Airplane Mode

Every now and then, Mt. Tam presents an opportunity, with sun on one side and fog on the other, to photograph glories. When I saw the right conditions on a flight to Chicago last week I looked for the anti-solar point out the window and voila.

Dropping into O'Hare, the deciduous woodlands of winter reminded me of a landscape scarred by fire.

The blue pond on the plain in the back (about a third of the way down from the top edge) has a power plant on its shore. I often wish I could take a GPS reading at various points of interest along a flight path so I could find them on a map later on. 

The Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains.

Snowy fields cut by a pair of large rivers.

Bay Area view toward Sutter Buttes.

San Mateo Bridge with incoming tide streamers.

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The Little Things

Family Get-together

Ordinarily I'd pull out my diffusing screen to block direct sunlight from striking the subject, but in this case I liked the way the morning light streamed in. I couldn't do a focus-stack (as I did with the first image above) because the sun would move during the time it takes to run the stack. So I stopped down to f/22 and shot a single frame before the sun's angle through the forest changed the scene.

I struck out in my search for mushrooms to bring home for the table. Nothing but a few small oyster mushrooms even tempted me, but I let them be. Even though the pickin's were slim, there at least were a few mushrooms finally cropping up here and there, enough to temp me to break out the Nikon. I felt like I couldn't just go home without taking some time out to set up a couple of macro shots. There's something very satisfying about getting down on the forest floor, in wet-knee country, and exploring the little things to be found.

Deer Mushrooms

Sulfur Tufts

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Phoning It In

I was thinking of the phrase "phoning it in" when I left my camera gear in the car to go check on the trail cameras, but I brought my smartphone just in case. "Phoning it in" means doing something with less care and effort that you might otherwise use. But I had an excuse other than laziness since I was planning to do some mushroom-hunting after checking on the trail cams. If I have my camera backpack on, I have nowhere to put any mushrooms I might find (for the table, that is). 

As luck would have it, I came across the scene above and kinda wished I'd had my Nikon with me. The trees and rocks were showing off their full winter jackets of moss, and a universe of water droplets on the leaves in the trees above was sparkling in the morning sunshine. It almost took my breath away when I walked up on the scene, whose layered depths are definitely lost in translation to 2D.

I found this foil balloon in some nearby branches. 

Too bad I couldn't find a better subject to include with the nice light striking the madrones.

The Mt. Tam folks are still busy chopping down Douglas fir trees along the edges of meadows. The oaks are left alone, but without a little judicious gardening, the firs would eventually crowd out the increasingly rare grasslands. There was a crew working out along Bolinas Ridge on Saturday, way north near the McKennan Trail but on the east-facing slope. It looks very different out there than when I last saw it, very much more open.

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