observations from an observant observationist: misty morning hop

another early weekend morning venture, but this time mist enveloped everything. it was so thick that the sun resembled the moon when it plays hide and seek with the clouds. it choked off the sound of the birds, their chirpy morning songs suffocated by the dense fog. nothing moved. nothing stirred, flitted, or twittered. it was as if the weight of the low-lying clouds could be felt by all of the little woodland creatures, and it pressed them down into their burrows, hidey-holes, and other nooks and crannies. no starlings on the baseball field. no crows doing their usual fly-bys. no cardinals, wrens, or finches chirping away from the tops of trees. nothing...

except for the spiders and their amazing webs.

this guy was hanging out between the slats in a wood fence, and the mist being as heavy as it was, darkening the sky as though it were 5 o'clock in the morning instead of 9, i had to break out my flash for this shot. 400 ISO, f/6.3, 1/250 shutter speed at 500mm added a lot of noise to the photos, but then i wasn't out to shake the wildlife photography world by the collar, and because of the mist, i had already resigned myself to just enjoy the walk.

then i saw this:

and this:

and it became clear to me that this would be the theme of my little weekend morning photo-walk. in fact, it couldn't really be called a walk, as i was only about 150 yards from my house and all i really had to was turn in a circle. they were all over the place; i was surrounded by these things. they were on every tree, and most trees had more than one; some had five or six.

the challenge was framing a decent shot with the zoom telephoto, so i did my best.

if you're wondering where all of this dramatic mist is — the one i carried on about in the opening paragraph — i color-corrected the heck out of these shots. all of the photos from that morning were muted and drab.

here's a shot of the sun i mentioned earlier, untouched by photoshop.