March Forward
Well, work didn’t let up like I hoped it would, but eventually things settled down and I’ve been able to get out. February was consistently cold, much to my pleasure. It doesn’t make running errands much of a joy, but if you’re willing to take 15 minutes to get dressed for it, it’s still quite enjoyable.
There’s a lot of Black and White coming up. It’s that time of year when most of the colour has been drained from the landscape, though if you look closely sometimes you can get surprises. These pictures are taken in my usual haunts, but I’m exploring further and finding new things.
Let’s start with the big views. We’ve had more snow this year, and the drifts make interesting shapes:
The skies were usually clouded over, but occasionally we got a few gentle rays, and a few gaps big enough to admit the rising moon:
Though these are sometimes lonely views, I find them alluring. I’m always asking where does this river go, what is around the bend, behind that hill or line of trees?
Sometimes what’s waiting just under the snow at your feet is surprising on its own. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture, but I’m now forewarned: as I was trudging up a trail I noticed an odd swish in the snow, about a metre long, like a sky elemental had accidentally brushed its toes on the ground. There were no prints anywhere else nearby, so it wasn’t a deer (where the distance between bounds is kind of awesome). I approached closer, curious, and just as I was hovering over the swish, a grouse exploded out of the snow and flew off clucking. Nearly crapped my woolies! Apparently they come careening in from above (hence the swish), rustle sideways about half a metre, and nestle there under a snowy blanket.
The crazy part is that, while that has never happened to me before (and not since), later that day it happened again! So now my eyes are peeled, but I can bet it will be a while before I get a chance to set up my camera for it.
Back to the pics, here’s a road well-travelled:
I might as well cap off the “big views” section with a panorama. It’s fairly simple with today’s software, and it does a pretty good job of stitching together your shots. It’s important to level the tripod, which is easier said than done in deep snow piled over springy grasses, but once that’s done it was just four shots. Technically I think this is too wide, I may revisit the edit, or better yet, go back and take the shots again.
On to the smaller stuff. The Whiteshell park has lots of moving water, no matter how cold it gets:
What really caught my eye here was the fringe of ice in all its glorious detail. And then, because I keep making the same mistakes, I opted for the wide view. I keep doing that, and it’s frustrating to get home and have that head-slap moment. My forehead is getting a callus.
It as the same with this next one. The original shot is much wider, but I think I was able to salvage something in the crop:
Finally I did move in tighter, focusing on a patch of thin ice over a gentle current. I really like the tiny frost “trees”. On a technical note, for this one I used focus stacking for the first time, taking a series of shots at a wider aperture to increase the sharpness in each section. These are then merged in Photoshop, taking the sharpest bits from each image. I think it turned out pretty well as far as that goes:
Getting smaller still, this patch of moss has trapped some snow, almost like a bird’s nest:
A couple days we had good sunlight, and towards sunset I found these, kind of like a promise of spring:
Finally, I found the shapes of these opened milkweed pods compelling. I spent way too much time here and my fingers were just numb from the cold. The problem was less about the pods, and more about finding a way to either eliminate the cluttered background, or working with it. Part of the issue is technical: the camera shows the view with the lens “wide open”, so all backgrounds look blurry through the viewfinder. There is a button to close the lens to what it will be when you take the shot, but this usually makes it so dark you can’t even see anything, especially towards the end of the day. And of course you can review the image on the back of the camera after it’s taken, and adjust accordingly, but that view can be misleading.
So it’s part of the learning process, to learn how each lens is likely to handle each background at a particular f-stop. Thank goodness for digital, it would be expensive to learn with film. Anyway, on to the pics:
Well, thanks for reading. Cheers!
