Prairie Dawn
This will be fairly short, as the last couple of months have been challenging photographically, and I don’t even have any good stories to make up for it. However, I have been making a point of getting up early and racing to meet the dawn. Usually, I’m late, but as the days slowly get shorter, it’s getting a bit easier. Waking at 5 to be somewhere by quarter to 6 is a bit easier than waking at 3:30 to be somewhere by 4:30…which apparently I just ain’t gonna do, no matter how much of a pep talk I give myself the night before 😀
Anyway, after weeks of what I consider mediocre pictures, dawn finally rewarded me yesterday morning, thus the title.
Dawn comes in phases, and the predawn is usually a palette of soft pastel colours. Here the goldenrod is starting to bloom, under the pale pink and blue of the morning sky:
Earlier in the season, in the same pre-dawn hour we had a mix of three-flowered-avens and some other plant I should know the name of by now, and I was drawn to the alternating layers of pink and white, with a backdrop of green:
I’m always entranced by backlighting, and when the sun rises everything takes on a more defined edge:
I’m a bit undecided about the above shot. In retrospect, if I had spent more time on it I should have either stopped down to get a “starburst” effect from the sun, or kept the sun out entirely. I find the starburst effect so overused…but it’s better than undecided waffling 🙃
Within 30 minutes the landscape was fully lit, but still had that morning glow, and sidelight providing good detail:
I used a polarizer and grad filter on the sky to help the camera “see” what I was seeing. The eye adjusts to (or the brain compensates for) polarized light and the brightness of the sky, but the camera always has a problem with those situations.
The dawn wasn’t always peaceful, my first outing was pretty stormy and dark, until a silver and bronze window appeared in the sky:
Dawn led me to other treasures in the tiny world of macro, but I’ll address that later. For now let’s stick with landscapes. Though I struggled over the last couple of months, it wasn’t a complete write-off.
Here’s a classic “farm country” panorama on a stormy day. That day had a ton of potential, but I really couldn’t get it together, and this was the only one that worked:
As a finale on the landscapes, on a gloomier day earlier in summer I found this complicated scene:
This is probably not to everyone’s taste, but personally it’s one of my favourites, and I spent quite a bit of time among the mosquitoes arranging the lines “just so”. It’s subjective as to whether any of that effort made a lick of difference 😄
From landscapes let’s switch over to some animals, feathered or multi-legged…
I haven’t been able to get up to the Shoal Lakes as much as I’ve wished. A couple years ago the lakes were loaded with all kinds of birds, but last year was a drought and they (and the lakeshore) disappeared. This year we’ve had more than enough rain to make up for the drought, but the birds do not seem to have returned in the same numbers yet. Still, I did try to catch some terns fishing, and I kind of like the pose this black tern took as it wheeled to dive:
Meanwhile, watching from a distance like a monarch on a throne, an eagle scanned it’s domain from a dead tree:
A bit closer to earth, this yellow warbler was hunting among the thistles for insects. I like the colour contrast of yellow and purple:
Even closer yet takes us into the macro world. I watched fascinated by this little bug sat on a grassy seed head. First it would produce a small bubble of liquid from its mouth:
Then it would slowly wave its wings back and forth until the bubble disappeared. I expect it was producing mating pheromones and helping them evaporate:
With macro photography I’ve been trying a new technique: focus stacking. This involves taking a series of images, each focussed on a very narrow band, and then using software to stitch the images together and prioritize the parts that are in focus.
The usual way to get more of an image in focus is to reduce the lens aperture (f-stop). However, this has two side-effects: first, your shutter speed has to be reduced to compensate for the lower amount of light, so your image is more subject to motion blur; and the background becomes more defined and cluttered. The point of focus stacking is to keep your shutter speed up, and retain a background that has that “creamy” look. It definitely has it’s limitations, and it will take more practice to get right, but here are a couple early attempts:
Normally I’d have to pick which part of the flower, or which part of the insect, was in focus, but in these cases I got the whole flower, and both insects. However, if you look closely, you can see that the insect facing the camera has half its top wing out of focus. I need more practice, clearly.
Converging the “dawn” theme with the “macro” theme, the morning light and humidity worked to create a sparkling little wonderland. These are not focus stacked, which was intentional, and I think I made the right call. First up is a simple top-down shot, I just liked the shape and lines of this plant, and the arrangement of light:
Finally, I really liked this single blade of grass threading between the stem and leaves of this sprig, covered in the smallest dew. I felt it was worth two shots with different emphasis:
And while I like the colours, I really took the pictures with black and white in mind. These are my favourites, so I’ll end with them:
Summer has really flown by and is half over, we’ll have to see what the second half has in store. I have a canoe trip planned for end of August, so hopefully I’ll be able to include something interesting from that as well.
Take care, and cheers! 😀
