Last summer I got to go on a pretty cool hike up north along the Au Sable river. The trail we stopped at turned out to have a lookout area up on the hillside above the river, and I quickly spotted a little island out in the river.
Also at the trailhead was Iargo Springs, which had its own special boardwalk leading down the hill to it. (When we looked it up before going we misread it as Largo Springs.) The springs were flowing out of the hillside into the river and were providing consistent moisture for a lot of different species of mosses and liverworts. There were too many other people around for me to get pictures of the springs themselves (hopefully I can go back sometime when it’s less crowded) but I did get a few pictures of some of the mosses:
I was fairly surprised to spot some sphagnum moss (aka peat moss) growing near the river. This was the first time I’d seen any in the wild (at least since learning anything about mosses). I’d always thought sphagnum mosses were particularly distinctive looking mosses, and it turns out that is presumably because they are a group of mosses with no close relatives (there are a couple of semi closely related species, but otherwise they’re pretty much off on their own branch of the moss family tree).Unfortunately I didn’t get the best photos, but this was another one that surprised me; I didn’t think neckera moss was found this far south in Michigan, but this might have been close to the edge of its range for Michigan. There was not a lot there, just a small tuft on a tree.This probably looks like a moss, but it is actually a type of liverwort (probably handsome woolywort). Liverworts are non-vascular plants like mosses but are considered their own group. Some of them look relatively different from mosses (thalloid liverworts), but a lot of them I would probably just assume to be mosses if I didn’t happen to recognize them. A lot of the differences between mosses and liverworts are fairly technical and it may be easier to just recognize a lot of them individually.This is likely pincushion moss (or a close relative).
There were a few cedars just growing out in the river in shallower spots (I’m assuming anyway), which I thought was interesting. And these ducks were enjoying having some cedar stumps in the river to rest on:
The Au Sable River is far enough north of where I live that the overall ecosystem is very different, so most of the plants I saw were not things I’ve seen much or at all. Some of them I recognized anyway from hearing about them and being intrigued, but some I didn’t recognize at all.
This sweetfern is a good example of a plant with very different habitat requirements than the habitat I live in. I saw quite a bit of it, especially in the higher sandier areas of the trail. It likes dry sandy soils and tends to grow in pine forests. It was quite easy to identify since it has no particularly close relatives (also it isn’t actually a fern, despite the name).Bracken ferns are super common in mid and northern Michigan generally (these I’ve definitely seen before) and this trail had large amounts of them carpeting the understory.Like other ferns I’ve encountered, the bracken ferns had cool patterns in their leaf veins and leaf shape.Bracken fern unfurling
Another thing I got to see for the first time was clubmoss. Clubmosses aren’t actual mosses, but are a group of vascular plants that are from a group distinct from the flowering plants that are particularly familiar (much like ferns or conifers). I haven’t seen any clubmosses in my local area, but on this hike I got to see two very different looking species.
I’m pretty sure this one is blue clubmoss, but regardless, it is for sure one of the species in a genus known as ‘ground cedars’ for their tree-like appearance. If I hadn’t heard of clubmosses, I’d probably have thought they were some sort of evergreen tree seedling, especially since the dominant trees in the forest canopy were pine trees. I might’ve started doubting this when I saw plants with strobili (which is apparently what the spore-producing part of the plant is called);
The leaves really do look very cedar-like, though.
There was also quite a lot of this clubmoss, growing underneath the ferns and other understory plants.
This one, stag’s horn clubmoss, looks quite different from the blue clubmoss, but they’re not too distantly related. If they had had strobili on them at the time I found them that would have made for a slightly stronger resemblance, but they did not. There was also not nearly as much of this kind, and I very easily could have walked right by it without noticing (actually, I did the first time, I spotted this on the way back).
This was one I didn’t recognize at all when I first saw it, but it was quite distinctive looking so it wasn’t hard to identify. It is called pipsissewa and it is a type of wintergreen. This one managed to hold on to its seed pods for an especially long time, which also helped with identification.There was a fair amount of lichens around where we were hiking, but this reindeer lichen particularly stood out as being something I don’t see closer to home.
Last November I went on a trip to New Mexico to visit some family and it was as beautiful there as I was assured it would be. While I was there I did quite a bit of hiking around in different areas. There were two general areas, that were each their own separate ecosystems, that I visited. One of these was the mountains, and the other was the canyon, which was in a lower (though low is relative) desert area. Both were the sort of landscapes that would make going there (as a photographer) and not doing some landscape photography seem… kind of wrong. I hadn’t really done a ton of landscape photography before, but I’m pretty happy with some of the landscape type photos I took on the trip.
Mountains
The mountains were mostly covered with evergreen forest, interspersed with rocky outcrops and cliffs as well as rivers flowing down to the land below. Because of the season we went, there were some interesting ice formations around the rivers.
A ponderosa pine trunk in the foreground standing out against snowy evergreens. This was taken on the day we left; there had been a snowfall the night before, so everything was covered in snow, but higher in the mountains there was snow the whole time we were there.This was a particularly rocky area we went through on the way out.Another mountain scene with some sort of birches.Rock formations like this one were pretty common in the mountains.
Canyon
The canyon we visited was the Rio Grande Gorge. I found a trail that went from the rim of the canyon down to the river, which we did on our last day there. The canyon area had lots of little shrubby looking trees (I think they were mostly just slow growing and sometimes stunted from the conditions they were growing in). I know some of the trees there were junipers, ponderosa pines, and pinion pines. It wasn’t really forested, though, and there were quite a few smaller bushy and herbaceous plants that I wasn’t familiar with (although I’m pretty certain a significant amount of it was sagebrush).
The Rio Grande Gorge from the bridge across the gorge.A large boulder from one of the cliffs in the Rio Grande.This was the trail we took into the gorge. You can see the switchbacks in the trail in this photo.Another picture of the gorge from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.The gorge from within, about halfway down the cliff.
Of course, I took more than just landscape photos on the trip; I actually noticed I was switching lenses and settings quite a bit more regularly than I usually do since I was trying to photograph such a wide variety of subjects. In coming posts I’ll share more of the other kinds of pictures I was taking.
I was really enjoying photographing the Autumn leaves last fall, and I wound up with quite a lot of leaf photos. Here are a few of them.
Most of the time the leaves on the blackberry brambles turn to a deep red or purplish color in autumn, but they don’t usually do this. This one plant I found at the edge of the woods has some sort of almost variegated look to it’s leaves.An elm leaf I found in the driveway and held up to the light to photograph. Elm leaves have cool patterns in the serrated edges of the leaf and the leaf veins that I like to photograph. I’m not sure where this leaf came from though, because there aren’t any elms near the driveway.This sassafras leaf was still on the tree when I photographed it. I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to try to get one of the large dark spots in the picture, but then under the macro lens it was kind of reminding me of a sunspot so I decided I liked it.
I saw this little house wren at a nearby park last summer. Looking through my telephoto lens I was able to see the impressively large moth the bird was carrying. As I watched, the wren flew down from the tree and landed next to one of the metal posts that was marking out the parking area, and went inside (they were at least partially hollow). I could see the movement of chicks inside the post as the wren fed the moth to one of them.
Lately I have been working on setting up another way for everyone to connect with me and my art. I have started a Patreon page where you can become a patron of my work! If you want to help support what I’m doing, please check it out. There are a number of different tiers and benefits for joining. Hope to see you over there!
This summer I was finding my newer telephoto lens to be quite nice for taking pictures of things like grass flower/seed heads due to a slight difference in the way the depth of focus works for that lens. This seed head particularly stood out to me since the slightly twisted stem gives it a whimsical look.
Grey Catbirds are common birds around here that were a bit of a challenge to photograph because they spend much of their time hanging out in dense, brushy areas. Since learning this it seems appropriate that my first good photo of one was this:
This is a crop of the first picture of a catbird I took that I liked.This is the full photo. Almost the entire picture is out of focus foreground plants… I had to line the bird up with a small gap in the leaves to get the picture.
Though I may not see the catbirds themselves too frequently, I know they’re common because I hear them all the time and almost everywhere. (They’re very talkative birds.) If I follow the sound I can often spot where it is coming from but not necessarily get a clear look at the bird.
Catbirds can make a wide range of different sounds as well. They have some sounds that are specific to them and will also mimic other birds (like this one was doing, stringing a bunch of different birdsongs together in rapid succession).This is a more recent picture of a catbird calling. It is probably my favorite now.
Here is a photo I took of a young grape leaf. I think what had originally attracted me to photographing this particular leaf was the sun shining through it, highlighting the leaf veins. But in the end, I actually preferred this shot from the front, instead of the ones with the light coming through the leaf. There are lots of interesting little details in this photo, like the tiny hairs on the midrib (and some of the more major leaf veins) and the veins that form an almost perfect pentagon… which is why I decided to include this close up cropped version as well.
My new telephoto lens is probably now my most high tech piece of camera equipment, and I’ve been pretty impressed with its capabilities. As I’ve been teaching myself to use it, I’ve been getting an idea of what kinds of things it can do.
Goldfinch foraging on sunchoke seeds. This photo was a surprise because I took it through a window screen! I can see some loss of quality in the photo as a result, but it isn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected, and I would have startled the birds away if I’d gone outside (they were pretty close to the door) so I was happy to get anything at all in that situation.
I mentioned in my last post that I can use my telephoto lens like a pair of binoculars, but the lens actually has an edge over binoculars because it has some built in stabilization that cancels out the tiny movements you make when holding something, which get very magnified when looking at a zoomed in image of something far away. This means the image I see looking through the viewfinder is much steadier than what I see looking through binoculars. (And then being able to take a photo of whatever I’m looking at is also nice, of course!)
For birds with subtle markings or features or birds hanging out in hard to see places, like this house finch in a cedar tree, looking through the telephoto lens helps to be able to identify the birds, and is helping me get a better idea of what birds we have around here.
When it comes to taking the actual picture, the stabilization helps some in preventing the photo from being blurry from slight movements (when you aren’t using a tripod, which isn’t very practical in a lot of situations), but the usual way to do this is with a very fast shutter speed. The person at the camera shop where I got the lens told me I’d be able to use a bit slower shutter speed than I would otherwise, but I would still need it faster than I was used to to get a sharp photo. Despite this advice, it was probably inevitable that I would try pushing the limits with lower speeds eventually (because faster speeds limit the light available and you end up with a darker picture or you have to find a way to make up for it elsewhere), and surprisingly, I was finding I could hold the camera steady enough to use pretty low speeds without getting a blurry photo, which is great… until a subject starts moving around quickly.
This was where I got a little too confident with slow shutter speeds… I can’t say for sure this picture would have turned out well if I’d used a faster speed, but this woodpecker was foraging pretty energetically on the dogwood berries and definitely moving around too fast for the speed I was on.The moon, at least, is a good safe subject to use a slow shutter speed on, which is helpful with a dark scene like this.
Lately it seems like I’m very much starting to get the hang of getting good bird photos (I’ll probably save those for their own posts, though), but even the less than perfect shots have been helping me to identify quite a lot of birds I wasn’t able to see clearly enough before; I mostly just managed to identify the bigger/brighter/more distinctive looking species.
This photo of a swamp sparrow almost turned out perfectly – except that there was something out of focus creating a bit of a haze over the bird. Otherwise, it is perfectly in focus, the sparrow is in a nice position and the background is good… but at least this photo provides a nice view of most of the bird’s markings so I could identify it as a swamp sparrow! Sparrows can be a bit tricky with their subtle markings and usually mostly brown colors… but like a lot of my subjects, they benefit from a closer look.
Relatively recently, I got a new type of lens for my camera. Previously, I had a macro lens and a pretty standard non-specialized type of lens. The new one is a telephoto lens, which is a type of lens that allows you to zoom in on distant subjects.
A very relaxed rabbit.
A telephoto lens has very different uses and possibilities compared with a macro lens, but there is one thing about it that feels familiar; both lenses allow me to photograph things I can’t quite make out. I may be able to see them, but not clearly enough to tell what I’m looking at. Through the lens, I can see them with much more detail. (Sometimes I will just look through the lens like binoculars to see what that dark shape in the trees is.) So, what the macro lens does for tiny objects (or creatures), the telephoto lens does for distant objects (or creatures).
A male goldfinch perched on a spruce branch. This was taken shortly after I got the new lens.
So this new lens doesn’t make any of my previous lenses obsolete, it just opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities that weren’t there before. One of the main things I’d had in mind for it when I got it was to use it to photograph birds; a telephoto lens is pretty much a requirement for bird photography. The lens also works well for butterflies and presumably any other large, skittish insects, like dragonflies.
A monarch butterfly foraging on New England aster flowers. It is possible to get a photo like this without a telephoto lens, but it would be a lot harder and more dependent on luck. (Most of my previous butterfly photos happened when a butterfly approached while I was photographing other pollinators.)
Another use for it I’ve found that’s less apparent is to be able to get a different angle on certain subjects, even though I can get close to them and I want a ‘close up’ of them…
This is a relatively close up picture of these sunchokes, but I took it from a ways away so that I could line the bright yellow flowers up with the dark backdrop of a clump of trees to the south, making for some sharp contrast. I had seen this contrast in previous years, but I wasn’t able to photograph it with the lenses I had at that point. Once I got the telephoto lens, I knew exactly what to do with it.
