Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged park
Shadow Photography
Sep 13th 2010
I mentioned briefly that I was taking a photography course this semester. Well, the first assignment has been completed, and my work turned in so I figured I’d post up some of the shots that I turned in over here in an effort to stop this from becoming the weekend recap blog. I’ll probably have some more over the next little bit as some of my shots weren’t exactly based on the topic but I got some good stuff anyway.
The subject was Light and Shadow, capturing how shadows and reflections can create interesting images. So here we go (Click on each image to get to flickr where you can see a larger version)
First up my favorite one I took:
I happened upon this early in the morning at one of the local parks. The shadows from the railing on the gazebo were just awesome. One of the shots I took here that I was praying a morning jogger wasn’t going to run by though. You look a little weird at 8 in the morning, laying flat on your stomach over the steps of a gazebo taking pictures.
Here’s another one from the same park. The assignment also dealt with reflections of light, and I came across this setup with the sun refelcting in the water of the little pond thingy they have, with the hard light shadows on the rocks.
Different park this time (and a different day). This particular town park has a big network of nature trails. This was taken morning as well. The sun at this time shines directly into the entrance of this path making the foliage on the trees kinda glow which looked pretty neat.
This one I didn’t end up submitting, but I kinda liked how it turned out anyway. We’re back at the second park, along the sandy “beach” area. This was another one of those “Please nobody come by” type photos due to how I had to situate myself to get it right.
Who Needs Trail Markers Anyway?
Sep 21st 2009
Berries And Flowers
This weekend, since the weather was so nice, my friends and I decided to go out to one of local town parks that has a bunch of trails in the woods. We were out there once before earlier in the year but the trails weren’t really marked at all and we ended up getting a little lost in the woods.
This time though, we went out earlier in the day in case we did end up getting lost. Which we did, but not as bad as before.
First of all, we really had no idea where the official trail entrance is. We wandered around a bit until we located the path we took to get on the first time with the intention of only following the marked paths and making as few turns as possible. Despite this method, on our way back, we ended up crossing a bridge that we hadn’t crossed on our way going. You would figure that you couldn’t mess up just walking straight back, but…there we were.
But thankfully, we were on a “marked” trail. I put marked in quotation marks because this is what the town considers to be a marked trail:
Trail Marker
You see the paint on that tree trunk there? Yeah, those are the trail markers. Usually these are invisible if you’re walking the trail in the wrong direction, or just plain hard to spot like this one.
Eventually we stumbled onto a wood marker post which pointed the direction back to the main foot path and we ended up getting out of the system without too much trouble. But man…we had hoped that they would have done some trail maintenance since the first time we went there. Obviously this was not the case. It was good to get outside though. The weather was really really nice.
Lost In The Park
May 19th 2009
It was really, really nice out yesterday. Just a little chilly, but sunny and warm enough to go outside and do some outdoors-y type things. So my friends and I wandered out to one of the local town parks in hopes that we could find some hiking trails through the woods like we did last weekend.
We went to a different park, but as we found out, it was just as large as the first one and had a lot more hiking trails. Enough to require a trail map to make sense of it. As we came to find out though…their trail map kinda sucked.
The first warning sign was that the trail map indicated an entrance to a trail that did not exist. We wandered down the road a little further and came to a path that lead into the woods that wasn't on the map, but we figured we'd follow it in anyway. It seemed to lead to a system of trails but we couldn't figure out where we were on the map. And a couple of intersections later we had lost track of where we were in relation to the park.
The trails themselves were pretty cool. Right in the woods, and through some interesting nature type areas. If we end up there next time I want to take my camera to get some pictures of some of the trees (if we can ever find the trees again that is) because they were really cool. It was a little bit muddy though. Like…a lot muddy. We were able to avoid most of it by cutting through the actual woods.
But, back to being lost. Eventually in our wanderings, we came across the back of a sign. As we passed it and turned around to see what it said we were surprised to find that it was warning us that the way we came was leaving the park land and the trails were going to become unmarked. At this point, we had two thoughts: "We left the park land???" and "The trails are supposed to be marked???"
Eventually we discovered that the trails were color coded. But the map was labeled with letters and no colors. So even if we found a trail, we had no idea which trail we were on or which direction we were supposed to be going on it. I have half a mind to write a really nasty letter to the town about their "map" and their "marked trails"
We stumbled off the park land again once more (also without being warned until we were back on) and then found ourselves on the red square trail…whichever trail that was supposed to be. Then we found the blue trail and realized that blue was "A" and we were back on the trail that we thought we were on from the beginning. Finally! Which was good because we were starting to get hungry.
We jumped off the trail at the first sign of the park showing up through the wilderness, but ended up walking into a bog type area. Ahhh…nature. What would a springtime walk be without mud. Eventually we found our way back to the park proper, although we ended up behind the maintenance building near where they store all the various pieces of equipment.
And thus ended our outdoors adventure for the day. It sounds like we've got a lot of options for outdoor walking in the area. A lot more than we thought we had. It's amazing what's local if you're actually looking for it.
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