February 17th, 2025

This past Thursday, as per usual, Joy and I headed out to hike and we were very excited because one of our favourite hiking spots, Carlton Reserve and FINALLY re-opened!  Yayayayayay!

On the other hand, we could not ignore that fact that the lighting was terrible.  It wasn't just a matter of it being early morning. Nope it was Very cloudy and Very Grey and for the longest time, it seemed like there was some sort of barricade up in the sky refusing to allow even a single beam of light through.   Eventually, there was an occasional. random ray of sunshine that managed to fight it's way through and that helped tremendously.  By the time we were nearly done, at last we had blue sky and sunshine yayayay! From the two photos above you can see clearly that the natural lighting in the photo on the right - which was most of the hike - is seriously substandard especially compared to the photo on the left which was the tail end of the hike. Oh well.

However, since the majority of our time was spent attempting to take photos in very poor lighting conditions,  most of my shots looked a lot like this:  (and this is having attempted to edit in as much light as possible!!)

Not Good.  I believe that I deleted more photos from this hike than ever before in the history of Sam.  How many photos of indistinguishable blobs do you care to look at?  Not many is my guess. Which means this Photo Safari Report will be called,   the Silhouette Hike.

It was still a good time, please don't get me wrong.  We ended up with a few good shots, a decent number of miles on our sneakers and a few good giggles which always makes it worthwhile.  Heck if we had come home with no photos at all it still would have been a great time :)

By far and away, the coolest thing we saw was a juvenile Eagle.  I'm not sure I ever saw one before.  Honestly, I would have thought it was just some bird I'd never heard of (there are lots of those) but nope, turns out it's an eagle, just a teenager eagle:

Captured a goodly number of woodpeckers of one sort or another.  We saw at least 4 different types but I think I only got photos of 3 and only two of those came out at all. Oh well.  Still a bird so it counts!

And of course some other birdies:

Not many botanicals for you today.  But of course I"ll give you what I've got :

And............................that's it!  That's all I've got for you on this "Silhouette Hike".  Hopefully the next hike with be on a lovely sunny day and I'll have all sorts of exciting things to share!

​Stay warm, stay safe and have fun 'til we meet again!