The Magic Hedge - 1.11.11, Post 1

Okay, I'll probably never put that many "1"s in a subject line again. Unless I post on the eleventh of November this year.

Anyway!  It's snowing here in Chicago.  Not 'it snowed'.  It is currently snowing.  It has been all day.  We've got about six inches and it's still coming down with serious intent.

So what do I do?  Stay home and bury myself in my blankets and play with the ferrets?  No.  I unbury the car and drive out the Magic Hedge to do some winter shooting.

You know what?  Shooting in the snow is *hard*.  Shooting the snow is *hard*.  You're talking blinding white snow on everything, which means it's really, really easy to get purple fringing in almost every shot.  But wow, it sure is pretty.

When I went out, I had this grand plan to make a weather-proofing for my camera.  I took a large freezer bag, put the camera in it, sealed the zipper thing around the lens and then put a rubber band around it to make sure it stayed secure to the lens.  I had to rip a small hole in the back so I could see through the viewfinder, since everything was fuzzy when I tried to look through the plastic.

This actually worked pretty well until I saw some squirrels playing in the snow and I decided that I wanted to be able to switch between auto-focus and manual and macro and er... not... faster than I could do through both my gloves and the bag.  So the bag lost.  By that point though the camera had been outside long enough that the housing was close to the air temperature and the snow wasn't melting on contact, it was more or less just falling off. 

The flip-side to that was that it is true that cold weather really does sap the life out of your battery pretty quick.

Anyway, it was gorgeous out there and I took a few hundred shots.

Winter Postcard

 Okay, so here's one of those quintessential winter shots.  Evergreens in the snow.

Winter's Top Coat

This shot is crazy busy, but I just love the play of white and dark with the snow on top of the dark branches.

Snowfall in Progress

This one is worth blowing up to full size.  (Unfortunately I can't upload the 4MB *full* size picture.)  I actually captured the falling snow.  It looks really, really cool.

Stripped in the Snow

 I'm not sure what's eating bark, but something had a serious go at these trees.  This is another one where you can see the falling snow when you blow it up to full size.

Who Was Out Here?

I only saw two other people in the hour and a half I was out there and neither of them were in this part of the sanctuary.  So the question is, who was there leaving a question mark of footprints before me?











There were critters afoot!  Many more than I expected to see on a 25 degree day in January, in Chicago, while it was snowing at roughly one inch an hour.  They'll be in the next post.  In the meantime, anyone have tips for camera-care or getting great shots in the cold and the snow?

Rollins Savanna - 9.20.10 - Post 3

And now back to your scheduled programming...

I got distracted there for a few days by finding out that I will, in fact, be able to show in a large local art show, after being initially told that it was sold out.  So now I'm trying to decide which shots to show and what sizes.  If you have a shot you're particularly fond of, or ideas about what makes a photograph commercial, I'd *love* to hear from you!

In the mean time, I was posting about Rollins Savanna...

A Swath of New England Asters

 I love these asters.  For flowers in the fall they were still going strong.  And the way they cut across the frame brings your eyes down and over through the entire shot.

Duck Checks Her Rearview

 The ducks in the three ponds were pretty calm - much calmer than, say, the kildeer. I was able to get up pretty close to this female mallard and then she turned to see what I was up to, which was nice of her. :)

Onto Every Chicory, A Little Rain Must Fall

I'm still quite fond of chicory plants.  I like the jagged edges of the petals and the stark black and white in the center.  As I mentioned back in the first post, it was raining off and on all day, which gave me this beautiful rain splattered flower.

Egret in Flight

 Okay, so getting good shots of birds on the ground or in a tree is still challenge for me, never mind me getting good ones of them in flight.  But this one doesn't suck.  I was even able to crop out the houses he was flying over.

Egret Reflects

 Another egret and reflection.  It was nice of him to stand where there was a patch of un-duckweeded water nearby. ;)

The Frog Remains the Same

 Remember in that other post I mentioned the frog that was sitting by the bridge as I passed by... and was still there, like, two hours later when I came by again?  Here is on my second pass.  I could see him breathing and his eyes are open, so, you know... not dead... but not active either.  On this shot I could see his little froggy toes turned in under his chin.

Tall Heron

 A Great Blue Heron being as tall as he could possibly be on top of a muskrat lodge.

Heart-Shaped Red Admiral

 A Red Admiral on white flowers.    I like that in this shot he's heart-shaped.

Goldenrod and Honeybee

A honeybee on goldenrod.  I can count his stripes. :)

A Pack of Quackers

Like I said, the place was thick with ducks.










Okay, one more post and I'll be done with this trip.  Is it bad that I'm kind of hoping for a week or two of crap weather?  I need some time to catch up!  As it is, it's October in Chicago and it's going to be 80 degrees today and 84 tomorrow.  I think I'm going to need to go out and shoot some more while I can.  Which, you know, is not helping in the "catching up" department.

Rollins Savanna - 9.20.10 - Post 2

Okay, picking up where I left off with Rollins Savanna.

Patterned Feathers

Because I ended up hiking counter-clockwise, I found the area I was looking for sooner than I expected.  Which was a good thing, as the animals were already starting to settle in for the evening.  This duck was eating the duckweed (go figure).  I adore the patterns in his feathers.

Duck in Bubbles

There were a lot of ducks out there from a couple of different species.  This female mallard was in the middle of a ring of bubbles.  I'm not sure what was making the bubbles (I don't think it was the duck ;), but it makes for an interesting shot. :)

Egret in the Grasses

Okay, so my parents live in Florida and they call these things "Florida Chickens" - they're kind of ubiquitous down there.  But in Northern Illinois they're a little more rare. (Did I mention this before?  As I type that I'm having deja vu.) And I was kind of keen on how you can barely see the water, and the egret is such a small part of the picture.

Watching Lunch

I was able to sneak up a little closer as he was looking for food in the pond.  I love the shapes they can make with their necks.

Egret Reflects

This was as close as I could get on the bridge.  Another reflection shot.  Yes, I'm unusually enamored of those lately.

Frog from Behind

As I came around the path and onto the bridge over the second pond, I found this frog.  I have no idea what he's sitting on, but you can see that he's, essentially, not in the water.  And while I was able to see him breathing, he was otherwise very, very still.  I walked up to him, and past him.  And then about an hour later I circled around and he was *still* there.

Can I Help You?

I can't get the color on this one to correct the way I want it too.  I've discovered that the white balance - even the auto-WB setting on my camera is great when I'm shooting in Aperture or Shutter Speed modes, but when I use the auto-settings, like 'sports-mode' or 'portrait', the shots come out much too blue.

Eyes and Ears and Froggy Toes

I think this is from my second pass.  Still just sitting there.  Talk about a great shot of a frog's ear.  Check out how prominent that tympanic membrane is.

Kildeer on Muskrat Lodge

Again with the color correction issues.  Partly it's saturation, partly it's white balance, and I haven't yet completely figured out how to fix that in my post-production software.  Anyway, another new species.  Kildeer!  Talk about skittish birds!  This was as close as I could get, and I spent quite a while trying.  I'd always heard that there were Kildeer in Northern Illinois, but I'd never seen one before these.  They're sitting on muskrat lodges.  I checked repeatedly and moved very slowly, but despite the *large* numbers of lodges (another casualty of kids not being able to handle language - we would have called these dams when I was a kid) and the large number of birds I saw on them, I didn't see one muskrat all day.

Muskrat Casa Es Mi Casa

Speeking of Birds on a Lodge... here's a duck making herself very comfortable.

Sunflowers Stretch into Fall

A few flowers were holding on even though fall was seriously starting to settle in.  These little sunflowers were a nice spot of bright yellow on a gray day.

Dam Lodge

Here's one of the lodges.  Don't get the idea that they've been there for a while, but there's greenery and flowers growing on top of most of them.  I want to head back in the spring, because I would imagine they make great nesting spots for breeding ducks.

Okay... there's more, but I think I actually have more than ten shots in this post, so I'll wrap this post here.

Matthiessen State Park - 9.25.10 - Post 2/2

Okay, here are the rest of the Matthiessen shots... (told you I didn't take many. :)

Stepping on Stones

Because this is a water-worn ravine/canyon, there are lots of places with either flowing or standing water.  Which led to a lot of either natural or concrete stepping stones.  Some of which were more stable than others.  One of our group ended up with one very wet foot. Whoops!

Roots Protrude

Erosion is a huge force in the area, which means that tree roots that were probably under earth or rocks or even water are now exposed.

Tangled Roots

 Here's a tree that's still growing strong even with this much of it's root system exposed to the elements. 

Roots Creeping Across the Terrain

Here's the long shot of that same tree.  Look how far the exposed root system extends.

My Kitchen Tap Has a Faster Flow

 One of two small waterfalls we saw.  It's hard to see from the only angle I could get, but the water at the highest level falls into a small pool and then the pool spills over, very slowly, into the next level down.  You can see that it's more of a water-migration than water-fall at that level as the lower pool is very still and highly reflective.

Sticks and Stones... Don't Break My Bones.  Please.

More stepping stones.  With fallen logs for bonus difficulty.

A Face in the Log

 So then there was this.  A fallen tree right across our path.  Is it me, or does anyone else see a face?

Not the Gator You Thought I Was

It reminded me a lot of this one from Volo Bog.

None May Pass!  Just Kidding.

 Okay, I am, in no way, a fan of graffiti.  But this did amuse me a little.  It's like it's a gargoyle guarding the cavern.

The Ghost of Hikers Present

And one last oddity.  I was running a thirty-second shutter to try and get the back of this cavern.  I didn't realize one of our group had gone back into it to explore the passage that was on the left hand side.  She came out and walked through my frame.  If I ever want to convince someone I've photographed a ghost, I know exactly how to do it now. ;)

Okay, that was it for this hike.  Like I said, I suspect it'll be better in the spring or summer, but I'm not looking to drive 2.5 hours each way again to get there anytime soon.

Matthiessen State Park - 9.25.10 - Post 1/2

In a little, tiny town called Utica, Illinois, there are two state parks.  One is the very well known Starved Rock, the other is Matthiessen State Park.  A group I belong to had a trip to Matthiessen planned, so I figured it would be a great chance to go shoot a site that's over two hours away and not have to make that drive on my own.

Which... worked up to a point.  I didn't have to make the drive on my own, but I remembered what happened the last time I had this thought (go with the group so I'm not out in BFE on my own)... I get highly annoyed at how fast everyone moves; I really do better when I go shooting on my own or with another photographer who understands 'move slowly and quietly'.  I mentioned something to the group leader about not wanting to sprint through the park, and she said we wouldn't be, but um... yeah we were.  And I don't mean that even from a photographer's standpoint.  Even if I'd left my camera in my car, I'd feel this group was trying to make land speed records.

Nevermind the fact that I was actually trying to take a few pictures.

Not helping at all is that this is a split-level park - there's an upper dells and lower dells section, which means there's a lot of stairs.  It's not like you go down, stay down and then come up and stay up.  You're up and down all over the place.  At one point we did 148 stairs consecutively (according to the signage).  That's roughly the same as going up (yeah, this was 148 stairs UP) 14 floors of a tall building.  Did I mention that my asthma deals with hiking across all kinds of land, but really, really hates doing stairs?  Ugh.

Overall, for this time of year and for a Saturday and for the the kind of photography I do, I'd give this park a D.  It's very, very busy.  Which means there are no animals anywhere you can see.  I heard some birds - I'm quite sure one was an owl - but other than the occasional blur streaking across the sky, I didn't see one animal.  We're also just far enough into fall to be at that awkward place where the interesting flowering plants are pretty well gone, but the really spectacular leaves haven't come in yet.  So ... it was pretty boring photographically speaking.

Between trying to break the four-minute-mile and there not being much to see, I only shot about 2 gigs of photos.  Comparatively, I hiked a place I wasn't ridiculously keen on last week (photos will get up eventually) where even though I was still in the middle of urban civilization, there were enough animals and flowers that I took about 10 gigs of photos in the same amount of time.

There were a lot of people in the woods that day.  A lot of kids and a lot of families with dogs.  So, again, no chance the wildlife was going to stick around.

I shot this sign when I was in the parking lot, waiting, just to test the equipment.  I find it kind of funny now...

See rule 4?  My initial reaction was, "Seriously?  Who's going to go wading in a forest lake?"  Well, we got up to the "Wishing Well" part of the park and there was a lagoon that was very, very low.  Which left a muddy bank from about five feet up the rock wall into the lagoon, which (judging by the dog swimming and playing in it) had to be at least four feet deep.  There were a couple of kids running up the bank and sliding down the mud into the water on their butts.  At first I kind of gave their dads a dirty look, like, "It's 60 degrees and I'm pretty sure you aren't supposed to let your kids play in the water."  (Not that I'd ever say as much, but I thought it).

And then I realized that thirty years ago, my brother and I would have been doing *exactly* that same thing.  My father would have been encouraging it while my mother stood to the side hoping there wasn't a stick popping up out of the mud that we'd snag on or a sharp rock on the bottom that we'd cut ourselves on (but not disallowing it or freaking out over what sliding in all that mud would be doing to our clothes.)

Speaking of signage, this one, from the auxiliary parking lot kind of cracks me up:

Don't get the impression this sign is old, but a.) it doesn't list 911 as an emergency number and b.) it doesn't give the area code.  And we were pretty far out in nowhere-Illinois, and I really don't know what the area code is out there.  I'm thinking we were too far south to be in 815 any more.  So my cellphone, which requires 10-digit dialing, would have been problematic.

I do want to try the place again in the spring or summer and preferably on a weekday when it's apt to be less crowded and have more interesting flora and fauna visible.

But, all that said, I did get a few interesting shots.

Long Lake

 Water is an integral feature of the park.  Largely, it's based on a canyon (hence the hiking back up 14 flights) that is carved by running water, much the same way the Grand Canyon was carved (only on a much, much smaller scale.)  This is one of the lakes that still had water.  You can see that some of the trees (but not many) are starting to change.  I really like looking at the reflections in water pictures.  It shows how still the water is now.

Carved Cavern in the Canyon

The canyon, I'm told, has an actual river running through it in the spring, but by the fall it's pretty dry and the water that is there is pretty still.  But you can still see the way the sandstone has eaten away the walls of the canyon and left caverns in them.

Rainbowed Cavern

To the right of this picture is where the kids were playing in the mud.  Despite their splashing and sliding, the water flattened quickly, the ripples didn't travel far.  I wonder if that has anything to do with the lime in the water.  I like this shot because of the different deposit layers and micro-flora layers on the rocks.  In the back you can see oranges and reds and purples from the sediments in the water and on the left you can see blues and greens from lichens and mosses and other 'air plants' like small ferns.

Crack in the Canyon

Here's one wall in the canyon with a grove cut in it.  I'm sure that when it rains hard enough, there's a fantastic waterfall here.  There are trees sticking out of the rocks all over the place in this park.  Sometimes gravity wins and the tree gets pulled down.  In certain places they create bridges that I'm sure the squirrels and such love.  In other places you just have these tree trunks hanging off the side of the cliff, their roots still holding them up even though the tree wasn't alive any more.

Quiet Creek

Here's the trickle of river that remains this season.  The water is brown from tannin in some of the plants and their parts (like acorns) falling in it.  It's not just muddy.  Even the clearer pools were usually gold or brown in color from this.

Sandstone Erodes

 Sandstone layers and small caverns. 

Sulphur Shelf Spots

One bright spot of color that I did find were a few samples of this orange fungus.  This is called a "Sulphur Shelf" fungus, and is apparently edible.  No thanks.  It's pretty though.

We Don't Need to Put Down Roots

A lot of the rocks had plants growing on or out of them.  I'm not sure what those long finger-looking plants are.  They have the texture of a regular leaf, but they seem to creep and grow like a lichen or moss.

Rocks Reflect

Another reflection.  You can see how still the water is as well as how dark the tannins make it.














Okay, I have one more post for this hike - not nearly as many as I would have liked to have had, but I think we're hitting that place where I need to resign myself to the fact that we're heading into that season where nature shooting gets a little bit harder.

Volo Bog - 9.04.10 - Post 6

Last post of the Volo Bog hike!

Migratory: It Doesn't Just Explain What It Does

See, this is the thing about how some species are named - they are descriptive, but you don't think you've found the actual name.

This is a Migratory Grasshopper.  I kept looking at websites and going, "Great, it migrates, but what kind is it???"  Turns out that it's the name as well as what it does.

*sigh*

Leopard Frog Looks Before He Leaps

Talk about a textbook example.  This is a Northern Leopard Frog.  He's sometimes called a Meadow Frog because he's likely as not going to be found quite a way from standing water.  Which explains this guy hopping right across my path in the middle of the savanna area. 

Bottle Gentian Plant

Another new flower I fell in love with.  This is a Bottle Gentian Plant.  These flowers never open.  Bumblebees are their only pollinators and the bees have to open the flowers themselves to get in and do their thing.  I'm particularly struck by the different color flowers in one cluster.

Shades of Purple and Blue

Here's a close up of the flowers.  Such a magnificent color palate.

Ruffled Robin

I saw a few birds.  I got good pictures of almost none. I think one that I did get a bad shot of may have even been an owl, but I really can't tell, it's so bad.  Most of them are smart enough to stay in the trees, but that means that you're shooting backlit animals no matter where the sun is.

Anyway, this robin just hopped down in front of me.  When I was a kid, we would have called this guy (who's a juvenile in the process of getting his adult feathers) a "Robin Red-Breast", but apparently kids these days snicker too much because all the websites now say "American Robin."  I guess it's along the same line as beavers now living in 'lodges' instead of 'dams'.

Vertical Stripes

Yes, another Lobelia.  But this one has folded up on itself, giving it a striking striped effect.

The Moth That Came in from the Cold

This guy wasn't in the nature preserve at all.  He was hanging out on the inside of my apartment building door when I was leaving for the bog!

Again, if I hadn't seen the name of it while looking for something else, I probably would have assumed it was a bright beetle or something, but it is in fact an adult moth!  It's an Ailanthus Webworm Moth.  You can see what he'd look like with his wings out here.  These things are apparently everywhere from Costa Rica to Canada, but I'm pretty sure I'd never seen one before this guy got into my building.


Okay, that's it for the end of summer/early fall hike at the bog.  I'm heading back in early October to drop off some photos for a contest, so we'll see what changes happen between the seasons.