Rime

Everything was covered in frost this morning, giving a dead leaf new life and outlining palmettos with bright white.

I thought I got up early

I thought I got up early this morning but someone beat me out to the woods. Here's a bike track.

And here's a dog's paw print.

And someone thoughtfully knocked down all the spider webs before I ran into them.

Oops. Missed one.

Find the toad!

The past few weeks there has been a hatching of tiny toads out in the woods. They hop and bounce all over the trail and I dance and skip to avoid stepping on them. Finally decided I was a force of nature and quit worrying about it. The dirt is soft and my shoes have many, many toad friendly depressions in them. I took some pictures this morning and when I got them off my camera realized that I had a hidden picture game here. So, find the toad! If you need a hint, email me and I'll tell you right where to look.

Waiting for the dog

Sometimes, when you're waiting for the dog to finish whatever it is she's doing, you look up and there's a nice picture waiting to be taken.

Morning is best

Have I mentioned that I love walking in the woods in the morning? If I have, pardon me for repeating myself, but it's true. I hear birds singing and fluttering in the saw palmettos. The noise of early morning traffic is muffled by the trees, like distant surf. I especially love it when it's foggy out. The dog gets spooked and hangs back instead of tugging ahead on her leash. Multiple layers of trees and grasses, in greens and browns and blacks loom out at me and then, as they recede into the mist, become gray ghosts. When you look up, the sky is bright blue with pink clouds all across it, like cotton candy.

It's like shooting on LSD…

That is, if I ran while tripping. I trip while running, but that's not the same thing. I used to do this a lot back in Michigan, take photos while running. I would get some really neat effects, depending on the light, the season, how hard I was jogging. The thing is, when I'm running, I don't like to stop, because it's so hard to start running again. And it's really hard to run and then stop and take a photo without shaking. So then I thought, why bother stopping at all? So this is the result. I maxed out the saturation in iPhoto, but the rest of it is just pure random magic. If you click on one of the pictures, you'll see a larger image. I think they look like paintings.

This last one, I like especially because it's a shot of the woods where a prescribed burn was done a few weeks ago, but it just looks so beautiful there now. All the pine needles have fallen to the ground so it's carpeted in orange and brown and yellow and a lot of the shrubbery is burnt red. Really cool looking. Hot, I mean. Hot looking.

Reason enough to get up

The sunrise this morning was beautiful. I took pictures of the clouds through my windshield while driving down St. Augustine Road, doubtless endangering my life and my dog's, but I couldn't help myself. And the only other people on the road are early garage sale shoppers. Those people are nuts.

And then, toward the end of our run in the preserve I looked up and realized that I was forgetting to enjoy the tops of the trees. I'm always so focused on what's going on at eye level and sometimes really lovely things are happening right over my head.

Moon is up

I love this time of year and this time of morning. The sun is just hitting the tops of the trees and the moon is still out. Just me and the dog and the birds and other, hidden critters. It's lovely and crisp and quiet.

Lost in the pickers

At least, that's what I call them. Here they're known as sand spurs. The little burrs on the end of the stalks fly off at the slightest disturbance and poke you, and then when you pull them out, the little barbs on the end don't want to let go.

Today we took a side track and ran smack into a patch of the damn things. Daisy got them in all four paws so I ended up carrying her out of there. I hate them, I do.

Dog fennel

Dog fennel smells so sweet out in the preserve. I could stand in the middle of it forever and not get tired of it. Such a silly name. The plants grow in great big clumps, like green and white fox tails. Steve says it smells like dill when he crushes it in his fingers. I think it smells like green.

Patience is rewarding

Daisy is watching a man with a beautiful border collie walk down the trail. I made her sit while they went by and she was doing fine until the man's dog made a move in her direction, and then she leaped towards them. After making her sit again, I decided to wait for a while before continuing.

I am trying to teach Daisy to be calm around other dogs and people. This requires a lot of patience on my part and I don't have any, so it's something I'm learning as we go.

It helps to have a camera when you're learning patience. While waiting for my dog to become resigned to the fact that we weren't going anywhere and the man with the collie wasn't coming back, I began taking pictures of what was around us.

I like this one because there are layers of color—green, lavender, brown and gold as well as layers of depth—undergrowth, tree trunks, mist and sky.

Here are a couple more, same spot, one left and one right.

What you see isn't always what you get

This happens to me a lot: I'm taking a picture or in the process of trying to get a picture when all of a sudden I notice something else, like a bonus prize, that happens as a result of my original picture taking impulse. Like these mushrooms, for instance. I stopped to take a picture of them because they're yellow (which is going to be next week's color of the week for this photography thingy that I'm doing with my siblings), and while I was focusing on them I realized that they were moving which in turn led me to focus on the bugs that were crawling around all over them. Interesting bugs, which I wouldn't have seen at all if I hadn't stopped to take the picture of the mushrooms.

This also happened last week with a tree I meant to photograph with my camera phone because I wanted something different as the wallpaper image and I nearly stepped on a pygmy rattlesnake in the process and so I took a not very good picture of that instead. Camera phones of the sort that I have are very limiting. I need to work on this, but you can see it's a snake, right? I thought so.

Effectivenessity

Sometimes I take pictures because something sticks out. Like this orange saw palmetto branch in among all the green ones. And then sometimes I get the picture on my screen and decide what's obvious to me out in the wild doesn't seem so obvious when it's digitized.

So here's another version that I made using Picasa. Very cool. Lots of fun. Almost postcard worthy.

And then here's one more version that I used Picasa's Picnik software to play with. Yow!

Duck, duck, duck, goose!

I've finally figured out what the deal is with the macro setting on this camera. It focuses only exactly in the middle of the picture frame, which is maddening for someone like me, who likes to offset her subjects according to the rule of thirds. But at last I was able to get some pictures using the macro that were in focus. Then I just cropped them to offset the flowers (and the grasshopper). The last photo is a bit indelicate. Just a heads up.

What sticks

Well, seeds. Seeds stick. This is a picture of my legs covered with grass seeds. I did try to get a picture of the grass stalks that are covered with these little black seeds, but I am still having an amazing amount of difficulty getting this camera to focus on anything in "macro" mode.

And that includes this other picture of a deer. I saw it and took a picture but forgot to take the camera off "macro" mode and so it is pretty fuzzy. Sigh. Oh well. If you squint really hard you can see an orange blur black there in the green. That's the deer. There were several. You'll have to take my word for it.

The seeds stick and sometimes I wear them for hours after I get home because I get distracted by other things, like eating breakfast and watering the garden and stopping sweating. And then I'll have to drive somewhere and it'll be while I'm waiting in line at the checkout counter or maybe while I'm pumping gas or visiting friends that I'll look down and realize my legs are covered with the detritus picked up from walking in the woods. If I walk on the beach I get legs that are covered with tiny shells. My legs are magnets for small things that long to travel. I don't mind.