camera up on my baby tripod, and thus needed my body to be rather low to the ground). The second time I passed the flowers, though, they were shaded. I used f/3.3, and even at that wide aperture the background is still a bit distracting. I think the diagonal color change is also distracting in and of itself.

Finally, I'll close with the theme on which this post began: sunrise lighting. I'm posting this one last because, even though I like it, it needs quite a bit of work. Even using a graduated neutral density filter, the trees are too dark. They aren't so far gone that some work in Lightroom couldn't bring them out, though. And the skies and meadows aren't too bad. I used an aperture of f/16 to keep everything in focus; I was far enough away from the meadow that I didn't need to use anything narrower.

Kamiak Butte, Part 1: The Forest

Kamiak Butte is truly a special place. One needs merely to glimpse it to realize this, for even this glimpse will reveal its tree-clad slopes protruding oddly above the gently rolling plains of the Palouse. It exists as a geological relic of an earlier time. The rolling hills of the Palouse consist of windblown deposits. Kamiak Butte, on the other hand, consists of quartzite from an earlier geologic period.

It's a particularly special place because the steepness of its topography relative to its surroundings and its east-west orientation (creating distinct northern and southern sides) allow the butte to sustain multiple distinct ecosystems. The north side, which receives comparatively little direct sunlight (especially during the winter months) accumulates a great deal of snow, which melts slowly throughout the early spring. Moisture of any kind is retained here longer than on the sunny south side. By summertime, the south side is too dry to support much of a forest. Instead, it is carpeted by grassy meadows, dotted only with occasional groves of pine and shrubs. It is this south side that is the star of the show, with extravagant flowers and sweeping views of the Palouse.

The forest, too, was beautiful in its own right, and in fact featured a floral show just as diverse as that on the ridgetop, if less ostentatious. The tree cover consists mostly of ponderosa pine, with a smattering of fir, larch, aspen, and other trees thrown in for good measure. Mallow ninebark, the dominant shrub throughout most of the forest, was just beginning to show some white blossoms, and profuse wildflowers carpeted the forest floor. Even with basically four days in the park, I only had time to photograph a small minority of the species in bloom.

This post focuses on my photography in the forested areas of the park. The next post will feature the meadows.

We'll start with star-flowered false Solomon's seal (what a mouthful!). I like this composition because it's nearly symmetrical, with attractive lines formed by the leaves. I used f/3.8 to keep the background simple. (You may notice that my wide apertures differ in some of my pictures; this is because, for complicated physical reasons, my macro lens' maximum and minimum apertures vary at different focusing distances. My other lenses similarly differ at different focal lengths. There are fixed-aperture lenses, but sadly they are more expensive).

Next, a flower that I saw for the first time: ballhead waterleaf. They bloom pretty low to the ground, but their purple color helps them to stand out. I actually really like this composition. It keeps the flower at eye level, and having the flower cluster partially obscured by a leaf adds some depth. It is almost as if the flower is shy, and peeking out from behind its leaves. I used an aperture of 3.5 to minimize background distractions.

Next comes another flower I encountered for the first time: Western meadowrue. The reason it was striking was that its flowers seemed to resemble jellyfish, especially the way the hanging stamens danced about in even slight breezes when the rest of the plant was still. Thankfully, I was able to photograph this flower on a relatively calm morning, enabling me to get even the stamens sharp. I stopped down to f/9 to keep some discernible detail in the stamens of the out-of-focus flowers. The background green is a bit splotchy, but I had to accept it because this specimen had more attractive blooms than any other meadowrue that I had seen on any of the trails.

Ponderosa pines, although they look cool in their context, don't necessarily top my list of the region's most attractive trees. My brother noticed an interesting phenomenon, however - the emerging cones, or whatever these are, actually look quite pretty. I used f/4 because I thought the narrower depth of field would make the image more dramatic, and prevent too much distracting detail in the surrounding needles. Kudos 24/7 to Julian for noticing this!

In a few spots, miner's lettuce carpets the forest floor. I struggled to devise a composition that depicted this without becoming overly busy or complex. What you see below represents my best result along these lines. I used f/8 to keep some detail in the leaves underlying the buds. Had the flowers been blooming already, the image would have been more spectacular, but the leaves below would have been perhaps less discernible.

Confusingly, the flower below can be referred to both as "woodland star" and "prairie star." It occurs in both places, I guess, but that's the trouble with common names. I found this particular specimen in the forest. I used f/5.6 to compromise between background blur and keeping some discernible detail in the flower.

Below is a detail of a mallow ninebark just beginning to flower. I used for f/5.6 for reasons similar to the above picture. Yes, the background is a bit splotchy. But this was the most attractive flower/bud cluster that I saw.

Below is false Solomon's seal (not to be confused with star-flowered false Solomon's seal). It grew very thickly in some places, and I wanted to capture that. The image below doesn't have as much depth as I would have liked, although viewing it at a larger size might help.

I'll end with a sunset image; I took it near our campsite, where the forest borders farmland. Primarily, I wanted to capture the way the late evening sunlight casts shadows over the Palouse's rolling hills, accentuating their contour. This phenomenon actually doesn't come out all that strongly in the image below, but I still like it due to the colorful clouds and the warm color of the sunlight on the tree.

Shortly I will post the second half of my Kamiak Butte pictures, the ones from the meadows! Until then, cheers!

Garden, Pt 1

I recently went on a camping trip, and the pictures are going to take a while to sort through and write about. But in the meantime, I can break the silence by posting a few pictures I've taken recently in our garden at home.

Garden photography has some obvious advantages - dependably big, showy subjects that are easily and quickly accessible. It has some challenges, too. One is tripod coverage, because most garden subjects will be low to the ground.

But the biggest challenge, in my experience, is background management. While background management is certainly not always easy in the wild, there are a few variables on the side of the photographer. A good background is more likely to present itself - a carpet of moss, a tree or grove of trees, flowers, a stream, a mountain, a view, a picturesque boulder...the list goes on. In a garden, fences, dirt, walls, and other such elements are often nearby and, in a closeup shot, can create an unattractive and distracting background.. You will see that I have not completely satisfied with my efforts to meet this challenge - two out of three pictures have backgrounds that I find distracting. I thought it would be useful, though, to post them and talk about their positive and negative aspects.

The first picture, of Lenten roses, comes from March. I wanted to "frame" the flower in the foreground with the blooms you see above and behind it. They don't stand out as well as I had envisioned, though, and the whole image looks a bit cluttered. This even with the wide aperture of f/3.2. Still, I achieved good detail on the foreground flower.

The second, of bleeding hearts, is more recent. The background consists of the plant's leaves and the ground. I am not fully satisfied with the background in the picture, as it's a bit cluttered. The flowers are striking, though, and I like the way I arranged them, with one of the middle ones in focus. That decision, I think, adds depth and interest to the image.

Finally, another picture in which I was able to use multiple flowers of the same kind as a background. The plant was thick enough that I was able to do so without incorporating any distracting elements such as a wall, dirt, or anything else. I tried several different focus points on the flower, and this was the most pleasing. I stopped down to f/6.3 to increase the amount of the foreground flower that was in focus. In hindsight, I wish I had experimented with a slightly wider aperture to see if I could blur the background a bit more without losing too much foreground detail. Ultimately, though, f/6.3 produced an acceptable result, I think.