Snow camping
It’s been a busy month. With the time change and earlier nights, photography is limited once again to the weekends. I forgot what that was like. Mornings would still work, but…I used to be a morning person. Not sure what happened. Photography-wise there is nothing too stellar this time around, but you have to keep at it.
Did a bit of camping, an annual event with buddies to Spruce Woods park. I also forgot what 0C and -10C feels like on the face. What do I wear? Where is that gear? I know it’s here somewhere. There are, after all, only a limited number of places where such gear could be. The house is only so big. How is this possible? Why am I so disorganized? Do I need full gloves, or will these fingerless woolies be enough? Why don’t I know?!
When we arrived at the camp site, the ground was clear, but frozen. A frozen branch makes a pretty good hammer, if you don’t need precision and are just pounding tent stakes. I’ll have to think about getting them out of the ground later. About an hour before dinner, the site had transformed somewhat:
Still, once inside it was pretty comfortable. We’ve camped in colder weather, though probably less damp. The coyotes howled with some regularity, there must have been at least 3 or 4 groups calling to each other nearby and in the distance. Some were very close by: on the second night I was wide awake, listening to the melodious sounds of my friends snoring, when Blair suddenly starts making what I can only describe as the sound of a tongueless man who is just learning that, sometime in the night, he’s become a eunuch: a moan of concern, followed by grunts of bafflement, and an inarticulate howl of fear and loss. A wild and panicked thrashing ensues. I was concerned for David, who was sharing his tent, but before either of us can speak, Blair yells:
“It was a coyote! I punched a coyote, it was pressing up against the tent!”
The way Blair described it, he felt something pushing on one side. In his sleep he thought it was David rolling over too far in the tent. Then, as sleep began to fade, he realized David was on the other side… so what was on this side?! So he howled and punched. It’s the wilderness after all, you don’t ask questions.
I’m not sure sure David or I fully believed it in the moment. It seemed “possible”, but improbable. So we got up to pee (we’re nearing 60, it’s a nightly necessity) and stared at the stars. We tucked in for a second round of “try to not listen to your friend’s weird breathing”, and after about 15 minutes…pitter patter, pitter patter… We all heard some creature nosing about our tents. I got up hoping to at least catch some “eye-shine” with my headlamp, but no luck. However, in the morning there were clear tracks all around.
Sadly, I have no pictures. But we decided next year we’ll bring a trail cam, and see what kind of visitors we get all night. I bet we’ll be surprised.
The next morning the sky broke up a bit. I’m not sure it comes through, and I probably need to learn some editing tricks, but I do enjoy the subtle colours in the clouds:
The others weren’t up yet, so I enjoyed a morning stroll. The campsite is on a ridge above a creek, and down by the creek things are more interesting. Last blog I mentioned that we had quite a storm. Winnipeg was treated to something like 40+ cms of snow, which is highly unusual for us. Well, here in Spruce Woods they had almost double, around 75cms. Needless to say lots of trees and limbs were down, old trails becoming instantly older and less passable. This fallen trunk made a nice catch for the previous night’s snow pellets:
One of the challenges with photographing our short scrubby forests is trying to find some order in the chaos. Structurally I kind of like how this came out, how the snow-covered branches lead up to the fallen trunk, which provides the visual base for the turned oak. A little direct sunlight on the leaves would have been icing on the cake:
Later we all went for a walk, and David pelted a snowball into the crook of a tree. I thought the result made a nice study:
I should mention for the technically-minded that except for the campsite scene (which was taken with the iPhone), all the above were taken with the Olympus. I decided not to bring my whole Pentax kit, and limited myself to one camera and lens. Makes for a smaller package, but more importantly in some ways, I’m growing to really appreciate its capabilities.
Another with the Olympus relied on its stabilization features. The camera is almost 5 years old, but still can hold steady at 1/5th of second. This is kind of a silly shot, but I was struck by the sun streaming in my bedroom window one morning and all the paint textures around the old door knob and lock:
I have only a couple of pictures with the Pentax this time around. A weekend jaunt to Bird’s Hill reminded me of one of the many reasons I prefer wearing wool, in this case, because it’s much quieter than other fabrics, and so:
If I had been paying more attention I would have seen them sooner, and possibly gotten closer, but a shot through foliage is all I could manage before they ran off. Their coats are healthy and richly coloured, they look fat and well-fed. We’ll see how they are by March…
I’ll end with a comparison shot, as I have a hard time picking between these. The differences are almost entirely structural (they were exposed a bit differently, but I tried to even that out in post-processing):
The differences have to do with how the path winds through the picture and how much of the top forest is included: how close to the corner the path starts, does it wind widely enough, does it turn back at the right point in the frame, etc.
I do have a preference, which is for the first image. To me the subtle difference in how the path winds, that it’s longer, and the inclusion of slightly more of the darkened forest edge provides both more tension and more of a foreboding feeling. I can’t quite describe it.
I could be way overthinking it. Maybe it doesn’t matter much, and besides, it’s not exactly a compelling landscape. But I’m trying to think harder about these structural decisions. I’ve noticed sometimes weeks after getting an image printed that, if only I had moved slightly a certain way, or cropped it differently, the image is vastly improved. So I’m finding it important to question, regardless of whether the landscape is compelling or not. After all, you don’t always get a storm or some dramatic event where the points of interest are obvious.
Well, that’s it for this month. Somewhat lean, but hopefully I’ll get out more before the end of the year.
Cheers!
