Month: February 2020

We’ve talked about Stephen Foster Folk Heritage State Park in White Springs, FL several times. We love camping there. They have events like Rural Days and a Festival of Lights which we like to attend, made all the more convenient by being able to walk to the event. Last visit Karl realized that while we often tour the museum and bell tower, we rarely photograph them. This last trip we spent an afternoon doing a photo shoot of the buildings and had fun doing it, and comparing photographs. Karl shot the first three of these, I shot the last.

The museum contains information and exhibits about Stephen Foster. He wrote many songs, one of the most famous “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River”. Large dioramas illustrate his most famous works, and there are many antique pianos and furniture from the period.

It is out of the way, but a fun place to visit if you are in the area or passing by.

I looked down and noticed this frog creating his own pattern in the water while floating. Just a different way of looking at a frog.

I never looked closely at how a forest looks after a prescribed burn. I saw many burn areas through the years, but mostly smaller sections, where green trees and undergrowth surrounded the small burned area. Somehow it blended into the color around it, taking away from its starkness.  Recently we happened upon an area where a large burn occurred.

Florida requires these prescribed burns. In natural areas the plants evolved around a cycle of growth and burn, and show it in their adaptations. People suppressed the natural fires for years, until they realized that the land and in fact many species of plant required burning to release their seeds, or nudge those seeds into bloom. Not only plants suffer without regular burns, people can too. If the under-story grows too thick a wild fire, usually caused by our frequent lightening, burns hotter and stronger and can kill the trees and spread to nearby houses and other man-made structures.

This burn appeared to be fairly recent but some grasses already grew back in parts of the area. The scene of so many pines receding into the distance stood out starkly. The trunks appeared charred; some more than others, but the fire adaptations showed in the green living pine needles on branches that start further up the trunk to protect the crown, not near the ground.

The very cold and cloudy morning gave way quickly to bright, clear sunlight and a very blue sky. By late morning that light hit the area in such a way as to show a great amount of texture and detail. I focused at first on the green areas I saw, providing the contrast. As the sun rose higher I noticed the way the light hit some of the burned areas gave many of the trees an almost surreal look. The top photo was not processed to give that look; it is how the camera captured it.

We both have used digital SLRs since Canon’s 20D came out. Part of the reason for our move was timing. My trusty old Nikon FE film camera took an accidental salt water bath while boating and never recovered. Technology continues to move on, and we keep up to a degree. For the couple of years Karl has watched the mirrorless SLRs progress and finally made the decision to move to mirrorless.

We visited our local independently owned camera shop, the only one in the area, looked and tried some of the models. Karl decided on the Sony A 7 III full frame as he shoots exclusively full frame and preferred to stay there. We bought a lens adapter and he uses the lenses we already own, Canon.

After his first test, above, he worked more on the settings and managed to get a portrait of one of the cats, Midnight. Midnight usually panics at the sight of a camera, so this was a surprise.

We tell our classes that with digital, we have gone from cameras to computers with a lens. This is very true for this camera. We’ll keep everyone updated on how he likes it.