As we were leaving the park the other night, a friend noticed a group of monarch butterflies roosting on a goldenrod stalk, in what appears to be a mating situation.
Two monarchs are mating back to back, two others are waiting nearby.
I took photos with telephoto lens so as not to disturb them. To see this magnificent but threatened species reproducing at Mary Cummings Park is a positive sign.
I took a few hours off in the middle of a work day and stood in a meadow watching the clouds. Here is a one-minute summary for you.
Hard to put a value on open space, but the meadows, forests, and wetlands of Mary Cummings Park mean a lot to a lot of people, and to countless critters.
You can see fluff from the thistle flowers and an occasional bird flying close. There were hundreds of birds swooping all around.
This is an odd one: it was clear that there would be no sunset as the sky was utterly cloudless. So the video was more about the changing light on the meadow. Rather than the normal method of converting 2-3,000 still images into video, I selected just 10 and dissolved from one to the next, then added the Ken Burns zoom effect. I like it. This fellow at www.bensound.com offers free music for unpaid projects and his work is wonderful.
After I set up a camera to take a timelapse, I have an hour or two with nothing else to do but wander nearby and see what else there is to see and photograph. Here is a gallery of some images taken “while the time lapses”… (You can and should click those thumbnails to see the photos larger…)
Here are some of the timelapse vidoes from Mary Cummings Park:
Day’s End • Afternoon Clouds • A Quiet Little Sunset • Never Give Up On a Sunset • A Sunset of Sorts
sdfa fdasdfasdfasdfasdf
You can think of it as a holy ritual: watching the sun go down each night. Making a timelapse video is paying homage to the sun because it sure does a lot of good stuff for us, and comes back for more every morning.
Sometimes you can’t wait for sunset. It’s a spectacular spring day, the clouds are dancing across, and you need a break from work. You run up to Mary Cummings Park with your timelapse camera and tripod and hope for the best. I like how the sun sprays over the meadow when it peaks through the clouds.
In spite of a bit of rain, we had a great walk, learning how to use iNaturalist from Andrea, and identifying many species of plants and insects. It is also nifty when other iNaturalist member chime in to help you ID a subject. It is a world unto itself, populated by scientists and people who revere nature. Roll over thumbnails or click them to read more about how this works.
If there are interesting clouds, it makes a good break from desk work to go up to Mary Cunmings Park and try for a timelapse video. (The sound track is all sound effects, no music.)
You never know how a sunset will turn out. This one never developed outrageous, gaudy colors, but as always, it is a profound experience watching the sun set over the trees. Or is it the earth turning away from the sun?
