Pine Street Woods Jan 31 2025

Mollie and I woke to winter wonderland conditions this morning. We dashed up the hill and walked for about an hour and half.

I brought my Fuji GFX 100s ii with the workhorse Olympus 135mm f2.8 lens. With the new camera the 35mm crop still achieves 60 MPixel resolution. This will be different this morning since i have been shooting a 500mm exclusively the last month. However I found that my eye is quite practiced with this lens. compostitions come naturally.

Only Sue was up earlier and we followed her and Amber’s tracks to the meadow then we crossed on virgin snow. The snow was about 5 inches deep and falling steadily, wet with the soft crunch of good snowman snow. Mollie was in heaven running about the meadow until she heard something in the woods. Sure enough she found Sue and Amber and up she ran for a quick visit and possibly a treat.

The snow falling leant a soft quality to the air and this tree showed its form across the meadow.

One of my fetish subjects is bracken, here showing a little color and pattern in the snow.

There are some resident ravens I see on occasion and there are a special pair I see often. I call them the sober and the playful ravens. One flies in a straight line, the other takes a more circuitous route often flying around the other. This morning I caught the sober raven here… while its partner was flying in and out of the trees.

Rapidly emerging as a new fetish subject is the larch (or tamarack). Every season this deciduous conifer has much to offer. Here in winter the bare branches show a pleasing symmetry highlighted by the snow.

While hiking on Momentum the noble fir needle pattern struck my eye. The bright snow background revealed it as lit from behind.

Further down Momentum and across the valley I was just able to make out the hills through the cloud and falling snow.

The snow reveals the small delicate details in the dried up plants of last season.

I never get tired of the tracery of fresh snow-laden branches. Streaks of falling snow. We went down Green Heart and up Zen Garden. Uncharacteristically Mollie asked to carried and I indulged her a hundred yards. Did she wish for the higher vantage point or did she sense a threat? I guess I’ll never know.

A rabbit in its pristine white winter coat, flushed by Mollie, jumped in front of me on the trail, skidded briefly then bound off into the forest again. It is still just a freeze-frame memory it all hapenened so fast.

The aspen patch on the hillside along Zen Garden trail.

Something about the form of a dead branch…