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Friday Slide Show: Signs of Spring
17 March 2023
The greening of the world isn't just a St. Patrick's Day event. It's the annual rite of spring. And after 11 atmospheric rivers this winter, we expected to see some signs of it.
We didn't have to wait long or look far. Just around the neighborhood. Between storms.
What we found was subtle but surprising. Wild not cultivated. Not storm-battered but irrepressible. In a word, spring.
A magnolia tree in bloom, a single red berry, an aloe raising its head, baby pinecones, wild blackberries, ivy holding only a few rain drops.
We shot these with a Nikon D300 and 43-86mm Nikkor with manual focus only. The combination at ISO 200 renders color in a particularly attractive palette to our eye. The ancient Nikkor gathers light like a girl picking a bouquet of wildflowers on a mountainside. And the D300's CMOS sensor captures it as if it were a beautiful memory.
We just love it.
For a while, we didn't appreciate the combination. The problem was the UV filter on the Nikkor. It seemed to suppress the color rendering. Only when we removed it and shot naked did the images become vivid.
We suppose there's a metaphor about spring itself lurking in that. But we'll just have to wait a while to see it come into full bloom.
