The spring season in a temperate climate is a wonderful time, isn’t it? If one is affected by such things, and I am, the colors, the new life, the fresh air, the sunshine, and the chirping of the birds can make you ecstatic with joy. Just as winter can be a time for quiet thought and reading by the fireplace, and that sort of thing is much-needed after a full year of work, spring is when you can get out of the house once more to explore nature as it comes back to life.
I thought I’d put together a little collection of some of my best spring photographs, taken in states such as Maryland, Virginia and DC. There are 50 photos in this post, all of which you can see individually below, or in the embedded slideshow.
A couple of weeks ago, we spent a beautiful afternoon at The Breakers hotel and resort in Palm Beach, Florida. This is a 720p HD video I filmed on the beach, with the Olympus PEN E-P2, a camera I am currently testing for an upcoming review.
It was windy, a bit chilly, the surf was good, and the afternoon sun added a beautiful golden hue to everything, particularly to the rocks placed on the beach. The texture of the sand at The Breakers is finer and darker than on other beaches in Florida. This complemented the blue waves quite nicely, as you’ll see below.
We were in the yard a few days ago, when we saw two lovely monarch butterflies engaged in a courtship ritual, on the grass. I recorded a video which you can see below.
According to science, what I filmed is the ground phase of their mating, and is preceded by an aerial phase, where the male will pursue and nudge the female, until she lands on the ground. He then lands on top of her and flits his wings wildly while he aligns himself alongside her body. Once he does that, he grabs her, and flies with her to a perching spot, where they sit end to end for about 30 minutes, while a spermatophore from the male transfers to the female.
The mating of the monarch butterflies occurs just prior to their re-migration back north. The eggs are not laid by the female until she reaches a suitable location there with plenty of food sources, such as milkweed.
As I write this, I remember that I’ve witnessed another stage of the monarch butterflies’ life when camping in the Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia, in September of 2006. It was there that I saw the caterpillars building their pupa, or chrysalis, and took photos of that.
This is a short video recorded in the yard of our home in South Florida, in December 2008. It features flora and fauna typical of our sub-tropical climate, such as palm and pine trees, ficus, lizards, and various flowers. I recorded these sequences with a (then) new digital camera, the Kodak EasyShare Z1015 IS, a 10 megapixel, 15x optical zoom camera that also takes 720p HD videos.
Given my fairly positive experience with the Kodak EasyShare v610 camera, I thought the Z1015 IS would be a good step up. It would have been, except for certain flaws which made me return it, such as its unacceptably soft and grainy images at 12-15x zoom, and heavy banding and compression artifacts visible on a lot of the HD video clips I shot with it.
Perhaps I’ll post a fuller review of the Z1015 at some point. It would still be relevant, even though it’s been almost 1½ years since I tested it, because Kodak still lists it on their website, and the price is only $20 below its original $299 tag.
The video was intended to be a test of the camera’s capabilities. The only editing/manipulation I did was to image-stabilize some of the clips in iMovie. The camera’s image stabilization work alright for photos at long focal lengths, but it has a difficult time keeping up when video is being recorded at 7-15x zoom. The audio is unchanged, so you’ll get a good sense of the microphone’s ability, and the colors are what the camera gave me. It’s in HD, so watch it full screen to enjoy it.
Raoul Pop 