Spider, fly, woodpecker holes

Every now and then I decide to make trouble for myself. Instead of the usual lenses I use on the camera - the kit lens, because it can handle small crabs and distant islands reasonably well (and it's lightweight; that counts when your bones are wearing out), or the 40 mm because it can focus and take a photo from an inch away; handy when I'm flipping stones with the camera in one hand, the stone in another. - sometimes I fit the camera out with the 85 mm. lens. It does better in the shade than the others, and lets me take photos of things like yesterday's butterfly without getting so close that I scare them away.

But it has its disadvantages: it has no zoom. It won't focus at all at short distances. It won't open up to take in a whole stump unless I'm so far away that there are a dozen other trees between me and it. It's almost hopeless on scenery. It doesn't like extremes of light and dark; it haloes branches in pink and blue.

But it challenges me to look at things in a different way. Helps me to notice things I might otherwise have missed. Allows me to take photos of small things that I can't quite get close enough to because of the terrain. And, as cameras do, it sees things that I could not.

I was hiking up the Ridge Trail, taking random shots at anything out of normal reach; a scrap of moss, a woodpecker hole, a distant shelf fungus, an oddly-shaped log. On the way up, there wasn't much else to see. I was following a bear's track, which the camera didn't think was as obvious as I did, and the patches of scraped-away duff and the moist sawdust under a log, fallen as the bear checked it for ants, weren't really photogenic. So: bits of moss on distant trunks. And the butterflies.

A tuft of moss on a tree a few metres away. And what I couldn't see: cladonia lichen and a spotted fly.

I have to use automatic focus away from home; without my glasses, I can't read the screen any more. So what I want and what the camera thinks is important sometimes conflict, and the camera wins. I found a small patch of periwinkles, already in bloom. I thought they were worth a photo; the camera saw, instead, a tiny spider beside one of them.

Blurry periwinkle, not-so-blurry spider, upside-down.

Blotchy brown shelf fungus, Interesting pattern. Moss, lichen, ferns.

Woodpecker snag. As shot. Looks rather spooky to me.

If you zoom into this photo, you can see the pink tips on the huckleberry shrub on the left.

More tomorrow.