Hairy Solomon’s seal
Solomon’s seals’ most obvious difference from the false Solomon’s seals (maianthemums) is that their flowers hang from the central stem instead of growing from the tip of the stem. I’ve found these sprinkled around the woods, but they definitely don’t grow in thick patches like some of the other wildflowers.
Last spring I noticed that the leaves look quite interesting when they’re unfurling, which actually made them stand out even more from the maianthemums for me.
Solomon’s Plume
Maianthemum racemosum aka solomon’s plume is larger and has larger flower clusters than starry false solomon’s seal, but it doesn’t spread as vigorously, so I don’t find it in such dense patches. I find this species particularly fun to photograph, and the flowers aren’t even the main draw for me. I do have one particular photo of the flowers that is one of my favorites, though:
The out of focus leaves in the background are of a different plant of the same species, which is part of what I like about the photo. The first photo I used is also an old favorite of mine, showing the developing flower cluster with wild geraniums in the background. But a lot of the pictures I’ve taken are of the leaves, which have much the same alternating, zigzagging pattern as their relatives, but with an extra wavy edge to the leaves.
It usually blooms slightly out of sync with the other ephemerals, and only has a cluster of buds when the others are at their peak. I still like seeing it mixed in with the wild geraniums, though.
It also has a distinctive speckled pattern on the underripe berries, which it shares with a few other maianthemum species, but is otherwise unique as far as I know. And because they have particularly large flower clusters, they also have larger clusters of berries.
I rarely see the berries fully ripe, so I’m sure they are appreciated by the woodland creatures as well.
From a distance the green algae growing in the wet pondish area last spring looked kind of foamy and not very interesting, but through the macro lens it took on an entirely different character and I could see that the ‘foam’ was made up of tiny algae filaments trapping lots of little air bubbles. While I was taking pictures of the algae I spotted a tiny springtail just walking over the water which I made sure to get in some photos as well. It turned out I got a couple more springtails in my photos that I didn’t see at the time (it was kind of hard to see what I was doing much of the time anyway; I was leaning out over the water to reach the algae but I couldn’t really lean far enough to look through the viewfinder properly most of the time). I thought the results were super interesting looking, and I ended up returning to it to take more photos.
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.
One evening recently while I was in the woods, I noticed some spiderwebs being backlit by the setting sun. As it turns out, my newer lens works great for spiderwebs, and after taking a couple fairly standard head-on pictures, I started experimenting with the angle. I didn’t have very long to work with this scene, though, because the sun was only illuminating each web for a few minutes (there were three webs that I found). I would have enjoyed more time with this subject, but I was happy with this photo.
Heal-all (also known as prunella vulgaris as well as a bunch of other names) is a common plant, and I frequently walk past it any time I’m out and about. Sometimes it catches my attention and I take pictures.
It’s interesting to see how different plants change throughout the seasons and which ones catch my attention in the winter.
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.
I like being able to figure out interesting ways to photograph familiar subjects that shows them in a much different way than people are used to seeing them (usually in a way that draws attention to something I’ve noticed about them). These photos are a good example of that concept: 
If you weren’t able to figure it out, these are veins on the ‘wings’ of maple seeds (which are technically called samaras). The samara in the second to last photo is the oldest; the green between the veins is actually the background because that one was pretty translucent. These were all cropped at least slightly which gives them a nice abstract look, but I also liked some of them uncropped too.
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.
I went up north recently to visit my Grandma and while I was walking around her yard I kept noticing lichens everywhere. They were small and probably not very noticeable to most, but they really stuck out to me because they were still much larger then the vast majority of the lichens that grow where I live. (And of the few that are larger, I haven’t seen any that are as brightly colored or intricately textured like the ones I was finding at my Grandma’s. This isn’t to say there aren’t any interesting lichens where I live, but they’re just generally much smaller and harder to find.) Lichens are pretty amazing, but I don’t know a whole lot about them, really. Most of what I do know is from reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (which I highly recommend), which was enough to pique my interest. So, for this post I don’t have much to say about the individual photos, I just think they look cool.
“They blur the definition of what it means to be an individual, as a lichen is not one being, but two: a fungus and an alga. These partners are as different as could be and yet are joined in a symbiosis so close that their union becomes a wholly new organism.” (From the chapter about lichens in Braiding Sweetgrass.)
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