Summer's Foggy End — Jon's Photoblog

Greetings all! Welcome to another episode of “as the leaves turn”.

After the canoe trip of the last blog I hit a dry spell, much like the weather, it seemed like almost nothing I could do behind the camera worked. But then we had a long stretch of morning fog…and not the usual “light mist” which passes for fog around here. As a friend put it, this was honest to goodness 19th-century-London-Sherlock-Holmes kind of fog, and I was lucky enough that it stretch over a weekend. So it was early mornings for a while.

Still, I managed a few “standard” shots just as the leaves began to turn. This particular shot works better in black and white:

But out west at Spruce Woods the colours were more intense:

I lucked out in the shot above. If you look carefully in the middle, there is a Pileated Woodpecker in mid flight. His wings are tucked in because they have a “flap-flap-rocket” mode of flight, and I caught him mid-rocket. If I had wings, that’s what I’d do 😁 it looks like a hoot. I was lucky enough to see him coming and time it pretty well.

Back at Bird’s Hill park, I spent a few hours in the late afternoon growing frustrated over the the waning light. Clouds kept following the sun and never let the light through, until the last ten minutes of day. Suddenly the sun popped out from behind the clouds and I was treated to a gold wash on gold leaves:

I’m trying to tighten up my compositions and include only what’s relevant to the story or mood. But sometimes a larger context is its own reward:

I really lucked out with the clouds somewhat mirroring the tree line, like a shadow, and (hopefully) giving a sense of depth. And also with the timing…a few seconds later and the light vanished, but the sunset looked something like this:

Enough with the sunny days. But before we move on, a quick abstract interlude, I just like the shape and texture of these seed heads:

On to the fog. The first sight that greeted me in the morning was this:

It’s kind of cheating, since it was right there, and I could just roll down the car window, but I’ll take it 🙂 The rest took a little more effort, and I’m glad I wore my rubber boots. Hiking around one of the ponds led me to this:

Elsewhere the ponds were thick with geese, all honking and yammering and getting ready for migration. These few lined up almost symmetrically:

As the sun rose the fog became thicker. I can imagine this would have been a perfect place to film a vampire or werewolf film:

Meanwhile the geese kept up their cacophony, until suddenly one group or another would take to the air and exercise their wings. Luckily a few passed through a scene I was working on, to its benefit I hope:

A few more geese passed by, and I managed to get them in focus with the telephoto:

Eventually the fog began to lift and I could see across the pond, where the sun’s glow began to strengthen:

Next to me in the reeds, while I was busy arranging the shot above, a sparrow was fluttering about looking for seeds and tasty bugs. One of the benefits of quietly photographing a landscape is that the wildlife starts ignoring you, which is why I carry the telephoto at all times.

This sparrow came pretty close, and I think I caught it just after gulping down a spider: