A nice big pic to brighten your day. You know I’m gonna be back to bugs as soon as they’re around, so enjoy this while you can.
The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog had planted a bunch of bulbs late last year, and the first indications of them were already up in January. This crocus had bloomed out nicely, then the storms came and it vanished under 10cm of snow. I had checked as the melt arrived, hoping to get a shot of it peeking out of the remnants if it wasn’t totally obliterated, but didn’t see anything – then found the bloom defiantly open this morning. The damage to the petals is probably just from the cold, and not evidence of a hardy insect like I’d first suspected.
That’s not the only flower out, either, though there are considerably fewer than last year.
There are just a few limited appearances of the winter speedwell (also called bird’s eye speedwell, Veronica persica) right now, and none of their companions. I purposefully went with a wide-open aperture, in this case f4 on the Mamiya 80mm macro with extension, to create this faintly surreal effect. I looked for blooms near any remaining patch of snow, to indicate the conditions a little better, but found none that cooperative.
I also did some frames with a smaller aperture for more depth-of-field, so you can decide which you like better.
As always during the winter, this is using the sparse color to magnified effect – you can still see the browns that cannot be denied in the background. I crawl around at ground level finding the vibrant stuff so you don’t have to – think of that come christmastime ;-).