Lately I’ve been trying to get some more recent creek reflection photos because they’re always fun to look at, and most of my better ones were from my old camera. Basically I was trying to recreate the effect with higher quality photos… which is not exactly how these turned out, but I think they turned out pretty well anyway.
It occurred to me that in one of my last posts ‘Life in a Dead Tree’, I described the bees I found nesting in the tree, and included the best photo I’d managed to take of one of them, which wasn’t very good. I knew at the time that it wasn’t particularly good, but decided it was better than nothing. That didn’t stop me from trying to get a better one next time their nesting season came around. It took me over a month of attempting whenever the weather seemed good for bees to be active, but I finally managed to get the photos I was after. And some of my ‘failed’ attempts were actually kind of cool in their own right.
Here are some tiny rove beetles I found the other day that push the limits of my current macro lens. In the first three pictures you can kind of see how the wings are folded up under the elytra (the shell-like covering of the wings of beetles, which rove beetles have considerably less of than most other beetles). In the last two pictures the wings are completely unfolded. I know the wings are pretty thin, but it is still impressive to me that they can just fold up their wings and put them away.
These are some pictures of snowflakes on my glove that I took the other day. They were big wet snowflakes, but there was one I found that was more normal sized.
Maché is one of the most cold hardy salad greens one can grow. They didn’t get planted this year, but that didn’t stop them from coming up anyway, since some of the plants in the above photo (taken late January 2018) went to seed.
The main reason the maché didn’t get planted this year was because we were all too busy trying to keep the rodents away from some of the earlier winter crops that had been planted. Here’s a look at a few of the more intentionally planted crops in the hoophouse right now:
It has finally started to look like winter around here, giving me a chance to practice my ice and snow photography. Quickly dropping temperatures seem to be necessary for some of the tiny ice crystals I look for and the conditions haven’t been right for seeing them until recently.
For a couple years now, I’ve been taking pictures of the sunlight reflecting off of the snow, but none of them have had the colors I notice in the snow while taking the pictures… after a bit of experimenting I noticed that the colors only show up when the snow is out of focus, so I intentionally blurred a few pictures to test it…
An out of focus picture with specks of color didn’t seem like a particularly good end to that line of experiments, though, so here’s what I came up with:
This time of year, after the last of the fall color has died away, but before it has started snowing regularly (or at least freezing the water in the creek and elsewhere into whimsical shapes), is pretty drab at first glance. There are always exceptions to be found if you look for them, though. Last year at around this time I wrote a post about rose hips, which are one source of color. This year, I’ve been finding myself taking pictures of mosses. They seem to like the cool dampness this season has to offer.
Here are a couple pictures I took last winter:
The snow is melting (for the moment) and I found the melt water dripping from the bridge into the creek. In one spot the drops were coming down very steadily, and I was able to catch the moment when the drop landed in the creek fairly easily. Here are a few of the pictures I took.
We recently got nearly a foot of snow, which is unusual for this time of year, and made for an unusual mix of fall and winter scenery.
I went for a walk in the woods yesterday, thinking it was about time to check on the witch hazel and see if it was flowering (it was) and kept getting distracted by other interesting stuff around. So, here’s a selection of what I encountered.
