January 29th, 2021

That would be Joy and I fighting our way through the tall grass while on our photo safari this past Wednesday!  To be totally truthful, there was a perfectly good trail we could have been walking on, but sometimes we just find it absolutely necessary to go off-trail for a bit.  This clearly was one of those times :)

This most recent hike was, without question, dubbed The Foggy Hike.  Man oh man, we just couldn't seem to shake it for more than a few minutes at a time.  I woke to some pretty thick fog in the wee hours just as dawn was peeping over the yardarm (I can usually see a few boat masts from the bathroom window and that morning I saw a whole lot of nothin'!).  A very short time later when Joy swung by to pick me up we decided that, well the first part of the hike might be a little challenging,  photo-wise, but soon enough the fog would burn off and then it would be fine.

But the weather had other ideas!  The fog would seem to lift a bit for a little while, sometimes we even saw blue sky and sunshine for a few moments and then, the fog would rise again and it would be swirly grey and mysterious again.  Oooooooo. Like being in a spooky movie!

The effect for our photography was interesting and like I said, I like a challenge, but it made it difficult to find some of our preferred subject matter now and again.   

Wednesdays foggy photo safari took us back to Oscar Scherer State Park to check on the eagles that we found there about 3 weeks ago.  We found 'em.  Or at least we found the nest and one eagle.  The photos aren't as dramatic as last time, but the fog made it look different if nothing else.

It was the oddest thing hearing birds all around us but not seeing them most of the time.  There was a very cool moment when we, again, went off-trail into a rather gloomy copse to track down the birds we could hear and there they were.  Robins by the dozens zooming from tree to tree and branch to branch, making such a racket!  Between the shadowy dimness  and the fog, it was hard to make out exactly what sort of birds they were at first. We kept thinking we saw the colour red and therefore assumed they were cardinals but also thought that they were too big to be cardinals.  Which was in fact the case. Eventually we saw one got close enough to determine for sure...robins!  I got Zero photos of them but it was amazing to see.  Sorry about that!

​Saw a few other birdsthat I was able to capture. Let's see what I have here:

And a couple of squirrels:

Here is one of the things about photography in the fog that I learned that day, colours don't show up very well.  So while the foggy effect is kind of dramatic the colours do not pop.  Everything appears to be softly wrapped in gauze instead.  I  kept thinking that my lens was dirty and constantly cleaned it with no change.  Normally these colours would leap from the page but instead they looked like this:

On the other hand, I FINALLY got some good dew on webs photos!  Very excited about these:

But mostly, it was about the fog. And trees in the fog look awesome!  Shouldn't we be hearing some weirdly creepy  music right about now? 

And as always there are the rando-photos that I save for the end:

Regardless of your weather, I hope you have a wonderful weekend!  Do something fun!  I will check in with you again on Monday.

​ Hugs all 'round