It has been a busy time lately. Job-wise, that is. Not much time to go out and shoot, no time during the day to get out and get some exercise either.
Ask my waistline about that. And when a decent weekend does drop by, well, all sails are out for other things than relax and shoot some great pictures. The result
is that this time, I had to contend with some low hanging fruit, photographically speaking. Fruit is not yet on the menu here. We all are still craving to get into the green phase of the year first.
But, by now, the blossoms are starting to show. And that is an easy pick for photography. At the same time, the bird shots will become more difficult. Leaves do tend to shield them from view.
Leaves are coming out, little by little and the green colour of them is nearly painful to the eyes. At least when you’re looking only to the leaves and block out all the rest. Brilliant yellow/green leaves, on their first occasion to savour the sun rays. They still have to get their final colour of dark green.
Other trees prefer to get the blossom period first. In Holland we call them “Naked Blossomers”, meaning the blossoms appear before the leaves do. Getting shots of those blossoms may seem easy and a great way to show off that low hanging fruit, but it still presents a few challenges.
Taking pictures this close to the lens also has an effect on the depth of field in the picture. Razor thin depth of field means anything in front of that focal plane is blurry and anything behind it as well. Big blossoms like the one above also catch a lot of wind.
Even if there is only a little wind, those blossoms will move. Together with that thin focal plane, your pictures are more than likely to get blurry. More than you’d want them, anyway.
The nice things with blossoms is, apart from that they present nice pictures, is that they attract insects as well. Now, getting those insects to pose for you is another challenge.
I guess they are just not into photography like the rest of us, photo-maniacs… They move whenever they want, mostly at the exact moment you are pressing that shutter button. Just like with bird shooting, you often end up with empty branches and unidentifiable fluff-balls.
I was lucky to get a few of these colourful guys/gals. These shots were taken in Birds Hill Park, north of Winnipeg.
Then I decided to go for some bird shots anyway, and wandered off into the swampy area in the north of the park. The lead shot is one of the results, a female Red-winged Blackbird. The above shot, the walk to the swampy area.
Despite the recent rain, the area is still pretty dry, I could walk through from one end to the other. In earlier times that trails seems to have been a road of some kind.
The only thing I didn’t take pictures of were the ticks. Those guys freak me out, flat, fast and painless when they bite you. Also a potential disease carrier. Not fond of them. I shook off at least half a dozen of them after I got out of the area.
Being as dry as this, it wouldn’t surprise me that one day or another, there is a fire burning everything. Bad for us, photographers, but the world may be better off without all those ticks…
Low-hanging fruit, one short walk in a long time, only the waistline getting longer by the day… That’s the result of the last few weeks.
Onto better times, photographically speaking! Down with mandatory low-hanging fruit!