Life Recycles - Images of Spring

Originally published Apr. 15, 2012

Spring season has finally arrived in Minnesota and the time is perfect to capture it.   Fall comes easy with its bounty of colorful leaves and the brilliant blue of the October sky.  Winter possesses its own attributes with snow and the transformative ability to appear as blizzards, icicles, hoar frost or a blanket of glitter.  The fact that snow glitters, well, I have a thing about glitter and so it gets a lot of bonus points in my book for that reason alone.  Summer of course graces us with green foliage, flowers, stormy skies, and a proliferation of life everywhere we look.

As a landscape photographer, I find Spring to be a more challenging season to photograph (at least in MN) with the exception of ice out on the local lakes.  It is much easier on a macro scale – tulips budding and spreading their petals to bathe in the sun, baby leaves sprouting from twigs, a mother bird sitting on her nest, raindrops and puddles, a groundhog peeking out from his or her winter home, crab apple trees blossoming with white and pink flowers, and fiddleheads uncurling.

Maybe that is the gist of things – new and young and somewhat solitary and meek, until they prosper and flourish as one – growing and spreading into clusters, fields, and forest canopies.

The other challenge with Spring is the wind and when you are photographing up close, everything needs to be as still as possible.  So when those windless days present themselves, nature photographers must act quickly or face resorting to a bag of tricks to keep things from blowing around.

My upcoming blog schedule includes:  The Chinese Year of the Dragon and Tom Pham’s Wondrous Azian Kitchen; Motorcycles, the State Fair and Count’s Kustoms; Women In Photography; Minnesota’s Statehood Day; and another round of Ernst Haas’ thoughts on photography.

I hope you will visit again and in the meantime that you are enjoying Spring wherever you are.