“Cool April hikes bring such joy. There is always something new, not always obvious or evident, but when you look around new surprises and revelations always present themselves.” – Ed Lehming
The spring that began so mild and warm has settled back to a bit more normal pattern of cool nights and misty days. The plants and flowers that seemed so accelerated have slowed down as well. This has been…
This is another shot that was some time in the making. For about a week, I had my eyes on a group of these Red Trillium growing along the top of a slope at the edge of an old pine plantation. I knew what I wanted this shot to look like. I imagined the sky, glowing in bright sunset colours, seen through the pines with the flower in the foreground.
On a first try, for the sky to get colours in it the ambient light was too low and the flower and foreground were too dark. I tried increasing the exposure to get the flower bright enough but the shutter speed was too low so that the slightest puff of wind blurred the flower.
On another evening, I tried light painting the flower with an LED headlamp. Still this resulted in a fuzzy image and a washed out sky. Between tries there were some evening where the sky was cloudy and I would not have gotten the colours I wanted in the sky.
The evening I got this shot, the sky had finally cleared and I had brought a speedlight and strap-on diffuser. It was also the first evening where mosquitoes were out in mass. Lucky me with no bug dope; they ate me alive! The image was done in one shot at two seconds. The strobe was hand held off camera and fired manually with the output turned down to balance the sky.
Camera: Pentax K-3
Lens: Tamron SP 10-24mm f/3.5 DI II
22mm / ƒ/32 / 2.0s / ISO 100
The ever sensuous and yet putrid-smelling wake robin (Trillium erectum), also known as red trillium and purple trillium. It never ceases to amaze me how such a salacious beauty was designed by nature to attract carrion flies, its primary pollinators. Alas, this fallen star stinks of cheap booze and rotting meat. I found these two preening for shady insects on a tucked-away boulevard of the Mon River Trail.
The eleventh monster of the day is the Wee Beastie, and so of course I chose another DnD character of mine for a campaign that @emerald-oryx is running. This is Wake-Robin, a rather agile Lago. The Dragonborn party member sometimes picks her up and just yeets her into the fray. She’s an incredible amount of fun to play. I just did a very messy sketch on the train; kinda hard to draw when you’re being rattled about. But I like it.
In Trillium sessile (birthroot, wake-robin, stinking Benjamin) the flower parts are in groups of three, with 3-petalled flowers above whorls of pointed triple leaves. The flowers have the smell of rotting meat, as they are pollinated by flies. These plants were thriving in a woodland border of Balmoral Cottage, Kent.
I was crawling around in the leaf litter to try and get low enough for this shot. A very wide angle and a +2 close-up screw on diopter let me get so close it felt I was going to touch the ferns in the lower right hand corner with the front of my lens. The diopter created the motion effect in the background bokeh.
Camera: Pentax K-3
Lens: Tamron SP 10-24mm f/3.5 DI II
10mm / ƒ/5.6 / 1/400s / ISO 100
