MC^2 Nature Photography

For day two of my camping trip I spent the afternoon out on the Great Marsh Trail. It had rained the night before and most of the morning so all of the vegetation was coated with water when I arrived. By definition a marsh is a pretty wet and moist environment, and after a good soaking rain it is even more so. Pretty much the perfect conditions for this sort of trail, in my opinion. As the image above shows, the slugs pretty much agreed with me, though this one was trying to hide behind a leaf.

A fairly typical stretch of the trail. It was impossible to pass through without getting your pants soaked from all the wet grasses that crowd in on the trail. Synthetic materials are great for this because they dry out so fast. So even though my pants were soaked through by the end of this stretch, they dried out pretty fast and were not uncomfortable.

When I began to really get into nature photography I did not think of grasses as being particularly interesting subject matter. But they have turned into one of my favorites. They mostly lack the spectacular colors of a lot of wild flowers. But I find their patterns, textures and details to be truly fascinating.

It is not easy to get a straight on head shot with most flys. They tend to bug out if you spend much time positioning the camera. This fella did not seem to mind my antics and he sat still long enough to get shots from several angles.

Bees can also be difficult to get clear photographs of. Even when they are working on a flower they are constantly twisting and turning. I have found that I keeping shutter speed high makes it much easier, even when doing so means using suboptimal ISO and aperture settings. Photography is a game of tradeoffs. Learning how to balance competing factors is part of the learning process.

*This is a good time of year for Lilies. The Great Marsh trail has a very nice patch of these beautiful orange one’s just past the observation deck.*

Water drops and filamentary plant fibers make a great combination. To me this image looks like interconnected neurons in the brain. There are many patterns in nature which appear in very different ways at vastly different size scales. I have seen very similar patterns of voids surrounded by filamentary structures in models of the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe. Just one of the many ways in which I find nature to be endlessly fascinating.

First camping trip of the year at Dunewood camp ground. Three days and three nights of relaxing, hiking and hanging out with mosquitos. At this point I can have my tent all setup, staked out and rain fly in place in bout 45 minutes, but the forecast called for thunderstorms through out the first night and it took about an hour and a half to get a tarp setup so I could sit outside the tent while it rained. Usually I go for a short hike after setting up camp, but I didn’t feel like it after wrestling with the tarp, so I decided to take a short walk around the campground and see what flora was available for a short photography session.

Here are a few of the things I saw on my walk around the Mather Loop.

A Great Day Two At The Great Marsh

Around The Campsite