Summer Solstice 2013

Friday, June 21, 2013

Hardberger Park, Oak Loop Trail

Today's photos:

Given all the rain that has fallen here the past couple months, the vegetation is about as green and lush as I've ever seen it along the Oak Loop Trail in Hardberger Park. I walked the trail today in preparation for leading a nature photography hike tomorrow morning.

Photography is the art of selection and elimination. Everything included in the frame of a "good" photograph should work together to communicate a unified theme. Generally, there is one dominant object or small set of objects that establish the theme of the photograph in much the way a topic sentence establishes the theme of a paragraph. Whether the photographer intends it or not, the viewer will interpret every else in the photograph in relation to the dominant object(s).

• The first photo is a Snapdragon Vine.
• The second photo is Two Leaved Senna.
• The third photo is a Common Buckeye in flight. I always try to take at least two and usually three to five frames of a photograph with slightly different focus in each frame, but sometimes, like this photo, there is only time to get one frame. This was one of the "lucky" ones were it worked.
• The fourth through sixth photos are a Texas Rose-bellied Lizard. Sometimes the animals cooperate. in this case, the lizard had run out on the trail in front of me, saw me coming then turned around and ran back to the top of a stump where it let me take a series of photos.
• The seventh and eighth photos are Zexmenia flowers.
• The ninth photo is a study in contrasting texture with the bark of a Live Oak tree in the foreground and an Ashe Juniper immediately behind the Live Oak.
• The tenth photo is a detail of a Tasajillo cactus with a small spider web woven on it.
• The eleventh and twelfth photos are blossoms on a Velvet-leaf Mallow.
• The thirteenth and fourteenth photos are a Sleepy Orange butterfly.
• The fifteenth photo is of the flowers on the top of a Whitebrush, also known as Beebrush. The way the sunlight was striking the flowers caught my eye initially, but I also realized fairly quickly there were no bees on the flowers. Given the well publicized declining bee population this is particularly worrisome. As the common name implies, theses flowers are particularly attractive to bees. These flowers appear barren without at least a few bees on them gathering nectar.
• The sixteenth and seventeenth photos are a Northern Mockingbird perched on the dead branch of a tree. There is only a slight, but significant difference in the composition of the two photos. In both, the bird and the tree are the related dominant objects. The first photo isolates the bird and the tree with only a hint of the distant horizon along the bottom of the frame. The second photo has the same basic theme, but includes more information. This particular tree is located on the side of a hill and is in an open area (there are no other trees close by surrounding it).
• The eighteenth photo is the inflorescence of Silver Bluestem.