Little Bang Theory

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.

Spring springs, and things bloom.

On the schist road cuts delineating the northerly edge of Route 2 in Florida, a relatively rare colony of sundews thrives on the perpetually wet biomass draping the soft, digestible rock. I’d photographed them before, with my fancy point-and-shoot, and the results were gratifying.

So I went back there today, scheming to catch the beginning of the seasonal cycle of these cool little plants.

After some crafty parking in a pre-improved pull-out (I specialize in Minor Modifications to Existing Structures) I got out my ladder and camera kit and started walking the narrow space between the traveling lane and the jagged rock wall.

Ten minutes later, I saw what I came for and set up for the capture:

This will be the inside cover photo for my forthcoming book, “Half-Assed Photography: The Rube Goldberg School.”

My prey was cornered, cut off from escape, powerless as I trimmed away last year’s intertwining grasses, now brown with memories of their season. I opened her up for Spring to see, for the Sun to see, for You to see:

This little beauty is a thumb’s width across, but will soon be three times that.

At the risk of setting the bar where life doesn’t lead me, I’m planning on a seasonal goal of visiting selected natural sites repeatedly over the course of a year, and trying to discern the changes. This and the Green River Moss photos will be the first installments.

My recent foray up the North River was a duplicitous ploy to get up into Vermont and come down the Green River, namesake of our local Teeming Megalopolis of Greenfield.

I wanted to do this because, in addition to being a soul-soothingly beautiful little river running through yet another deep, verdant valley, I had also noticed that the dirt (read: mud) road which parallels it is flanked on its uphill side by myriad small blasted road-cuts through the world’s crappiest deteriorating schist (rock climbers notice this kind of thing,) and that these little escarpments are festooned with a variety of mosses.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention for any length of time, you know that I have Moss-Wood. Since beginning my forays into photography, I’ve discovered a whole ‘nother world in the forests of moss and lichen which glide unnoticed beneath our strides, some so fragile that a poorly placed boot can end its existence.

Forever.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to document, insofar as my rudimentary skills allow, the Universe of Tiny Things which I encounter in my travels, and the phases which they go through in their life cycles.

So back to The Green:

Here’s some moss which is just emerging from its winter cloak of snow and ice. In fact, just below the photo there’s a chest-high ice bank, the reminder of a banner snow year.

But what caught my attention (because I was looking for it!) was the appearance of some sort of reproductive parts (hereafter referred to as “sexy bits”) which had escaped my prior notice, despite having spent much of my conscious life looking at nature:

See it? No? Look closer:

Fifty years of tromping through the deep verdancy of New England’s splendid forests, of bedding down for the night on lush carpets of this stuff as a kid, of scraping it off of rocks as a climber, and I never saw this before.

It makes me wonder what else we’re destroying, or at least taking totally for granted, as we pursue our human mission of conquest and development and plunder.

I seriously think we need to slow down before we’ve paved Paradise to put up that parking lot.

Finally, some local color - the Spring wildflowers are popping in the valleys just a bit south of here (where I’ve been working this past week.)

Colt’s Foot along the Westfield River:

Bloodroot in a nearby field:

…and a solitary Trout Lily growing at the edge of a rural lawn:

Welcome back, little ones - you’ve been missed!

This is my contribution to FranIAm’s Flower Roll Call post and its memeage-mimicking infectuosity!

At work:

Naw, I’m not bored at all - why do you ask??

Spring, in all its magic and Rightness of Place, showcases its peculiar fecundity in ways which go unnoticed at highway speeds. The swelling of pussy willows is matched by so much else which we hustle past in a kind of oblivion which would astonish our ancestors, who were necessarily more attuned to the timing and rhythms of Mother Earth.

Photography has slowed me down a bit, for which I’m grateful - one can’t run around like a chipmunk without eventually burning out. Or getting squashed by a bus…

Anyway, this weekend’s rains found me at River’s Edge in hip boots, carrying an umbrella and my camera gear. And while the lighting was sub-optimal, the outing still connected me to the swelling of the season, of tubes and tissues being pumped full, of the tumescence of life which is done being patient, through with waiting, eager to send forth its children:

New moss bursting forth on the banks of The Deerfield.

Today, Sunday, began with my alarm waking me in the darkness of 5am. I had intended to get some photographs of the fog lifting off our valley floor, but something in the pre- dawn gloom clued me that it wasn’t to be. I rolled over and went back to sleep, burying my alarm clock beneath a thick pillow.

My second coming, circa 8am, was met with a similarly gray prospective, but hey, regardless of the yield, the fruits need pickin’, so I bewed a pot and hit the road. The dank, gray weather didn’t promise much in the way of photographs, but I hopped in my CO2 machine anyway and started producing.

As things happen, as things evolve, as the light plays across the world, today I got lucky. The dull gray of ‘Tween Season gave way now and then to the promising light of Unborn Spring. I visited a just-now-accessible riverside area for a few shots, including Shelburne Falls at mid-day, through a slender break in the clouds: Then out onto Route 2 for a short drive to the Old Road, now an embodiment of the agrarian past , and a driveway which spoke to the past as succinctly as the present:

And back on the old Road, I was once again running in the rural reality, surrounded by the farm life which I’ve come to accept as the norm: Today Father Sky shared The Light, and my drive was productive. Thank You, Father Sky.

Here’s something from the Recent Pile, a community of moss sending their Sexy Parts skyward above an evocative bed of black jelly fungi :

Nature makes strange bedfellows out of all of us, non?

…And another shot of the gneiss which figures so prominently in out riverside geology hereabouts”

Yeah, I know.  It’s derivative.

But then, so am I, and so are you.  Playing with my children is one of life’s pleasures for which I won’t apologize.