Woodland Spring Evening

Cottonwoods and Moon, May 13, 2003
When I made this photograph (using my Nikon N-80 and a 300 mm lens), I was standing on the Lake Superior shoreline shortly after sunset in the upper peninsula (UP) of Michigan. I had spent the day photographing wildflowers, and I decided to try this moonscape for a change of pace. At that time, I was living near Lansing, Michigan, but had driven several hours north to attend a week-long Rod Plank Photography workshop that focused primarily on spring blooming woodland wildflowers. It was a wonderful trip.
It was mid-May in the UP, and spring was in its early stages. Spring beauties were beginning to bloom, as were trilliums, toothworths, trout lillies, bloodroots, and dutchman's breeches. A group of 12 photographers, each day we hiked back into the forests to find wildflowers that had been mostly spared the disturbance of human activities. We found thick carpets of spring beauties and large patches wild onions (also called leeks or ramps) and patches of all kinds of other wonderful plants.
There is such thing as "love at first sight." I fell in love with that forest the first day. Even sitting here today, I can close my eyes and recall vividly certain familiar patches of that wonderful northern forest. I can see the colorful forest floor, speckeled with pink, white, yellow, and green. I can hear the woodpeckers hammering, and songbirds singing. I can feel the cool wind on my face as the bare branches of trees overhead sway and collide in the breeze.
After a fantastic and somewhat exhausting week of photography, I headed home with a couple dozen rolls of slide film waiting to be processed and eventually scanned. And as I drove south along route 75, it was like driving ahead--fast forward--through time. The leaves on the trees started off bare in the UP, but became increasingly more and more leafy as I headed south toward Lansing. By the time I got home, the forest floor was almost completely in shade. Instead of finding spring beauty and its early companions, I found columbine, Solomon's seal, and wild geranium--some of the later blooming, and more shade tolerant wildflowers.