Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Northwest Return Travelog #16
Spokane, WA - Mon, 2 Aug 2021. 2pm.

I've explained in my past couple blogs how I consider it important when traveling to have a few runner-up plans, or at least a sense of reasonable alternatives, in case Plan A goes south. With wildfires, heavy smoke, and challenging weather some of our plans this weekend have gone... up in smoke. One of the ideas on our runner-up list was visiting the flower gardens at Manito Park in Spokane. Though even those went slightly sideways.

"I want to see the lilac garden," Hawk insisted. Except when we got there this afternoon none of the lilac bushes were blooming. That whole section of the park looked half dead. Fortunately almost everything else was in bloom. We parked at the Japanese garden and started there.



After a short stroll through the Nishinomiya Tsutakawa garden we headed back out the gate and walked up the hill toward the park's rose garden.



As you can see in the distance of the photo above the weather was not exactly great. It was warm and a bit muggy, and the sky was shrouded with a combination of clouds and thick smoke. How can you tell the difference between smoke and clouds? Both are gray above, but the smoke is especially apparent near ground level when looking 100m away. Still, we were here for the gardens. We tried not to let the weather and smoke detract too much from the experience.

Photography Lesson in Real Time

I started taking a lot of pictures of individual flowers in this area. There are so many colorful varieties! As I reviewed the first half dozen or so in my camera, though, I found the pictures were... off. I have a nice camera, nice lenses, and I know how to use them.... What could be wrong?

What was wrong was I was trusting the camera when I needed to trust myself instead. Specifically, my ability to know what to focus on and then actually focus on it. Here's a side-by-side comparison that shows the difference:



In the view on the left the camera is set to autofocus. In auto mode the camera picks out something with high contrast and focuses on it. In a flower close-up that might be the edge of a leaf or a prominent isolated feature such as a stem in the background. Not desirable! On the right I've switched the camera into manual focus mode and I've nailing the focus on the pistil. Much better!

BTW, the reason exact focus is so critical in these pictures is I'm shooting with a lens with a fairly wide aperture. In technical terms it's f/2.8. At that setting, and when shooting close-up, there's very shallow depth of field. Having the focus point off by even half an inch can make a huge difference. Half and inch is literally the difference in the composite above. If you shoot at a much smaller aperture, which is about all that's available with smartphone cameras, your focus isn't as sensitive to small differences. You also won't see those blurry background unless you use post effects to put them in.



Now, knowing what to do and doing it 100% of the time are different things. In the pic above I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't get the bee in perfect focus. Partly that's because the damn thing moves! But when I zoom in on the full size original I see that the hairs on the bee's hind segment are in focus while the eyes are slightly out of focus. Yes, that's half an inch again— and it can seem like a mile!

Enough shop talk; back to the gardens.



Manito Park isn't all rose gardens. The rose garden is only one section of the park. There's also this traditional garden area, which I believe dates to the park's creation in 1904. (In the Western US that counts as old!)



Watching people of different ages enjoying the park I thought about what it was that I was enjoying. Seeing children here, especially, reminded me that when I was a kid I would've gotten bored after about 5 minutes. What's different now?

Partly it's that as an adult, especially as a middle age adult, I'm okay with taking it easy more of the time. But mostly it's the photography. Photography is how I engage with places like this.



There's the challenge of making a great pictures, like I wrote about above with that focus comparison. There's the joy of practicing and skill and getting it right. And there's the fact that exploring an area with a camera encourages trying different perspectives.