Short Hike

With the longer days, it's easier now to go on short hikes in the evenings after work. On Tuesday, Tracy and I went over to Chris Green to walk the border of the lake. We'd seen the trail from the boats, but never actually hiked over there. It was more a stroll than a hike, really, but was pretty. I borrowed David's camera and she borrowed mine - here are a few of the pictures we took.


Something's missing in this picture, sadly. It lacks the dreaminess of the spot and doesn't quite capture my original interest in the way the stream bed seemed to make a figure 8 - perhaps because you can only really see the bottom of the 8 here in the photo. It's even worse in black and white - too little contrast and too much uniformity of light.


Both of us like to look for small things - a reason we both would like to have a good macro lens. The lichen on the sticks caught our fancy - both of us shot several pictures of it. I ended up liking Tracy's pictures far more than mine - one of hers is shown above.


I shot this with David's camera. It has a feature called "Color Accent" that renders a scene in black and white except for one color value (plus or minus some built-in tolerance). It's surprisingly fun to use - fun especially because it's simple. It is, of course, the sort of thing one could do in post-processing using Photoshop, but having it right there on the camera means that you don't have to wait and don't have to wonder (as much) what the effect will be. I cranked the contrast and the saturation on this one. I like the boldness of the sudden green amidst the black and white.


This, surprisingly, is a beaver-gnawed stump - not some crude, unfinished sculpture (which it rather looks like to me). Again, Tracy's shots of this were much better than mine: the angle she chose makes the stump more dramatic and mysterious.


Something drew me to these seed pods - I took many pictures of them. The light was low and to get the aperture I wanted (for depth of field), I had to work pretty hard at keeping the camera steady. Overall, I managed to keep the sharpness good, but I suspect between asking the camera to focus and actually releasing the shutter, I frequently moved toward or away from my subject: the focal plane isn't ever quite where I would have liked it to be. Perhaps I'll go back with a tripod and try again.