Saturday 18 July 2009

At moss level

As the rest of the family headed of to visit some friends yesterday, I packed my backpack with my camera, 50mm lens, a bottle of water and some mosquito repellent. I also grabbed with me a bucket and a lid for it. My idea was to spend a little time at the swamp, pick some cloudberries and then come back home for a nap before heading off to work for the night. At the swamp I walked around, picking berries here and there. Approximately 1/3 of the berries were ripe, so picking them was a rather slow process. There is not much point in picking raw berries, they are hard and completely tasteless, so I left the red ones alone and grabbed only the ripe yellow ones. I'll go back for the rest later when they are ready. If somebody else gets to them before me, so what? The person picking them has earned them just for going to the trouble to get to them.

While walking along with my nose in the moss, I had a great opportunity to take some different type of pictures than usually for my project. Here are the days pics:
I must say I am very pleased with the days walkabout. I got pictures I needed and were long overdue for my project and a bucketfull of cloudberries. The only downside of the trip was that my ½ liter water bottle was much too small. It was 25 degrees, sun shining down and because of the mosquitos and horseflies, I had to keep my camo jacket on and my water consumption went sky high in a flash.

All of the above pictures were taken with a 50mm f 1.8 lens. Far too often I myself and many others I know think of "nature photography" as something that requires a lot of money to get long lenses. I think we should just remember to keep our eyes open as we move along, there is a lot to see in nature at a very close level, and photographing it all does not necessitate long lenses and big bucks. Just stick your nose down into the moss and see what comes up.

No comments:

Post a Comment