For a few days it was un-seasonly warm and toasty around these parts of the world and sun worshippers came out in droves in parks in the city. I too felt the need to get some fresh air and move my legs a bit after being a bit too sedentary for too long, so out to my regular walking area I went - to the Skryllegården recreational area outside Lund, Sweden. However, unlike my usual 3K walk I chose to do the 5K one this time, since I was by my lonesome and not with my dad, who finds the 3K plenty enough for his liking!
This is an actual fresh water spring, although at this time it wasn’t all that full of water.
I took my Fujifilm XT-3 with the 18-55 mm kit lens as I usually do and enjoyed a lovely saunter through the sunlit woods where it was quite obvious that very soon the trees will let their leaves explode forth and cover everyone in a bright green foliage. Until then though there’s a chance to take a picture or two with the sunlight reaching all the way to the ground.
As I stood by the water in the picture above trying to frame up a composition I heard a quiet tap-tap-tap noise that was unmistakedly a woodpecker, and a close one too, judging by the sound of it. After some scanning of the trees by the water’s edge I finally spotted the little fella (or lady) and carefully raised my camera to my eye. I didn’t have much of a zoom with me, so I just snapped a lot of rapid fire images and hoped that at least one of them would be sharp right on the bird and that I could crop it close. Turns out I was right in my hopes and I ended up with two frames where the bird was quite alright, this being one of them. This is a very tight crop, perhaps 10 percent max of the full frame. I must say I do get impressed with my Fujifilm XT-3 and it’s ability to focus on tiny things!
This is an image consisting of three bracketed images that I took in rapid succession and then combined in Lightroom with the HDR function.. The reason why I did it like this is that the difference in light between the shadows at the edge of the frame and the light streaming down in the middle was so large that a single exposure wouldn’t have been able to capture it properly.So in order to make it look like the human eye saw it I combined the three images:
It’s called “Managed Forestry” but I can’t help feeling sad when I see huge swaths of empty out in the woods like this!