Seeing the Beauty of the Little Things Around Us

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Wildflowers – Snow Mountain Ranch

As I walked along the trail at Snow Mountain Ranch, I stopped frequently and just looked around enjoying the countryside.  Almost every time, something caught my eye.  This simple image of rocks and flowers was one of those moments.

Photography has taught me to see the beauty and interesting things around me.  Today, everywhere I look, I see something interesting that makes me step back and enjoy the moment.  When I become engrossed on a photographic subject, I feel like I become part of it.  I am no longer just an observer.

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Remnants of the Past

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Remnant – Snow Mountain Ranch

Back to Snow Mountain Ranch.  Before it was a conservancy preserve, this beautiful countryside was a working ranch.  Throughout the preserve, remnants of the past history are scattered about:  watering tubs, barbed wire fences, barbed wire rolls, sheds, small corrals.  These remnants of the past add interest to the preserve as well as provide photo opportunities.

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Stairs

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Stairs to a Hidden Garden – Golden Gardens, Seattle

My friend and I went out for a little photoshoot on a bright Spring day.  This was the first thing I saw. The stairs, surrounding rocks, and the plants were all different shades of brilliant green.  I thought the different tonalities would make a good black and white image.

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Experimenting

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Sagebrush – Straight Out of Camera

This is an experiment to try to create an image that was in my mind when I shot this photo.  The above image is the base image I captured.  The sagebrush seems to blend into the background. I lost the 3D feeling that I had when I saw this bush.  I first tried to add structure to the bush and delete structure from the background.  That did not achieve what I wanted.  I then tried black and white.  That merged the brush with the background even more.  I then tried to blur the background.  That looked to “fakey” to me.  I then blended the blurred B&W to the color image to come with the image below.

Sagebrush – Processed

This came the closest to what I saw  in my mind.

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Surrounded

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Snow Mountain Ranch – Wildflowers

This little clump of white and pink wild flowers had a very interesting shape.  It kind of looked like a huge clover bloom.  The surrounding little yellow wildflowers highlighted the larger white/pink flowers.

Walking through the field of flowers, there were little vignettes everywhere.  I would walk a little way, stop, and look around.  Almost every time, something caught my eye.  No one was around, it was quiet and peaceful.  It was a great way to spend my time!

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Field of Wildflowers

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Snow Mountain Ranch – Field of Wildflowers

Like I mentioned in my last post, my objective of this photo excursion was to first enjoy the beautiful day and wildflowers.  Then my photographic objective was to collect a series of images that captured the “Grand Landscape” of wildflowers and the area as well as smaller “Intimate Landscape” of flowers, rocks, sage brush, and other interesting objects.  This image is somewhere in between. I picked this image because it gave me a feeling of being amongst the wildflowers instead of being apart from them and viewing them against a distant background.  I actually was down on my elbows and knees when I took this image with a wide angle lens.

 

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A Day of Fun and Practice

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Wildflowers – Snow Mountain Ranch, Cowiche, Washington

I took a day to explore and photograph wildflowers.  I tried to capture both the overall feel of the large masses of flowers and their place in the countryside as well as individual vignettes of little scenes of flowers and interesting subjects.

This image I attempted to capture the field of bright wildflowers set against the green hillsides covered with sage brush and bunch grass and the interesting clouds in the background.  My objective was to capture the feel of the beautiful, cloudy, peaceful day.

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A Perspective of Time

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Argillite Boulder – Rattlesnake Mountain, Washington

This image depicts an interesting perspective of time.  The rock in the foreground was deposited here on Rattlesnake Mountain around 15,000 years ago.  The Rattlesnake Mountain and the Horse Heaven Hills in the background were created as part of the Yakima Fold formation about 1.5 million years ago.  The bedrock of this area is basalt from basalt flows through eastern Washington from 6-15 million years ago. The argillite boulder in the foreground is metamorphic rock from western Montana formed 1.5 billion years ago.

So here I was, sitting on a rock created before life on earth existed, brought here by a humongous flood around 15 thousand years ago, deposited on mountains uplifted 1.5 million years ago, created by a series of gigantic lava flows about 2 miles thick 6-15 million years ago.  And I think I am old at 67 years. As many of my Whizzy friends would say, “It’s a thinker.”

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What is a Bergmound?

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Bergmound – Rattlesnake Mountain, Washington

As glaciers moved southward during the Ice Ages, they scoured the terrain picking up rock debris.  During the Missoula Floods, parts of the glaciers would break off forming ice bergs.  These were carried down through the Eastern Washington scablands into the Pasco basin.  As Lake Lewis formed, many of the ice bergs floated to the edges of the lake.  As the lake emptied, several of these ice bergs were left stranded on the surrounding ridges.  They melted leaving mounds of accumulated rocks, gravel, and sand. These are “bergmounds”.

Most bergmounds are found in the Pasco Basin at elevations of 600 – 850 feet.  They are 20 – 35 feet higher than the surrounding terrain.  The bergmound pictured above is on a plateau of eastern Rattlesnake mountain above Richland, WA.  The bergmounds are somewhat inconspicuous unless, one is looking for them.

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