Surprise …
… I couldn’t fall back to sleep.
Austin had a orchestra concert in the early afternoon, it was going to rain in the evening in the evening, and the next day would require my supervision of 2 preteen girls in the house as Victoria continued to celebrate her 11th birthday, so this morning was going to be my only chance to get out for a walk with the camera. I rolled out of bed, got dresses, grabbed my camera bag, and proceeded to walk out the door and drive to Green Lakes.
I had all intentions of just parking at the lakes and walking the trails to the rolling hills to practice handheld macro and wildlife photography, but things took an unexpected turn for the better when I arrived to find low mist/fog at the lakes.
I started at the northwest side of the lake and worked my way along the beach to the northeastern shore.
I stepped out onto a boat dock to capture a series of images that would ultimately require the unplanned compositing of 2 images in GIMP (with significant content fill) to create this image that reminds me of a Mandelbrot set.
What is a Mandelbrot set? Per wikipedia:
Images of the Mandelbrot set exhibit an elaborate and infinitely complicated boundary that reveals progressively ever-finer recursive detail at increasing magnifications; mathematically, one would say that the boundary of the Mandelbrot set is a fractal curve.
Technicalities aside, they are just cool looking:
(This is especially true when you watch their infinite recursiveness in video, like here.)
As I walked around the beach, a few scenes caught my eye along the way, like this one, where I loved the gritty and contrasty foreground juxtaposed against the soft light and purposefully shallow depth of field in the background.
Or this one, where I enjoyed playfully cropping out the top of the reeds while purposefully reintroducing them to the frame in an unexpected place.
While neither of these images matched the quality of the first, I would soon capture my favorite image of 2022.
This is print worthy. I love the tones, the contrast, the colors, and the layers. Perhaps it would be a bit nicer if the lake were glass-like or if the most-distant trees had foliage, but I still think this is a once a year capture at this location. The morning light is so soft and warm, the viewer is barely aware that those treetops in the distance are bare. Meanwhile the clouds … and the reflection … and the rocks … and the symmetry … and the fog … and the composition … and did I mention the layers? I am smitten with this one, I think.
As is always the case, the light was fleeting and I still had plenty of time to walk about with my camera after it was gone, so I continued on my way along the eastern shore of Green Lake, then Round Lake. As I made my way up the trail back into the woods on the south side of Round Lake, I felt compelled to take what feels like a cliched low key image of a tree that was too nice to ignore.
As I made my way through the woods, I remained eager to trial my handheld macro setup, which had been my initial reason for leaving the house earlier in the morning. My out-and-about bag no longer features my 14-150 zoom. Nor do I bring the manual focus 25mm. The fish-eye too stays on the shelf. Each of these lens are great for certain purposes, but are not needed when I have no idea what I want to do. In the woods/community, I walk with the a 17 or 25mm AF prime on the camera body with the other lens in the bag with my 45mm, 60mm, and 75-300mm zoom. In my over the shoulder bag, I also have polarizing and 3-stop ND filters, 4 camera batteries, grip, Godox flash, 4AA batteries, bounce card, office paper, and scotch-tape. I have a 24″ reflector hanging on the outside of my bag as well. At just over 6 pounds, this is an incredibly flexible kit and I can switch from capturing images of wildlife, to landscape, to macro with ease.
I had plans to try to use the reflector to bounce light from my speedlight onto a macro subject and it worked. So too did the bounce card over the subject with a piece of white office paper taped to the card/camera to serve as diffusion material. In calm air, I could have spent more time finding an interesting subject, but I was more inclined to work fast and see what I could do if I narrowed the aperture and capture an image at max shutter speed to try to freeze a branch in the breeze while maximizing my depth of field. In the end, I was pleased with the result and excited at the prospects of using the until-now-under-used 60mm macro throughout the remainder of the year.
I would continue to walk for another 60 minutes before turning around to return home. I would take out my camera on occasion but didn’t capture anything even worthy of importing from the memory card, and that was okay. It had been a wonderful morning.