The Natural Bloomington Blog

Eye-popping nature photography wasn’t high on my list of gets during a re-exploration of Trevlac Bluffs Nature Preserve on Saturday with my granddaughter Raina. While color is at a premium in late winter, these Brown County bluffs do support some eastern hemlocks that add swatches of evergreen to the otherwise drab color spectrum. But the sun just wasn’t in a mood to show.

I had other priorities anyway, foremost among them some mid-winter exercise. I also needed some orientation, as the two times I’d been there I’d come away rather befuddled. In late July 2014, the Bottomland Trail literally disappeared in undergrowth; I could see the path but not the ground. That fall, I ended up photographing a scenic pond near the Yellowwood Trail, which turned out to be on private property.

But that’s not to say I left the old D600 at home on Saturday. I needed some more Trevlac images for the slideshow I’m preparing for my Earth Day book signing at The Venue. And, as I tell my students, you only need enough light to illuminate the scene in the digital age. As I think the images in this Photo Album show, PhotoShop magic can help.

I am once again relying on the Indiana Geological Survey (IGS) for perspective in my Northern Indiana guidebook, reusing a quote in the Southern Indiana version: “No other event since the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago can compare to the Ice Age in terms of the profound effect it had on our landscape and the natural environment in which we live today.”

That quote assumed more relevance this week as I began mapping the year’s guidebook travels. Exploring what scant little there is left of the Northern Indiana landscape encountered by French voyagers in 1670s is indeed experiencing the remnant effects of the “rivers of ice,” to cite the IGS again, which have repeatedly advanced and retreated over the Northern Indiana landscape the past 700,000 years.

When I photograph the Cedar Creek in the Dustin Nature Preserve in Huntertown, for example, that Natural, Scenic, and Recreational River's water will be following a course that was set some 13,000 years ago, when the last retreating Wisconsin Glacial ice sheets left behind a ridge of glacial debris known as the Fort Wayne Moraine.

As a journalist, my natural rhythm is to lay back at the end of the year and review the year just past. And, of course, the biggest developments in 2016 were essentially completing my equipment upgrade and signing two book contracts that will keep me committed to the woods for two more years, at least.

However, in my eyes, 2016 was the year I finally got down on Lynda.com and refined my video and audio editing skills. I've dabbled with them a bit here and there, and my students and I spend a month each semester producing short video projects. But for a number of reasons -- i.e. the hands-on is pretty tedious -- I've never really applied myself.

I doubt video will become a staple, but this year I produced three videos on the Natural Bloomington YouTube Channel -- a trail doc, a six-minute natural history slide show and, on New Years Eve, The Natural Bloomington Year in Nature Photography 2016. The natural history show was the early stage of a 20-minute show I presented at the Wylie House Museum on Oct. 20.

Awakening to sunshine on Thursday morning, I vowed to close the laptop early and hit the Beanblossom Bottoms trail that afternoon for some frigid, telephoto perspective on Winter 2016. I’d spent the past week, through the gloom, researching and writing the “Rock, Ice and Water” section of the Northern Indiana Landscape chapter for the guidebook. And honestly, I wasn’t quite sure when I’d see the solar fireball again.

The cloud cover may have lifted more than once in the three weeks since I returned from Roberts Camera in Indy with my new 80-400mm, but I’ve only shot one blue sky with it. I was past due for some solitude, exercise and silence. [I’d awakened at 5-something that morning to the impact of an accident a block away and the subsequent comings and goings of five emergency vehicles and a tow truck.]

Despite winter gloves and liners, my right-hand fingers began icing up, and I didn’t reach the second platform overlook as planned. And there’s not a lot of color or any activity in a frozen bottomland forest, aside from a distant call of a crow. But the trail was clear of any two-legged tracks, so I could make the most of the snow, ice and frozen water that is the Beanblossom Bottoms Nature Preserve this time of year.