A Previous Winter

No, this is not from this year. When we had snow to get out in, it then got way too cold, at least for me. Then the snow has been kind of melting and sublimating (evaporating without melting), leaving little opportunity for outside snow activities. So, in lieu of the real thing, I just went back a year and dug these out from a January snowshoe excursion to my favorite local park- Whitewater State Park.  Stay warm.

Hidden and Waiting in the Snow

Open Water Reflections

Get Moving

Was out walking at Whitewater State Park last week. Looking down before I took a step I saw this little guy moving along. So I watched him for a few moments.

  

Made me think of a joke I've heard around recently:

What did the snail say when it got on the back of turtle?

"Wheee!"

Colors- Wild and Subtle - Fungus, et. al. Edition

It was a cloudy kind of day on Sunday when I went to Whitewater Park. I did get some good overall pictures, but I focused a little more on the little things. Fungus, mushrooms, lichen, moss- that kind of thing. Again, the sharp colors or the more subtle ones combine on the fall forest floor for interesting patterns. I am always amazed at how the colors merge, blend and contrast depending on the area of focus and depth of focus.

What continues to amaze me, even more than the colors and contrasts is a technical item. The camera on my iPhone 4s produces such good pictures. The next two of the mushrooms from underneath were taken with the iPhone. It is light, compact and has a decent lens for the more wide-angle shots. I do not even use the wide to normal angle lens on my Nikon and rely on the iPhone for the general shots or when I get down on my knees and try to get pictures like the next two.

Shades of Art Work

One thing I like doing when out taking pictures in the woods, etc. is to find combinations of colors next to each other. Sometimes one is a "background" and other times they are right next to each other. The out-of-focus areas behind the main subject can also add a different dimension. Even though I try to plan these, I also know that most pictures are a matter of luck, lighting and things you didn't notice when you were taking the picture in the first place. Back in the old days of film, we used to remind ourselves that film was the cheapest expenditure. The more pictures you take, the more good pictures you will have. Here are a few from my most recent visit to Whitewater State Park.

The one above surprised me when I saw it. I had taken two pictures of the same sets of colors and flowers focusing on different parts of the picture. What I didn't expect was the truly out-of-focus effect of the reddish flowers with the small blue ones in the left-center. How many shades of just green there are!!

Then there are those times when even my best planning of focus is overcome by the auto-focus in the camera itself. That genie does some of my best work. The real center of this picture ended up as the shadow in the center and the leaf pointing to the right. I had planned to have that darker section on the upper left. At least something I did worked as planned.

The next two were truly created on the computer. First, above, the cropping of the original gave me a combination with the blue in the center as well as the yellow to the right both being in focus. I have discovered that some flowers, depending on zoom, cropping, sharpness and lighting have an almost painted quality as the mixing of the blues, greens and yellows in the center of this one above.

So I did a little more of the playing around with Gimp (I'm too cheap to but Photoshop.). As I have said before, this gives me the opportunity to play at art. (I'm not an artist, but I play one on the Internet.) Using a picture cropped a little differently I tweaked and played with different filters, layers and fadings. The blending of the colors as well as the flow of colors into one another struck me- so I kept it.

Though It Is Still Summer

Here are some of the pictures I got last week at Whitewater State Park. It is not hard to find the leftovers of summer and the signs of the coming autumn.

Being an Artist

I can't draw to save my life. Stick figures are even beyond my ability. That has always been a frustration and no doubt why I have always been a photographer. It gives me the chance to be artistically creative. With digital photography I have been able to do things like crop and enlarge without even a darkroom.

I have tried to play with some of the other digital bells and whistles from time to time. I sat watching TV and started playing with GIMP and came up with something that I liked. So I decided to share it.

First, the original picture, taken at Whitewater State Park.

Here is the digital "work of art."

Has a nice oriental feel to it.

Mid-Summer Days

When in need of more wilderness, I go to my favorite park just down the road- Whitewater State Park. As I have said before summer is usually thought of as a time of green- underbrush, trees, ferns. Greens are everywhere. But it is never boring. It all is on where you look.

Even the ferns are varied in color.

At Coyote Point the wondrous network of roots and trees growing right out of the rocks.

"Underbrush" that's three feet tall in a multitude of colors of green. This borders the path that is never the same from visit to visit.

After climbing through the dusky green of the woods it's out into the sunshine and the presence of flowers. Where there are flowers, there are bees.

In the prairie butterfly garden the colors are even more stunning than they were in spring.

And perhaps even more varied.

Then there are the butterflies.I am learning a little about the differences between butterflies and moths. I thought this was a moth, but it isn't. It's actually a Silver-spotted skipper.

The Powers of Flowers

 

Mid-summer in the forest, the wooded lands, is not a time of variety of color. It is the in-between time. The explosions of spring have settled down. The colors of fall remain hidden.
	In the forest it is green. At times, even a slightly tired green, but it is the sign of life moving on in its day-to-day process. Chlorophyll doing its job. Out of the vast chemical bath of the Sea, not from the deeps, but from the element rich, light exposed platforms of the continental shelves wandering fingers of green had crept upward along the meanderings of river systems and fringed the gravels of forgotten lakes. -L. Eiseley
	Ferns and horsetail, the living fossil, show the primitive, primeval life of the forests that once ruled the earth. A little while ago about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimates time… flowers were not to be found anywhere on the five continents. Wherever one might have looked, from the poles to the equator, one would have seen only the cold dark monotonous green of a world whose plant life possessed no other color. -L. Eiseley
Then one comes around a corner, or looks across the creek and colors break forth in the sunshine. I immediately remembered an essay by Loren Eiseley, “How Flowers Changed the World” and I saw its reality portrayed in front of me. Colors, reaching out to the food of the sun’s energy, attracting pollinators and unwitting accomplices to spread the angiosperms (seeds) far and wide. What a miracle, for without it Eiseley reminds us, life as we know it would probably never have appeared.
	Somewhere, just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there occurred a soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion, nevertheless. It marked the emergence of the angiosperms the flowering plants. Even the great evolutionist, Charles Darwin, called them "an abominable mystery," because they appeared so suddenly and spread so fast. Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know even man himself would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star. Intuitively he had sensed like a naturalist the enormous interlinked complexity of life. Today we know that the appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man. -L. Eiseley

The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world 

and made it ours. – L. Eiseley

(Loren Eiseley quotes from "How Flowers Changed the World" from The Immense Journey, 1957)

Things With Wings

Whitewater State Park, like the rest of Southeastern Minnesota is settling in for summer. Lots and lots of green, especially since we seemed to be living in a rain forest the past month or so. Last week's visit to the park brought some pics of fauna and not as much flora. To be specific- here are pictures of

Things With Wings

We'll call this one The Pollinator

Ooops! Forgot these other things with wings- birds....