Ever since Claire and Matt first led me here, I've been trying to capture the character of this special part of the woodlot at Revolve Farms. The area itself is not overly large, but there is certainly enough space to walk around. The area has no canopy overhead and vegetation is quite varied, large patches of reindeer moss, sizeable low junipers, soft ground. Here and there, these lovely scraggy, ragged, dark coloured trees with little to no leaves mixed with some other varieties of pine, maple and oak. It's a wonderfully soothing place to enjoy and I visit every time I'm at the farm.
I always take a camera on at least one walk through the area and have wanted to experience and capture it in a varietal of conditions, snow, fall colour, mist, fog, rain, early morning sun etc. So when we visited the farm last fall, of course it was one of the places I struck out for even though morning light was flat, there was a touch of mist in the air.
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| ' craggy characters ' |
This image was captured in vertical (portrait) orientation and contained a fair bit of washed out sky. Thanks to a video on shooting woodlands I found (or rather YouTube found for me), I was provided with some inspiration to 'not look for trees'. I've always found myself trying to get the full tree in the frame when it's likely more about how the tree fits into it's surroundings.
In ' craggy characters ' I cropped out the sky and went for a square aspect ratio that shows the bases of three trees leading me off into the distance with moss, lichen and fallen oak leaves at my feet. I could lose myself for hours in scenes like this ...
A
bit of background ...
This image and a number of others made at the
location that day could have quite easily gone overlooked. The date was
2024-10-10, the day/night of the awesome aurora event across the
northern hemisphere. After taking my walk through the woods, we departed
the farm for home with some hope that I might be able to continue on to
the cottage in hope of some dark sky captures of the northern lights. As things turned out, after arriving home another 3+ hr drive mostly in the dark was not in the cards. But I recalibrated and managed to get out to a more local dark"ish" sky area for what very well may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. That outing spawned a collection of images that I interrupted my stream of posts from the trip to Scotland several weeks earlier. Fast forward to earlier this month when I finished posting the 300 plus images from Scotland 30+ from the Aurora and one or two from the New Year and I had a fair collection of images going back to Oct that I had not even really looked at other than to download and backup the originals. I had forgotten about my shots from the woods that day and were it not for instructions from the Dr. to rest and take it easy for 3 weeks following minor surgery to repair a hernia, I could very well have been out tramping around capturing lovely wintry scenes from home to the cottage. As it is, there has been a lot of time in front of the computer to review what I have and spend time online taking in photographic inspiration. Both led me back to this week's image and the others from that magical walk in the woods.
DJE
