Tag Archives: Fort Harrison State Park

Life beyond butterflies

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I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning and instead of heading to the area where I’ve seen the most butterflies, I went in another direction.  It wasn’t that I didn’t expect to see butterflies in the old location, the question was whether I could find happiness in subjects other than butterflies (soft plaintive violins in the background).


A leaf in the water.  Not bad if all we want to do is aim the camera away from butterflies.  But not too good either.  Try again.


Jewelweed is nice, very bright and I can’t say I have ever noticed an insect like that before; one of the benefits of macro photography.


Now I like that.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked by little beauties like this.  Once again, a benefit of going out with a macro lens.  I’ve noticed that when I have a telephoto lens on the camera, I tend to see more telephoto opportunities.  Today I was using my 100 mm macro lens.  This lens works as a moderate telephoto but I tend to think of it more in its macro application.

Here’s the high point of the morning.


I love back lit shots.  A very important lesson came out of this morning’s jaunt.  I was headed east on the Fall Creek Trail because I picked up the trail at its western end – walking toward the sun, accidentally creating the opportunity for back lit shots.  There were many opportunities.  I went a couple of hundred yards past the area of this shot and turned around looking for what other opportunities I could find.  There weren’t many.  If you like back lighting try going east in the morning and west in the evening.  Writing this down is a little embarrassing.  Of course that is what we would do to get back lit shots.  This is one of those points that is so obvious it needs to be stated.

And yes, there is happiness beyond butterflies.

The days grow short when you reach September

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A few days ago the thistle blossoms were covered with butterflies and now the numbers are much reduced.  In the hot weather morning was a good time to see them but cooler weather is here and afternoon is now the better choice.


Photographing butterflies on a windy day is good exercise for toning up the reflexes.  Whoops, that wasn’t a butterfly at all.


And with the cooler weather September Song is the background music.

Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time for the waiting game

Indeed with the shortening of days the butterflies are fewer and all the more precious.





Don’t wait, go out and shoot.

I couldn’t help myself

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Having published eight images of butterflies in the last couple of days it was time to give them a rest.  Time to move on to other subjects.
Weeds make fine images, lots of texture and even a little drama.  Flowers are good too.

But despite hundreds of acres of foliage, water, birds, etc. at Fort Harrison State Park, I went right back to the butterflies.


They just kept coming.

You may not be able to count them all, but there are nine butterflies in this image:

I suppose I could have called some friends and asked them to talk me out of it but they would have wanted to come along too.

My name is Barry.  I photograph butterflies.

More butterflies

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Here are some more butterflies from Fort Harrison State Park yesterday.






Later this morning I’ll go see if the butterflies are still there.  That will be part of the trip, but it is time to look for something new as well.  But I’ll still check out the butterflies.

Gifts: Today it was things with wings

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It was William James who spoke of the ‘slow dead heave of the will’ and boy, did that expression come home to me this morning.  I was getting ready to go see my mother and I thought I would stop off at Fort Harrison State Park on the way home and shoot what there was to shoot (with a camera).  I had a good visit with Mom and then it started: do I really want to go shoot or not?  What was I going to shoot?  What would be interesting?  Anything?  Maybe I won’t go.  I’ll go tomorrow.  You get the idea.  And the moral of the story is that the head should not be in charge of some decisions.  Sometimes it is best just to go do it.  Which I did.

I went over near the walnut plantation and was roaming around among the weeds and I came upon a good sized thistle with lots of blooms and on many of the blooms there was a butterfly.


Hoo boy!  This is the good stuff!  Fortunately the camera was in burst mode where all I had to do was point it and hold the button down and it would take up to six and a half frames a second.  Butterflies were coming and going and everything was changing from one moment to the next.


Bumblebees were getting into the act as well.

And that was when the Canada geese showed up.


Yes, the moon was right there.  I will admit I didn’t even notice it until much later.  Some days we’re just lucky, which is nice because it balances out some of those other days.

To shoot or not to shoot is no longer the question.  My hero is Elwood P. Dowd, the Jimmy Stewart character in the movie ‘Harvey.’   If someone said the two of them ought to go for a drink sometime, Elwood would reply ‘When?’

Image processing is important too

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Back when we shot slides, there usually wasn’t much that happened after the slides came back from being developed.  Some were accepted, many were rejected and for those that were accepted there was often some little thing about it that would have benefited from the digital image processing we now have.

Becky and I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning to see what there was to see (and shoot).  We were both happy with what we found and instead of spending two hours, we spent three hours wondering around.

There were a lot of shots where it was clear there was something there but more needed to be done to look into the life of it.

It came to a head for me when we went to an area called the Duck Pond.  Yes, there were ducks on the pond when we got there, but  I was more interested in some landscape possibilities.

This image wasn’t bad but it was lacking something.  I converted it to black and white and that helped, but it wasn’t quite there yet.  I added some filters and adjusted the blending mode and was much happier with the result.

This looks a little like an infrared image but it isn’t.  Now this is talking to me.  I tried the same technique on some other images and was pleased with them too.  Here’s another one from this morning.

That was nice too.  Finally, I tried this with some older images that didn’t stand on their own but were good enough that I wasn’t going to throw them out.  Here is an example.

Some object to all of this digital image processing but I don’t think of myself as a documentary photographer, rather I’m a kind of photo poet.  The poetry (for me) is in the interpretation of the image.  Modern digital image processing allows a wide range of interpretations and the main limit now, rather than the image itself, is our own imagination.  More on photography and written poetry in a later post.

No herons for you today, would you take some nice Canada geese?

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Becky and I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning.   I wanted to see how the trees were starting to come out across Lake Delaware.  I had taken a similar shot a couple of days ago and this time of year, things change pretty quickly.  That earlier shot was included in my last post.

The trees are starting to turn green and I was glad to be there to record it.  As I was setting up for this shot I was showing Becky where the heron was that I wrote about last time.  It had come in from the left and swept across right in front of me.  But because of the camera settings I had forgotten about, I blew the shot.  As I was talking she was nodding rather vigorously and when I was through she said a heron had just flown behind me.  This was April 2, not April 1.  She was telling the truth.    OK, I can be philosophical about these things but then Mother Nature rubbed it in.  She gave me Canada geese.

There was a nesting pair across Fall Creek and why not get a shot of them?

The nesting pair attracted others and we counted nine geese.  There were probably more.  They were everywhere.

The occasional Canada goose is nice but I’m holding out for the heron.  Next time I’ll be ready.  Unless she (or he) is readier.

Object lesson

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I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning, more to see what was going on than to do any serious shooting.  The light on the hillside across Delaware Lake was inviting so I set up to shoot in that direction.

I was so wrapped up in composing and shooting that I wasn’t paying much attention to the camera settings.  Where I usually shoot at f/11 in a focusing mode that allows the camera to pick where it will focus (normally the closest object), here it was at f/5.6 and focusing was set to a point off to the right, roughly where the dead tree is at the right of the image.  The focusing point was left over from a shoot a few days ago.  None of this mattered much for this particular shot.  The distance was such that I had enough depth of field and even if the camera had been free to pick where to focus, it would likely have focused where it did anyway.  On top of that, I intentionally overexposed the scene by two stops because normal exposure produced a rather dark image.  Correct exposure and where the camera would focus quickly became very important.

A blue heron flew across the lake to give me the opportunity for a great shot.  It was coming in from the left and cut right across my field of view about 20 feet away.  But the camera was focused off to the right (not very evident in this shot, but it was).  And the shot was two stops overexposed. 

I looked at the camera settings after the shot.  That’s when I saw how the focusing was set.  As you can see in the image, Photoshop did a good job recovering from overexposure but if the image is out of focus to begin with, it stays out of focus.  I try to remember to put the camera back to my favored settings when I shut it down, but sometimes I forget.  Oh well.

The rest of the morning produced some OK shots.  Here is one.

And here is a black and white shot.  It worked much better this way than in color.

My camera is put away for the present and I have checked it twice to make sure the right settings are in place.  They are.

Good grief, where have I been?

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I’ve been so wrapped up in going out to shoot in this great weather that I haven’t been posting.  I hadn’t realized it had been ten days since my last entry.

For some odd reason I have come to prefer the cold weather.  Part of it has to do with the opportunities for photography and some of it feels a bit like revenge.  I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania and for many years our driveway was two ruts going up the side of a steep hill.  The driveway was long and we shoveled the snow by hand, not a lot of fun.  Now the driveway in Indianapolis is flat (if rather long) and I clean it in the winter with a good snow blower.  There is great satisfaction seeing the snow in front being thrown off to the side leaving a clear path behind it.

There is a spareness to the winter that I find particularly appealing.  Plants, or their remains, which would have gone unnoticed in the crowd of other plants in the summer, now stand by themselves, stripped of that which we call life but nonetheless still beautiful.

If all we see is the dead and withered stems from last year, we also know that there is a root that is awaiting its opportunity to put forth more bounty.  It won’t be long now.

In the meantime, there is winter and its particular beauty.

Dress warmly and go enjoy it.

The sun came out

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I wasn’t sure we would have much sun today and when the clouds disappeared it was clear that it would be a good day to go make some photographs.  It was ‘gloomy’ yesterday but that was also a good day for making photographs.  Today was also a good day for sledding.

I grinned as I tromped through the snow to get to a favorite place for shooting – the only tracks in this patch of snow beside mine belonged to a dog who had come through earlier.   Or maybe it was a coyote.  No humans though.  With a near virgin snow, and it being very quiet,  it is easy to think that this moment is the beginning of time, and according to one way of looking at it, I suppose it is. 

A friend had a baby boy a few days ago and for that young fellow, all things are indeed  new.   This day is a celebration for him and his family.

The day will come when he is sliding down that hillside.  Perhaps he will also see what I saw at Fall Creek.

Happy birthday, Roman.

It is never too late to have a happy childhood.  Tom Robbins