I am now 2 days a slave to this photo a day thing. That sounds less funny once on paper, doesn't it?
I popped out to pick up a mostly intact roll of black paper background by Superior for 15 bucks from a Kijiji seller. This was a steal and I could not resist. On the way back, I had planned to visit either Mer Bleue or Stony Swamp and try to get some images worthy of day 2. Stony Swamp won the day and I shot quite a few images as I walked along. From the main parking lot for the Beaver Trail, I wandered by the Wild Bird Center. I brought four cameras along -- the Panasonic G6 with Panasonic 100-300 zoom, the Nikon D90 with 18-105 zoom, the Panasonic GM1 with 12-32 zoom, and the Olympus E-PM2 with 45 1.8. When I arrived, I pulled out the Manfrotto monopod and mounted the G6 and 100-300 on it by the lens foot that I obtain from Germany. This worked flawlessly as I was walking. I ended up shooting none of the other cameras ... they were just along to amp up the exercise value a bit :-)
The temperature at the time was approximately 0C, and so there was a bit of melting action for both the snow and the icicles on the side of the building. I managed to catch a falling droplet on my second try ...
Quite a few fallen trees grace the trails these days, and no all seem to have been victims of the beavers that live in the pond in this area. It is not quite clear what brought this one down, but it looks great when covered in snow. I like to process for a fondant texture to snow, but it was not quite melted enough to really achieve it here. Still ... not bad.
I was surprised today to notice that quite a number of the large trees have bifurcated trunks that grow in close proximity. Since we've had a lot of snow recently, they all have some amount of snow in the small space between trunk branches. Here, we see the end of the snow in between and the space above it where a trunk in the distance can be seen out of focus. Love those long lenses.
I noticed a large number of smaller trees or larger branches being propped in the air in a crook of another tree. In one case, I saw a couple of branches hanging directly over the path, thinking to myself that this is a widow-maker waiting to fall. The following one is well off the path and was probably felled by the chewing of beavers.
It is pretty easy to tell that we have not had significant cold in this el nino year, as there is a babbling brook that is frozen over most years ...
But the big show of birds I had been waiting for only materialized when I arrived at the overlook on the beaver pond. There, people had dumped all sorts of seeds and the Chickadees and NutHatch were going nuts, as always. I got some lovely images of these ...
Unfortunately, a mother and daughter snow shoed up to me and passed by to get onto the overlook, more or less ending my session there. I turned around and as I turned back towards the wild bird center, I noticed a small red squirrel eating by the side of the path. I shot a huge number of images of this fellow, although as with the rest of the images here there are more to be seen in my gallery, linked below.
You can see all 46 images in my gallery here: Walk In The Woods 2 January 2016
