The Annual Defrost - 2025
Welcome back! Last time the lakes were still frozen, but a lot has changed in a month, at levels both grand and tiny.
Let’s start small. Deep in the woods I saw this red bead attached to a poplar. I’m not sure what it was, but I think it’s a stink bug egg. If anyone knows, please comment below. In any case, it was unhatched, and gave me a reason to bring out the macro lens:
You can see the hood of my lens in the reflection, along with the surrounding trees. From a different angle, I was able to get the camera to successfully “focus stack”, which takes a series of images and stitches them together in-camera. A breeze was blowing which caused the images to be slightly “off” from each other, but the camera did a pretty decent job:
Further afield, some of the young poplars were blooming. Apparently the white flowers are the females, the red are the males:
I’m a little shocked the above shot worked out: the wind was blowing strongly and would fade only occasionally, and sometimes pick up again before the whole plant had stopped moving. Finally a pause in the wind lasted long enough for the plant to settle, and I managed to hit the shutter just before the wind started up again. I guess I’m obsessive (ya think??), because the whole process took over half an hour with several attempts.
Speaking of flowers, there were a lot of crab apple blossoms in our local Assiniboine Forest. Apparently these are Chinese crab apples, and sadly invasive…but they do look nice next to poplars:
Already seeding were cottonwoods, which look like snow on ponds:
Finally, I really loved the textures and colour of this frog’s eye, and as a bonus, I got a selfie out of it:
Going a bit larger, I have way too many shots of returning birds, but I’ll keep it to a few.
I came across some coots in battle-royale over mating rights. Unfortunately I missed the shots where they were in full grapple and practically trying to drown each other (a tall order since they can hold their breath for a while), but eventually one had enough and fled:
Meanwhile, a pied-billed grebe watched quietly from the sidelines:
The highlight though was a short-eared owl who kept making passes near me, and eventually decided to check me out close up…maybe it saw its reflection in my lens?
The sky was a real treat this month. I went for a long drive through the Shoal Lakes, up through the Narrows and back down the western side of Lake Manitoba. A strong north wind was pushing the remaining ice up into the shallows and piling it remarkably high. Here was early in the day at Shoal Lakes:
Later the clouds thinned but the wind increased, and the pile was much higher on Lake Manitoba, at least 2-3 metres high in the distance:
Back on land, these next two seemed natural for black and white (you can still see the ice in the background in the first):
Finally, a couple of sunsets from before the ice had broken up. Black and white might be an odd choice for a sunset, but initially I wanted a monochrome silhouette of the reeds. Once I got home I found that the lens flare around the sun really made a mess of the colours on the ice, turning it into a blob of harsh orange. This is possibly one of the sacrifices of using a micro 4/3rds sensor—hard to say, since I can’t compare directly—but it reinforced the “black and white” decision and I was able to clean it up somewhat:
Then the sky turned soft and pastel, which became the title shot:
This is long enough, so I’ll end it here, even though I already have half-a-blog’s worth for next time.
Hope you enjoy the summer, and cheers!