and things went downhill from there

Our temperatures crawled up into double digits this weekend for the first time in recent memory. It was not quite into double digits on Friday when we decided to drive up to Oak Hammock Marsh to see what the migratory birds were up to, but it was pleasant if we stayed out of the wind.

Unfortunately, there is not much shelter to speak of up in the marsh, so we spent much of our time out in a damp, chilly wind. As a result, we did not spend more than an hour or so walking around the marsh. There were not a lot of birds hanging around other than a couple different flavours of blackbirds, and an assortment of geese. The place will probably be teeming with fowl in another couple of weeks, but the marsh was still frozen solid this weekend in spite of the warmer weather.

The geese were being wonderfully photogenic for their part. I cropped this a bit, and obviously converted it to black and white (though it was so nearly monochrome anyway that it did not lost a lot of colour in the transition).


As I said above, the marsh was not big on sheltered areas.


The marsh was still a sheet of ice while we were there, and the path around it was blocked by sizeable snow drifts in spots.


I never even thought to check if the interpretive centre was open, though we'd have had to pay to get in there anyway. We have talked about getting season passes or memberships there, not because we go out there very often, but to give a bit of financial support to the work.


My mother once accused me of living a filtered existence since I experience the world through the lens of a camera. I suppose there is some truth to that. When I am out without my camera, I tend to be more Zen-like in my appreciation for my surroundings, rather than keeping an eye out for my next good shot. It looks like I may be rubbing off on atara


Do you see what is behind this porous little shelter? If you answered "nothing" then you win the prize. When you hear me or atara mention that we live on the bald-ass prairie, this is what we are talking about. We are surrounded by a whole lot of bugger all, punctuated by nothing.


I may be relying too much these days on post-processing software for my pictures. I need to process them because my camera shoots very dark - especially when I have the polariser on it. Still, when I look at all of these pictures together in one post, the colouring and contrast is so different from shot to shot that it's almost hard to believe they were all taken at the same place on the same day. I think I am becoming a bit addicted to contrast and saturation. I can quit them whenever I want though. Any time.