A Little Bittersweet

Apologies for the late post today. I ended up wandering out towards the northwest corner of the state. It was something of a weather chase/grain elevator project/state park project/random wandering kind of day that didn’t really have a defined goal in mind.

I did stop at White Pines State Park along the way. This might have been kind of a crazy stop since I really don’t need more pictures of this park for the state parks project but I kind of wanted to relive some happy memories. It was a little bittersweet. As I mentioned in this post, the operators of the hospitality arm of the park have had to call it quits because of Covid 19. While the cabins are owned by the state and so I am hopeful that someday they’ll find another operator, it’s still sad to see the current operators out of business after 31 years of running the cabins/restaurant/theater/etc.

I hiked a couple of the trails while I was there, including a favorite that seems to be a little unknown for reasons I can’t discern. Indeed, I didn’t see another soul on this particular trail for the whole time I was there and I spent quite a bit of time there working out how to make this picture work:

Finding these columbine was another somewhat bittersweet moment for me, too. Rocky Mountain Columbine (which is blue/purple instead of red) is the state flower of Colorado.

I’m getting better about finding the bright sides of things but I still tend to have a lot of strong memories about what has been lost. I still miss Colorado. I’m happy to be back around family in Illinois and I’m actually enjoying getting out and taking pictures here but I still miss Colorado, too. Thankfully, it’ll still be there after the pandemic passes and I look forward to trips that way again someday. For the time being, I’ll focus on the positive vibes I’m getting while working on the state parks project and documenting the wood grain elevators in the state.

About the picture: by this time, the storms had passed and there was copious sunshine which made it hard to get a nice shot of these flowers. I was able to use my body to block the sunlight hitting this patch of woodland floor and used an off camera flash with a very small soft box to light the flowers. The nice thing about soft boxes is that they can be angled so that only a corner of the light output hits the subject. Additionally, this is the softest light coming from them and it’s rather pretty. I dialed in the ambient below the flash so that it was there for context but wasn’t too distracting. I did a few minor edits in post processing to accentuate this effect a little bit.