Having provided readers with a couple of bright images, I have decided to include this one, too — an image so monochromatic that changing it to black and white makes no visible change at all. There is something peaceful, though, about gazing through the branches with half-focused eyes, admiring nature’s geometry….
With overcast skies and below-seasonal temperatures anticipated for several days yet, I am hungry for bright colors, which are all too scarce on my daily Piney Woods Church Road walks. Today I glimpsed a flash of brilliant red, when a cardinal alighted in a loblolly pine tree at the intersection with Hutcheson Ferry Road. Alas, my +10 macro lens was on at the time, and by the time I had unscrewed it and pointed the camera toward the pine branches, the bird was gone. Fortunately, though, water oak leaves this time of year are quite obliging (and far less ambulatory). I don’t think I could ever be sated by all the possibilities these leaves furnish for photographs evocative of stained glass windows.
On a raw gray day, with the temperature hovering in the mid-40s, I compelled myself to seek out more signs of spring’s eventual arrival. I spent perhaps fifteen minutes endeavoring to photograph a tiny bluet (Houstonia pusilla), a native wildflower so minute (a few millimeters across, on a stem a couple of centimeters high) that it is a challenge to capture even with a macro lens. The result, though, is worth the effort: a photograph with a vibrant splash of violet color, in the midst of a dark and drab late-winter afternoon.
The weather took a turn for the cold and damp today. Although the rain had ended hours before, the gray sky lingered into the middle afternoon. I set out down Piney Woods Church Road with hopes of new reflection photos, but a cold wind stirred what water there was (the largest drainage ditch was completely dry). It no longer felt like spring was near — there was a raw edge to the air that reminded me of winter, or possibly even late fall. So I took refuge instead in mementos of last autumn — a pair of acorn caps left behind on a branch after the acorns had dropped away.
The daffodils are still in bloom along Piney Woods Church Road, and more seem to be popping up every day. I find them intriguing, because even though they are so commonplace, they have an unusual feature, the corona, whose origin was not known to science until 2013. Just last year, researchers from the University of Oxford published a scientific paper in the Journal of Plant Science, indicating that the corona has evolved as a modification of the stamens of the flower.
As spring slowly approaches, I am finding myself drawn to the ditch at the Hutcheson Ferry end of Piney Woods Church Road. Every visit, I am rewarded by the sighting of another new wildflower to photograph. There is a catch, though: none of the flowers is showy (henbit being perhaps the most dramatic of the bunch, with its flashy, orchid-like blooms), and all of them are minute, with flower heads a few millimeters across. These flowers belong to a group known as the ruderals: wildflowers of waste places (such as roadside ditches). They are nearly all non-natives. Hoary bittercress, for example, hails from Europe, and is common throughout the eastern United States. Of course, unless one is prone to kneeling on the lawn in late winter armed with a magnifying lens, the flower might an unfamiliar one. In this photograph, the blooms are surrounded by long, narrow seed pods, called siliques, which will ripen and then pop open upon being touched, sending a new crop of seeds on their journey. Later in the season, this annual will develop a basal rosette of pinnately lobed leaves; despite “bittercress” in the name, the leaves are edible raw or cooked.
I turned the corner onto Piney Woods Church Road this afternoon to be greeted by the first orb web I have seen this season. The minute spider was resting near the center of her construction. There were some imperfections in the web’s symmetry; but then again, the young spider, like this photographer, is a novice at her craft.
I am continuing to explore the geometries of leaf and background. Water oak leaves this time of year make such entrancing subjects. Only, with this photograph, I find myself drawn, instead, to the light beyond the leaf.
For weeks I have been trying to photograph robins along Piney Woods Church Road, since they seem to be abundant there this time of year. I picture the American robin as the ultimate suburban bird, equivalent to the urban street pigeon. So while they seem to be everywhere, it has also been difficult to photograph them in a way that does not leave them looking nondescript and, well, uninteresting. Finally, this image of a robin on a wooden fence works for me. Perhaps it is because this particular robin seems to be taking an interest in the photographer, in turn.
After a marvelous day-long composition workshop with Kathryn Kolb last weekend, I have been thinking a great deal about geometry and nature. I have begun exploring the diverse colors and forms all around me on my Piney Woods Church Road walk. Water oak leaves in winter, with their vibrant splotches of green, orange, red, and brown, make fascinating subjects for the camera lens. Until today, I have always concentrated on entire leaves and clusters of leaves. This time, I zoomed the lens a bit further; The result is this image.
