For some it seems long ago, but a few days ago we had a nice weekend with warm weather. Too warm for the season, as it turned out. It wouldn’t stay that way for long. Long enough for a nice day out at the beach, though. We didn’t go with the intention of bathing or even sun tanning, but with the idea of shooting some wildlife and spending a lazy afternoon with a book.
The book was for my wife, the shooting was my part. The beach in question was Grand Beach, situation on the south-eastern side of Lake Winnipeg.
Of course that’s the Prairie Crocus. Manitoba’s Provincial Flower and harbinger of spring. So before you all start thinking that I am some kind of a biology wizard, I have enlisted the help of the Internet for this post to make sure I am not blabbering about things I know nothing about. There is already enough of that around.
Prairie Crocus, that already starts bad. Nice and fluffy; fluffy, ok, nice… I’m not so sure.
Dull grey, cold and dusty, that’s what characterises the period between winter and spring. At least that’s what I hear all around me. Even worse, people tell me that this is the best time to do all your late house work as there is nothing to see outside anyway. No need to go to the beach or a forest as there is no warm swimming water or even leaves on the trees. The only “new” birds coming back are Red-Winged Blackbirds and those are not interesting.
There are too many of them and they are everywhere. This is from people who do not look around them.
Often my family and friends ask me why I use my cellphone to take pictures when I have a big camera with me. Inevitably the next questions are if / why I prefer my phone and if the quality of the pictures is comparable. Sigh. I would say that the use of a camera depends on the moment.
You don’t always have a DSLR with you, but often enough a cellphone is all you have. At the same time, a cellphone’s ability to waste your time to find the camera app, start it and wait for it to initialise the camera in the cellphone may make you miss the moment.
It’s something we don’t need to hear very often. Even more in our overfed western world. For a while I was in a more eastern world and one would think that food would be scarce. Nothing is further from the truth. While homemade food is simpler than anything you can eat in a restaurant, it is made from real food. Food made from food, as a commercial here on TV states.
Well, if there is a need to specify that what you’re going to put in your mouth is really edible, there is a serious underlying problem. Namely that food is apparently not always made from food, but more created from chemistry and some wizardry. That looks like a losing battle to me.