Little Bang Theory

Yes, after a brief hiatus, we get back in the swing with some Llama-kittehs I spied near today’s bridge:

I loves meh some kittehz!

I’m currently working on a bridge in Williamstown, a pretty little northern Berkshires spot which just happens to host a well known college as a major player.

It’s pretty here, and though I seem to recall using the adjective “bucolic” within my last ten posts, it’s certainly appropriate as a description of the rolling countryside which comprises the landscape where I’ve spent the last week:

That’s an orchard in the mid-foreground, with young blossoms setting:

Later this evening and closer to home, the same dramatic light illuminated a herd of dairy cows in neighboring Colrain as I took a “long cut” to the supermarket:

Sorry about the sky in this last one, it was a hand-held quickie without filters, as the cows were moving in the low light.

But it looked good to me, so I shot it!

A pair of sparrows says it all:

Yes, that’s a birds’ nest on a Budweiser can.

No, there’s no problem rotation happening here.

Taken under a bridge I’m currently working on, with a beer can protruding horizontally from the concrete fascia beam.

The ribbon road runs westward, winding winsomely along the verdant valley floor.

On the right, fields flow by, hay fields with their nascent sprouts, cornfields tilled but as yet unplanted, roadside barns, gravel drives aiming anonymously toward neighbors you know but don’t know, nameless people you say hello to at the Post Office, the gas station, the general store.

On the left, a thin screen of maple trees unfurl their prayer flags in the steepening rays of a setting sun, celebrating their own arrival with a symphony of lime and chartreuse.

Beyond that runs The River, down and back to your upward and ahead, contrary to your Mission Homeward and simultaneously central to the world which you inhabit, an irrepressible canvas of blue light and pink noise, the sight-and-soundtrack of a riverine existence.

And above it, appearing and disappearing between the ecstatically budding trees, an undulating patch of bronze parallels your journey, catches your eye, connects with something deep inside of you.

You forget the road and focus on the bronze, and it becomes an Eagle, wings rowing effortlessly through it’s own ethereal stream, the long, low rays reflecting first off its smooth uppers, then off its dense lowers, seeming to propel it forward with every beat of its heart, every breath, every tick of the odometer.

For a thirty second eternity you move through time together, siblings on a journey, Destination Unknown, stripped of every intention other than being, watching each other exist and not exist through the shadows and light of the intervening reality, your windshield reflecting the same setting sun which warms its brilliantly white head, the powerful hook of its golden beak, its glorious tail splayed in aerodynamic perfection as it appears, disappears, appears, disappears, and finally fades into the night.

Thank you, Father Sky, for sharing another of your children with me.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

I’m sorry I don’t have photographs; it was all too brief, and I was all too mesmerized.

Got to Hawley Bog by mid-morning, in time to feed the black flies. Yes, it’s May here too, and May means Mayflies, blackflies, les mouche noires. Voracious little bastards who will find a way through any discontinuity in your clothing to exact their pound of flesh (well, ok, a “pound” is exaggerating a bit, but they take a piece away and leave a bloody hole, so I’m not fond of them.)

But I got down on my belly and I took some pictures anyway:

I don’t know what kind of plant this is, but it was valiantly attempting to erect a solar collector above the saturated plane of the sphagnum moss, and Little Plant, I Salute You!

Then off to deliver Ultimate Spawn to her Mom’s house for a couple days, with a return trip through pastoral Shelburne. Here’s a view of a mowing field with violets erupting in a sea of dandelions:

…and along the way, a patch of Marsh Marigolds in a wetland, with a guest thinning out the pollen:

It was a beautiful day despite the bugs.

Last evening’s foray into the field for photos was well timed, but the thin, high clouds and thick bands of lower ones confused the light and confounded my efforts to capture the beauty of a high meadow being reclaimed by its surrounding forest.

Despite my frustration, and promising myself patience, I noodled around among the young hawthorns, cherries and dogwoods, collecting images of the small bits of poetry which comprised the scene - explosions of tiny flowers popping in and out of patches of diffused sunlight:

…and pussy willows and catkins extending their precious offerings of pollen to their neighbors, to the bees, to the evening breeze:

The air was turbulent, and while my subjects bobbed and danced I struggled to find the combination of camera settings which would get me enough depth of field in a brief enough exposure to not just be making abstracts for my recycle bin.

As I headed back to the car the light warmed suddenly, streaming from beneath its thick gray blanket, illuminating the scene with a brief gift of light. I snapped off this quick shot, still with my 50mm Sigma lens, which I’ve found to be faster than the 17-85 I’ve been using, and managed to freeze the breeze:

Once again, the totality of this natural place far exceeded the sum of its billions of individual parts.

Thank you, Mother Earth. Thank you, Father Sky.

…The blossom of a Tulip Tree, or Saucer Magnolia:

Now I’m off to fetch Ultimate Spawn from Boston.

Later, Taters!

Just got a new toy, and I’m aching to use it.

I hope you’ll enjoy watching as I explore the ins and outs of it, probing ever more deeply into the intimate natural world, exploring moist places, seeing how things grow before your very eyes.

I’m in Love with a Sigma F2.8 DG MACRO.

Hope it titillates you too.

……………….

Solar Sex Panels unfold above an atmosphere of moss in a gambit for first dibs on The Light:

The Moss Strikes Back with a phalanx of moss-goslings:

…While above them, a columbine beneficently blesses the battle:

Yeah, I’m gonna like this toy a lot.

Something I saw today, on a ride after work. A solitary person, alone in their world, only marginally aware that I was watching:

Along the banks, periwinkle was in bloom, its dream-blue flowers scattered in a tangle of dark green trailers

And in the soft, low bottoms, an array of grasses, and with them the ferns, yawning and stretching and opening to the filtered light of the lowlands:

These are ostrich ferns, the kind I like to eat. They say all fern fiddleheads are edible, but not all fiddleheads are food.

…I thought I had a picture of some really hairy ones hanging around, but I’ll either have to find it or take another. My money’s on the latter - I never find pictures I misplace. And you deserve to see some really hairy fiddleheads, so I’m on it.

No, it’s not the opening line from some cheesy Gothic romance, it was my trip afield with camera in hand.

Today was a river of low light and gusting winds, and the combination of long exposures and moving subjects produces blurry photos, almost no matter what one does. So don’t look too hard at this batch or you’ll get a headache right in back of your eyes - you know the one?

A dogwood by the Deeerfield:

I seldom allow man-made objects in my nature shots, but somehow this cable guard rail adds context to what would otherwise be a boring composition.

Here are some rafters passing, their motion imparting a dynamic element to this shot - it’s one case in which the blur portrays something other than Wino’s Shake:

And finally a stop beneath a road-cut where a dense bloom of white flowers shared a sloping ledge with verdant moss, the color of which I’m totally incapable of reproducing for you:

Someday, maybe.

This was a thirty second exposure, and though my subject stood pretty still in the stiff breeze, there was probably a good deal of camera shake. Sorry it’s not clearer, ’cause this was a really beautiful scene. If it’s calmer tomorrow I might go back and try again to show you what it looks like.

Now I’m off to a Western Mass Climbers’ Coalition dinner/fund raiser, where the grub always satisfies and the band always rocks - who could ask for more, eh?