Tamarack Rose
Greetings! The northern world stirs once again, and holds a few surprises for me. After my last post end of April I went out the next day and was greeted with bright sunshine and intense northern winds. All the birds and such were hunkered down, but it turned out to be a good day for the last of the milkweed. Last year’s pods have been opening all winter, and finally let the last of their seeds loose.
Given the winds I had to change my tactics, and it was a good learning experience. Normally I’d try to get close, but with everything moving I had to back off and ended up using my longest telephoto lens, normally reserved for birds. Even waiting between gusts I still had to use a very high shutter speed, but I really like the results:
Like a bird…
The willows were also blooming, and again wind made it difficult, but I do like how the telephoto provides good isolation. It’s a different “look” from what the macro lens produces, I need to experiment with it more:
Next day was off to Grand Beach. The weather was gloomy and foreboding, and it ended up thundering and raining, but no matter. Now that I discovered the “beaver trail” I wanted to return and see if I could recapture the caption shot from last blog with a different sky. On the way, a squirrel caught my attention mostly by how he ignored me while he single-mindedly chowed down on a pine cone:
Like a kid with a fresh corn-on-the-cob, he stripped it to the core:
Arriving at the beaver dam, the scene wasn’t as interesting looking in the original direction (east), but the sky to the west was dark and threatening. The sun peeked out just enough to light up the near part of the marsh, leaving the distant section enshrouded. There was plenty of lightning, but that’s hard to time :)
I found a place to sit for a while, hiding in the shade and hoping for some birds. Then I looked down, and there were fresh bear tracks in the mud! From that point on, every twitch in the grass made me look around. Meanwhile, a vulture came to check me out, perhaps he knew something I didn’t:
On the way back the lightning and thunder drifted away and the sky became more ethereal:
Naturally the above shots are in colour too, but I find the B&W more “to the point”. It’s really about the light and textures, and sometimes colour just overshadows that. One amusing note: resting on top of the beaver lodge above is a goose. I didn’t see it at all out there, and it was only when I zoomed in at home that I noticed it. It makes me think I should scan the area with the telephoto before leaving the scene.
On a different day, the warblers are back. This is apparently a Palm Warbler. It kept flitting ahead of me on my hiking path, never quite in reach or in good light, until finally it perched for a couple minutes in full sun. Patience rewarded:
Then it was off to a different set of ponds, where the water was almost completely still, creating these perfect reflections. If I’m honest, I like the idea of these shots better than the execution…it’s quite stunning in person, but I don’t think I got the right angle or took the right approach. I can’t get close enough to limit the depth of field to hide the background, even at f4 everything behind the reflection is effectively in focus. The second shot was taken about 45 minutes after the first, which gives a better result by not lighting up the background, but….so many things wrong with these, not sure how to fix them. Anyway, I think it makes a cool pattern:
Finally, the Tamarack trees are regrowing their needles. For those who don’t know, tamaracks are a coniferous tree that sheds and regrows its needles every year, like a deciduous tree. What I didn’t know is why some of the needle clusters looked like a little rose, bearing a gorgeous wine colour in the early evening light. I got home and googled “tamarack rose”, and whaddaya know, it’s a thing! Apparently those are young cones, and the “petals” will turn hard and woody:
That’s it for May. Not sure if I’ll get to post another before mid-June: I’m off on a two week road trip in mid-June so I can do a weekend photo workshop on Vancouver Island. Hopefully I’ll have some good stuff when I get back.
Cheers!
