Ghost Plant close-up, taken on the Munger Trail. |
I take a lot of photos of the wildflowers, mushrooms, and other things I see when I'm biking along the Munger Trail. I have approximately 4,000 images on my home computer, and about 7,000 on my Flickr account. I share a lot of my photos on Facebook, too.
Sometimes people tell me they don't "have a good eye" for photography, meaning they think they can't take good photos. Or they tell me that they never see what I see.
I said in a recent post that noticing details (in the woods or in a
This screenshot shows the original photo, before I cropped it. |
If you're not used to reading a text closely, you can get better at it over time. It just takes practice. I said on the first day of classes that you shouldn't save your reading for late at night. Be alert and awake when you read. That's the first step.
Secondly, be an active reader. As you read,
- stop and think, from time to time;
- stop and ask questions;
- stop and write down your thoughts.
Bumblebee on Culver's Root Flower, Munger Trail. I was in the right place at the right time. A week later, these flowers on the edge of the Trail had been mowed down. |
For about four years now, in all four seasons, I've been obsessively observing, or reading, if you will, the same ten-mile stretch of Munger Trail, and I'm still finding plants I haven't seen before--because I keep on looking. The Culver's Root flowers to the left, for instance, are new to me: they've been there, flowering each year, I'm sure, but I never noticed them until this summer.
Ghost Plants, with brown seed pods. |
These last fews weeks, as I've been observing the Ghost Plants, watching the flowers disintegrate and the seed pods take their place, I realized that, in the past, I've seen seed pods like these along the Trail in the Autumn, but I never knew they were Ghost Plant seed pods. Somehow, I've always missed the flowers, until this year. Perhaps I was never in the right place at the right time. Of course, the key to being in the right place at the right time is to be in the right place all the time!
Yellow Lady Slipper, Munger Trail. |
Look up the slope, & you get one view... |
Look down the same slope, & you see something else. |
Over the Labor Day Weekend, I was biking the Trail on Saturday morning, and I saw one other sight I never noticed before--Clayton G and his dad! I didn't get a photo--they were moving fast, and I wasn't expecting to see anybody I knew. But that's my point, about Munger and about books, isn't it? You never know what you'll find until you look.
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