A Spring Sunday Afternoon Drive - Camera Success!

Yesterday was a glorious sunny day so we got out for a long Sunday afternoon drive, heading west on Hwy. 26 through Owen Sound to Shallow Lake.  After that we hit the back roads up through the marsh and eventually back to Owen Sound.  

But the challenge for me was taking my larger, heavier Nikon camera which I was unable to even hold after arriving home from the hospital five years ago.  I wanted to try and see if I could manage to use it for taking pictures from the car rather than using my cell phone camera.

We first drove the highway to Owen Sound, down and back up through the valley of Keefer Creek and then down into Owen Sound itself.

It was very much an early spring landscape, with the snow melting, the creeks overflowing and the willows looking bright yellow.

After stopping at our favourite Tim`s in Owen Sound to pick up lunch, we soon found the marsh.  It proved to be still mostly frozen, so not many waterfowl to be seen.

The edges were shrubby and had more open water.  We spotted what looked like a Beaver lodge of chewed sticks.

We did spot one pair of Canada Geese, checking out the marsh for possible nesting sites.  Canada Geese are normally paired off by now, and you see them on scattered still frozen ponds or wetlands well before nesting is possible.  It`s quite fun to see them fly in and skid across the ice as they try to stop!

Leaving the marsh behind, we wandered north and then east.  This is an old small church, still in operation I believe as the Shouldice United Church.

Regular patterns of tree trunk shadows across the road as we drove east.

I`ve judged my camera challenge as a success.  I was able to hold it and shoot pictures from the moving car quite easily.  The zoom function is SO much easier to use than with my cellphone.  And the big advantage, I can later crop the pictures much more effectively.  I have found that my current Samsung phone has an amazing zoom, but if you then try to crop any pictures, they are blurry..  Cropping yields much better results with my Nikon.  We shall do some more testing over the coming months.  This is a big step forward in photography for me.

This being said, I find that the light in late March is very bright, providing a lot of glare and giving your pictures a slightly over-exposed feeling, even after editing.

And when we got home, what had appeared but the first green shoots of our tiny Iris and a few Daffodils!  Yea! Spring is here!