Random structures
Welcome back!
A couple of days after my last post I found myself in Whiteshell Provincial Park again. There is a side road, rarely frequented, that runs down to a river and a small bridge. At the bridge the river switches suddenly from placid to roaring, and with all the snow we got a couple of months ago, the water was unusually high. That and the frigid conditions provided this scene. I really like the “mushroom caps” of ice on the boulders in the background:
I’m a sucker for these kinds of transitions between motion and stillness, so this little scene caught my eye:
The trick is finding the right shutter speed. Too slow and the water turns to a milky wash, too fast and it might as well be ice. I think I lucked out here, with 1/15th second giving the water some kind of silky texture. Now, it would be a much better picture without the branch and ice blob intruding from the right. I rarely like to manipulate these scenes, but in retrospect I should have.
Across the bridge is a snowmobile trail. During the summer it quickly becomes overgrown and swampy, but each fall somebody mows it and it makes a good walking trail. The view of the river in the other direction was a bit more serene:
It was a bit of a gloomy day, and became more so: I’d noticed quite a few pickups with trailers for ATVs in the parking area before the bridge, but I hadn’t thought anything of it. At one point I came across what was obviously some kind of kill: a gout of blood in the snow, red drips and prints trailing a ways off, and crushed foliage spelling the collapse of something large. But nothing else was there. Eventually several kilometres along the trail I ran into somebody on an ATV. I waved as normal, and he pulls up and says “What are YOU up to?”
A rather curt greeting I thought. “I’m just hiking up to the cabin up ahead, there’s some rapids there and…”
“You really should be wearing orange,” he interrupts.
My mouth said “why’s that?” but I was starting to finally clue in after seeing the kill spot. And maybe it was that he was all decked out in an orange jumpsuit…and maybe it was the deer rifle laid across the front of his ATV, complete with scope and everything. He looks at me like I’m a moron.
“It’s hunting season. My brother in law is just over that ridge in a blind. Now, he’s pretty careful, but some of these old-timers…” he just shakes his head ruefully. “Or these young guys who get ‘buck fever’…” He let the implication hang out there.
“Well, thanks for telling me. Sounds like I should turn around and head out.”
At this point he got a lot friendlier. “I hate to say it, but that’s what I would do.” After a bit more chat and a couple of laughs, and a stern admonition that even a simple orange toque would be enough in the future, he headed on his way and I headed back. I have to say it was a longer walk out than in, just because I kept thinking about it. But it all ended well, and hunting season is done now, so I plan to return soon. Next year I’ll check the dates.
The next weeks I only managed to get as far as Bird’s Hill park, my go-to when I have limited time. The first outing I was treated to a Pileated Woodpecker chiselling his way into a dead log. The angle isn’t great, and I didn’t have time to set up my tripod, but I did have time to get the right lens on, so it wasn’t too bad. That crest just glows like a hummingbird’s throat:
Then just last week I was treated to a spectacle. I was driving north of the city and the sky turned hazy, like a vast foggy cloud had suddenly risen up. I’m not sure what caused it, but it looked like the snow from the night before was suddenly swept up from the city, combined with ice crystals, and blown across my path. I had to pull over quickly, run down the ditch, and just snap away, no time really to get up a good composition. Within a couple of minutes it was over, and the sky was back to clear and blue.
One of the things I like about that shot is you can see individual flakes, like tiny stars in space. It’s kind of surreal, and much more apparent in the original image.
Now I’m looking through the rest of the images I’d selected for this blog, and damned if I can find a theme. So maybe I’ll start small and work my way out. I like the colours and light on this simple shot of fungus and snow:
Sometimes it’s about the colour transitions, here from blue to gold as the grass sweeps from shadow to sunlight:
The failure in that one is the framing, I think I should have included more of the curve sweeping up from the left.
This next one is about the shape, and the natural frame. One of the challenges I keep relearning with macro photography is that the depth of field is so narrow, unless you have a light source you control, you can really only get good results if you make sure your entire subject is on the same plane. This works for the web of frosty twigs, leaving the contents of the frame suitably blurred as contrast.
But of course, a frame needs something in it! Even something as simple as:
This next one has similar challenges, and an additional issue:
The problem here is the strong intersecting line in the bottom half. As noted above, I generally don't like to “clean up” the scene artificially, because for me it’s part of the challenge to make do with what is really there. But in this case, again, I probably should have broken my little rule.
Moving out a bit from the tiny, again it’s all about shape and pattern. Finding interesting and useable patterns in the midst of the clutter in our scrubby woodlands is one of the things that keeps me going out. The land is always changing, and something new always presents. In this case, a very shallow depth of field helps isolate the curving branch and its support:
The one issue I have with the above image is … check out the snow on the ground. It’s pretty dark. In order to get the right contrast I needed to bring down the highlights in the sky, but since the snow (especially in the shadows) is dominated by the same colours, the snow is affected. I’m not sure what the solution is, a little dodging and burning risks affecting all the other clutter. Something to ponder and learn from.
Moving from patterns to vistas, this is more of a vista with patterns. Except for the massive storm a couple months ago, we haven’t had a lot of snow. But we did have a recent gentle snowfall, delicate dry flakes falling without a breath of wind to whip them about. This meant everything got an even coating, which resulted in these little archipelagos of junipers, or junipelagos… :)
I have to confess I probably like this next one more than I should, I even made it the title shot. I’m not even sure I can fully explain why I like it. It’s a view from the top of a small quarry, taken with a long lens. Something about the shapes of the island of small conifers, and the island of shadow just grabbed me out in the field:
A similar idea, on a different and gloomier day:
Almost done.
There were a couple of things that drew me to the next shot: the winding path the animal took, which suggests some kind of story where it curves (what did it smell? why did it go around the far stump?); and the lacy grasses contrasting with the flat snow.
Because the grasses were key to this scene, I tried focus stacking. I like the lens I use for wide shots, up to about f/11. After f/11 the diffraction becomes noticeable, so I generally try not to use f/16 or higher. And normally I’m okay with a bit of “out of focus” results as long as the subject is sharp. But this scene required focus from front to back to emphasize the grasses, and I could only get that with f/16 or f/22.
With Photoshop you can “focus stack”: take several images, each focussed at a different point in the scene, and the software will stitch everything together for you and keep the most “in focus” bits from each image. So this is really three shots. Honestly, it feels a bit like cheating. I do like the result, but I think it could have been almost as good with a shallow depth of field with sharp focus on the near grasses. I should have tried that when I was out there. Always “work the scene” they say, but I don’t always remember that when my hands are cold.
I’ll end on a fun note, with a picture of some stranger’s dog :) I was out with my sister and her dog on a snowy day, we ran into another dog and his owner. My sister has met them before, and this dog and hers get along just great, so we wandered the woods while they chased each other around. The dog finally came over to check me out, posing nicely. I think he wasn’t sure what to make of the “giant eye” pointed at him.
And that is probably it for this year. I hope you find love and joy and stay warm this season!
Cheers!
