While Illinois’ shelter in place order was extended through the end of May, it did provide some forms of relief for its cabin fever weary denizens. One new provision was the opening of some state parks as of May 1st. I decided to see what some of the parks along the I&M Canal trail looked like yesterday. Alas, both Channahon and Gebhard Woods State Parks were both pretty crowded yesterday. I had kind of feared that might be the case for the first Saturday that the parks were re-opened, especially given that it was a beautiful day with mostly sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s.
While I had hoped to do some work on my Illinois State Parks photo project that I started last year, I decided that yesterday was not going to be a day for it. I decided to try my luck with a county park, instead. McKinley Woods is part of the forest preserve system of Will County. It was a family favorite growing up. While it was busy, it wasn’t overly crowded like the state parks I mentioned. It also allowed access to the I&M Canal trail, so I was able to still enjoy that part of the day.
Spring was definitely evident based on the flora of the park. The redbuds along the trail were looking wonderful. Here’s a somewhat abstracty, compressed view of a few of them:
The wildflowers were out in full force in the park as well. Here’s view of a big patch of bluebells that also features some trillium, yellow violets and a single wild geranium:
I really liked how that geranium stood out among the bluebells, so I went from a really wide angle view with lots of depth of field to a telephoto view with very shallow depth of field to emphasize that:
There was quite a bit of wildlife along the canal as well. I saw quite a few species of birds, some snakes, a huge muskrat, and lots and lots of frogs. I was able to get a couple of shots of bullfrogs. Here’s the first:
Looking at that shot closely reveals that the bullfrog has something in its mouth, though I can’t discern what exactly. Here’s a cropped view that gives a better look. Ideas?
I found another bullfrog that was right along the edge of the canal and didn’t seem too bothered by my presence (most of them jumped into the water before I even saw them). Since I had a cooperative subject, I decided to try something a little different and held my camera out over him to give a top down look:
By this time, the trail was starting to get busier, so I decided to pack up and do something a little more social distancy. I decided to drive to Mazon to photograph the grain elevator there:
While I was there, a gentleman came up and started chatting (in a socially distant manner) and told me about an old grain elevator along an abandoned railroad right of way. This is the elevator in Langham, Illinois (now privately owned):
I talked (again, in a socially distant manner) to the gentleman that owns the elevator and he gave me a little bit of the history of it and said that he used it for his farm until 1999.
The light was definitely getting kind of spot-lighty by this point, so I decided to head to Seneca to see if I could get a shot of the beautiful, old elevator there in better light than I had last time.
Yesterday’s post didn’t seem too optimistic for a hole in the clouds but one thing that John Fielder has taught me is that sometimes if you wait long enough for the light, it will come to you, even if it’s only very briefly. Lo and behold, that turned out to be the case yesterday. About 45 minutes after yesterday’s post, this happened:
I took two shots with the 8×10. I’m curious how they’ll turn out since I had to resort to some trickery to make sure the building didn’t keystone. Normally, this would just involve some front rise. The Kodak Commercial Ektar I was using didn’t have enough image circle to fully correct for this, though. So I pointed the whole camera up and then used back tilt to again straighten the perspective. While this helps with the image circle problem, it also means that the plane of focus has been tilted. I tried to overcome this by stopping down to f45. I think this should be enough to correct. I looked at the ground glass but even with a loupe, it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on at f45. One of these days, I need to get a brighter ground glass to help alleviate this problem.
I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and send the 8×10 film off for processing. My developing supplies are still at my mom’s and I really don’t want to stop over there, especially after spending a day out in “the world.” Not the ideal way to proceed but it will work for the time being.
All in all, it was a really enjoyable day and one that I was glad to get out for. For at least a couple of hours, I was able to avoid thinking about pandemics, economies and politics and just enjoy being out and making pictures.