June Photo Tour of Clark Haven, 2020

June is the “jumble season” at the farm. The orderly emergence of spring vegetation gives way to an unruly mess of leaves, vines, flowers  and grasses. It’s a riot of color and tangled vegetation and strange shapes and creatures. Everything is so mixed up together, that it’s often hard to get a clean shot of a target plant or animal. It’s even hard to walk from point to point.

Sometimes it’s fun to see what kind of beauty you can find under an odd set of restrictions. Last weekend at the farm, I went out hoping to document a particular bee species. I put on my “bee lens” and didn’t take any others out with me.  It’s a lens that doesn’t focus any closer than five or six feet away, so I can’t get anywhere close to my subjects. That might sound like an odd lens for photographing tiny creatures, and it has its issues, but I’ve found that if I can get the creature perching in the clear, I can often get a better shot with this lens than with anything else that we own.  I’m not the Bee Whisperer. Generally, when they see me coming they take off, so staying six feet away is about all I’m able to do anyway without chasing off my subjects.

The photos in the June photo tour were all taken in a few hours one day, June 27th,  and most are heavily cropped– they are just small portions of a larger image.  In many cases, they weren’t the actual thing I was trying to photograph, or even close to the center of the image. The reasons I like them are as diverse as the images. Some seem to convey motion. Some are simply interesting patterns. Some subjects have pleasing blends of colors or elegant forms, and some tell a story.  Mostly uncaptioned, here is a small serving of June at the farm.