Even though it was a cool damp weekend, spring is clearly here and progressing… the black flies are out in full force and the apple trees are beginning their show.
I spent a bit of time on Sunday morning between the showers photographing one of our two apple trees.
Here are the results:
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Warning… photo talk ahead!
I was not particularly satisfied with the photos of fiddleheads that I got last week; the light was too harsh. Ferns tend to grow in sunny spots and thus fiddleheads are thereby often in lots of bright direct sunlight.
I knew the light was harsh yet I photographed anyway — a failure of my “patience filter”. I should have come back when the light was softer or made a trip back to the house for a diffuser and stand!
Resolving to do better this week, I headed out in search of fiddleheads again.
There were broken clouds aloft so all I needed to do for “good light” was to carefully operate the “patience filter” and wait for the sun to go behind a cloud. A bit of flash (with a small plastic dome diffuser) off to one side allowed me to stop down the lens for the depth-of-field needed when shooting these small objects. I think that these photographs are better… what do you think?
While “out and about” in the woods, I noticed that the trillium were in bloom so they had to be captured as well! Trillium tend to grow in heavy shade so here I switched to “Strobist mode”: put the camera in full manual for exposure, use the shutter speed to “dial in” an appropriate level of background illumination, set the needed the aperture (dictated by required depth-of-field) and control the exposure of the subject by adjusting the flash power.
Here are the weekend’s “keepers”:
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One of the nice things about spring is the constant change. New birds arrive in the area, new shoots and blossoms appear every few days and, the beech leaves finally fall to the ground!
I filled the feeder on Friday evening with sunflower seeds and we awoke the next morning to feeder covered in bright yellow. A posse of gold finches had found it! At one point a pair (one male and one female) of purple finches was mixed among the gold.
Photographing gold finches was impossible. They were either on the feeder (which does not make for nice photographs) or buried deep among the branches of hemlock which neighbors the feeder; chickadees are the same. I may have to try adding a bare branch perch nearby or moving the feeder to another spot.
In addition to the finches, there seemed to be more chipping sparrows that the week before and the white-throated sparrows arrived. There were still numerous chickadees and juncos around as I expect there will be all summer.
During our walk on Saturday (in which we circumnavigated the beaver swamp that abuts our property) we noticed the appearance of fiddle-head ferns in a boggy area. The light was not great for photographs but I headed out the next morning with macro lens on the camera in search of more fiddle-heads and possibly other emergent ferns; the fiddle-heads were most common, by far.
Both days, I kept careful watch for the first odonates while I wandered, but none were yet to be found. Soon!
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