Blog Archives
Peace
Friends, Sunday morning and all is peaceful and quiet on the Crex Meadows. This morning the fog lifted to reveal the Trumpeter Swans sitting (actually standing) on a mirror of water. In the foreground you can see white feathers floating on the water. The swans are doing a lot of grooming, shedding the red stained feathers and regaining their more white appearance. My new mantra is peace and love, peace and love, peace and love, repeated three times to calm my raging spirit, a new day dawns, til Tomorrow MJ
Strange Blossoms
Friends, hopping around the tall grass prairie remnant in Iowa last week, we found bottle gentian in a beautiful shade of blue. I photographed from several different angles but liked this one the best because it includes the leaves. These are not buds but are blossoms that are closed on top, Is the grass behind, distracting? til Tomorrow MJ
Pleasing Blur??
Friends, a photo contest that i like to enter has a category for pleasing blurs, so i camped by the water and watched this magnificent trumpeter swan stretch his wings. He must have stretched 10 times in the hour that i sat there. I started at shutter speed 1/640 then to 1/500, 1/400 and finally 1/100 to blur the wings but keep the bird head and body sharply focused, does this image work for you? til Tomorrow MJ
Dead Head
Friends, a recent trip to the tall grass prairie was a great source of flowers, but also flowers that were past their prime. I liked the details in this macro shot of a dead head. If this were on one of my mom’s plants she would pull it off, but out here under the clear blue sky of impending fall, this looked as beautiful as the fresher flowers. til Tomorrow MJ
Bee on a Bottle Gentian
Friends, a trip to the tall grass prairie in Iowa we found some bottle gentian that are a pretty shade of blue, but the insects had eaten many of the blossoms, so i chose to concentrate on the bees that were clustered around the,., These blooms are closed on top, but must be very sweet cause the bees were still attracted to them, til Tomorrow MJ
Eyespots
Friends, went south for the weekend to Iowa to explore some tall grass prairie. Found this butterfly, the common buckeye, very pretty but perched in lots of junk, so had to blur out the background. Photoshop to the rescue. Don’t you just love the eyespots, my friend is in opthalmology so this butterfly is for her, enjoy til Tomorrow MJ
Move Over, Monet
Friends, this photo of wildflowers in Crex needed some creativeness to make it pop. So I was playing this morning, I started with the image below and after futzing with it, i came to this image, do you like? til Tomorrow MJ
Sandpiper
Friends, this pretty sandpiper was busy filling her tank with water critters and didnt notice me sneaking thru the cattails to get close enough to snap her portrait. I like the reflection in the water and that is our theme this month at our local photo club. Maybe I will enter this image. til Tomorrow MJ
White tail
Friends, this young male whitetail deer is out in the open trying to escape the last of the deer flies, see the antlers growing on top of his head. he is probably a second summer deer as his coat is not spotted and his antler growth is vey small for late August. The white blur is his tail swishing around chasing the flies. til Tomorrow MJ
Crex Reflections
Friends, summer is almost over and soon i will move my photography to Hawk Ridge to record the fall migration, but here is one more landscape from Crex Meadows so you will know where i spend most of my photo time. A more horizontal composition to depict the peaceful quiet summer in this very green place, til Tomorrow MJ
MJ Springett 