Another walk around Doffcocker Lodge this morning. Instead of my usual 28mm f2.8 ais lens today I brought my 50mm f1.8D. The lead photo in today’s post is a crop from a 6 image stitch. The 50mm lens was not wide enough to get the landscape shot I was looking for, so another stitch job!
The shot alongside is a single shot image with the 50mm lens. Such a different feel between a landscape and a portrait orientation. I suppose the thing that grabbed my attention today was the circular sun and it’s reflection on the water.
It was a hot and humid day yesterday, and today is supposed to be cooler. All the same, the sky looked hazy and I really wasn’t expecting to see the sun as a crisp ball as is visible in these photos.
The next photo, taken quite a bit later, is looking across the smaller lodge toward Winter Hill. Here you can see the sky isn’t crisp and clear, but hazy. You can also see in the close foreground the Himalayan Balsam. I’ve been quite amazed with the amount of balsam in the parks and waterways. It was introduced in the mid 1800s and I understand beekeepers are quite fond of it for the amount of nectar it produces for bees … but it is quite invasive and swamps the native plants.
Heading home I couldn’t help but notice the nettles and grasses – probably because the grass is quite long and I got rather wet from the morning dew. Nevertheless, these grasses are very pretty. Maybe I’ll go looking for grasses tomorrow … there’s certainly a large variety and their seed heads are most attractive. Nettles never seem to be popular either … probably because they can be painful, but they are a popular plant for butterflies.
