Well, the Crex photo contest is over for the year, and some very excellent photos won. I was inspired to try for some new ways of getting better shots for the next time around. Since entries are limited both by location and category, I definitely need to get out more, not a hardship in the sense that it's my favorite place to hang out with my camera anyway.
One restriction was that they need to be taken within specific boundaries. I discovered I hadn't quite realized where those were, and how far reaching they went. I picked up some maps of the locations to expand my horizons and opportunities available for scenery and wildlife. I've been missing a whole lot of territory, basically because I've been hunting for locations holding my favorite birds, the greater sandhill cranes. There's a lot more out there.
A new category opened up this year as well: night skies. I hadn't realized one could get galaxy shots and their reflections in a lake. I also had no idea how many different people got aurora shots as well, something that the latest smart phones capture very well. In fact much better than the human eye can perceive. All but one of the entries in that category were auroras. (How does one choose between those? I mean, really!) I'm still not tempted to get a smart phone, but the lack of variety of submissions got me thinking in new directions.
I have been experimenting with thunderstorms at night from the house, mostly video so far. It's been a very stormy summer. Just the attempt has made the benefits of digital photography apparent, since no film is wasted and all the mistakes are free. I have a particular idea in mind, requiring a fairly wide expanse of open lake and just the right storm location relative to that. Yep, I want lightning reflections. I found the lake for it to set up a tripod from, where the only access faces east across the water, so I can set up after it passes but is still active. Or at least that's the plan. Another lake I didn't know existed until this week has a great vantage point looking north.
Why am I thinking I need new lakes? I want a lot of open water. Even the largest lake I was familiar with is covered in blooming waterlilies, rice, and cattails. Reflections of the sky are a pipe dream. One can only get large areas of clear surface water in the early spring after ice out, and that's just too early for thunderstorms. Great for those galaxies and auroras though, when conditions are right. I just don't have the right cameras.
Reflections of the sky? In this? Sure! Uh huh. Riiiiight!One disadvantage of the stormy season this year - if I'm not making all the wrong assumptions - is a dearth of young birds. Adults are scarce enough, though they are around, and usually way far away from what a modest camera can capture. I have yet to see a single trumpeter cygnet this summer. As for baby cranes, aka colts, the grasses are tall enough to hide all but parental heads when they rise to watch for danger, at least in the refuge. Around the local roads where we live, they have been sighted from the car when foliage is low, such as early cornfields or soybean fields, and even a construction site or two before the machines get noisy. At least this year I haven't seen any as highway roadkill. Come to think of it, I haven't seen possums splayed along the margins either, just coons, a single skunk, and the seemingly requisite number of deer.
My scouting trip yielded a few shots, as it was a rare blue sky day - no Canadian fire smoke - and a few puffy white clouds did double duty both above and below, with just enough landscape details to make the shots both identifiable and interesting. A lot of other shots were just the kind I take to remind me by, say, a sign, exactly where I was at the time of the shot. Which turns do I take to get back there? One also had the sign clearly rising from a nice swath of poison ivy, just in case I might be tempted in the dark to get closer.
These are both shot from the same spot, one nearly straight east, the other more to the north. Pleasant enough for now, so long as I avoid the poison ivy, but with interesting possibilities in the right weather. By the way, tonight has been forecast as a possibility for storms. These also have the advantage of being next to paved roads and a fairly quick, straight shot from here to the highway. Most of the refuge roads are gravel and dust coats the rear of my car before I leave. One rear wiper blade and a squirter gives me some visibility, but I'm glad the hose easily reaches the back where it gets parked, saving me a car wash each visit.
Because they look east, I also have started to make note of full moons. I have hopes for a nice bright orange one rising from where the top picture is aimed. I know my camera has no problem getting a rising full moon and its reflection as it clears the far shore. I've done it in another location a few years back. This is the only place that shot would work inside refuge boundaries. The road to this spot is problematic enough I wouldn't consider it in winter conditions, but a harvest moon approaches.
On the way back, at full highway speeds, I was blessed with two interesting sightings, much closer than I've seen either since both were just a few feet from the pavement and unfazed by speeding traffic. First was a fawn, still fully spotted and huge ears for its head, looking as if it was planning to cross, with no understanding of how the process of transforming into roadkill was accomplished. I slowed a little despite almost no warning of its presence, and spoke a warning to it as if it could hear through my closed windows and understand. Just before I came even with it the fawn got sensible and darted back into the woods it had presumably emerged from.
I do hope Mamma was on that side of the road so it wouldn't try crossing again.
Just as I was getting over such a close deer sighting, up ahead at the very rim of the pavement was an adult sandhill crane, very dark from a recent dirt application, head down to the ground, leaving me with a first impression that somebody left a dark silhouette sign at the edge of the road. Then it moved, tugging at something I couldn't see which appeared to be caught under the pavement edge. My car didn't alarm it a bit. Was it a snake perhaps? I had read that they ate small reptiles and amphibians when available. What else could be stuck there to interest a crane?
It was still tugging as I passed, and safe in the glimpse from my rearview mirror.
Just as safe as my camera was, zipped into its hardbody case while I rolled by. Sigh....