Three Images

This time between winter and spring seems to be bringing its own challenges to photo taking. We seem to have to look harder and harder to find new images. The results from today are three. First there is a photo of small snow crystals that I found on a tree branch early in the morning.



It seems to me that the snow crystals are much more three dimensional that I thought from looking at Bentley's famous photos. It seems odd to me that I had not noticed or remembered noticing that fact before.

Églantine took this photo of a Mourning Dove not far from our bird feeder in the morning.



At the end of the day yesterday I caught this skeleton of a Sunflower in the light of the setting sun.

Growth

I should not be amazed at where living things grow given the fact that researchers are finding that plants and animals seem to grow in more impossible places everyday. The life in deep ocean volcanic vents come to mind where it is both too hot and too dark for life as we know it to survive and yet there is life there. Anyway, my find yesterday was on an old metal tank that was abandoned in a ravine behind our house.



You can see both a moss of some sort and the beginnings of a lichen in this macro photo of the top of the tank.



And a closer look is here. The rust is a beautiful colour too in my opinion.

Sunset Colours

The low light of the setting sun caught these raspberry canes in an interesting light just before the sun went below the horizon.



When I turned to the west, I found great colours around a few dark clouds on the western horizon. I saw no sign of Mercury even though it is supposed to be above the western horizon just at sunset right now. I'll keep looking.

Bird Songs and Art

As Églantine and I go out to walk our dog these days, there is an increasing amount of bird songs to be heard. The Blue Jays are calling constantly, the Black-capped Chickadees are singing their spring mating song and so are the Cardinals. Yesterday morning I took photos of a beautiful male Cardinal until my fingers were numb from the cold and then brought them in to process on the computer and lost them. (I saw a batch process that I had not used before and wondered what it did. Now I know. It makes great photos look lousy and it works on lots of photos at the same time. Sigh!)

Today I did my last long training run for a half marathon race next weekend. The temperatures were not bad but the wind was high and made the temperatures feel much colder. When I got back home I was too tired to use the camera on the lunch time walk so I have no new nature photos to post. Instead I offer two views of an art work in progress. This term at the local art school class in which I am enrolled, I have chosen to work on a mask theme. Below are two photos of a nightmare mask that I am working on to both produce a scary mask and to reproduce an image from a nightmare that I had years ago, several times. I hope it does not give you nightmares.



The second photo of the mask gives a feel for how large the mask is. It is about three feet by four feet or 1 metre by 1.3 metres.


(Photos © Églantine)

Spring Flowers

I found my first spring wild flower yesterday, February 23.



On this Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) the flowers are on the knob-like projection, called a spadix, inside the hood-like modified leaf, called a spathe. The flowers are under all of that yellow pollen that you can see. This plant has been damaged. You can see the spadix to the left has had it's spathe ripped, or eaten, off of it. I suspect that it was the fact that it was damaged that caused it to bloom early as I have often noticed that damaged or stressed plants will bloom early. This is definitely an early bloom as the earliest that I have ever found Skunk Cabbage in bloom is March 4th in 2000 and 2004. Average blooming time is closer to late March or early April in our area.

The second bloom that I have to show is on a forced willow twig. I collected this twig, along with several other species of twigs, on a bright, snowy, cold January 25th. By February 1, I had a Silver Maple bloom. This is the second twig species to bloom and it just started this week. It is a willow of some sort. I don't know the exact species.



P.S. I had a better write up with a bit more information and larger photos on a previous blog but it disappeared. I hope this one gets through.