Photography — Page 6

Painted Trilliums and a Mid-Week Storm Chase

The painted trillium, trillium undulatum.

You’re looking at one of Michigan’s rarest wildflowers, the painted trillium.

With plans for a picnic in place and nothing but sunshine in the forecast for today, Lisa and I headed east with our cameras for a Michigan Nature Association preserve near Port Huron. The location is one of a handful where the painted trillium grows in this state, keeping company with the red trillium, which is also uncommon but far more widespread than its painted cousin.

Good luck finding this in the Michigan woods!

Out east in the Appalachians, the painted trillium is fairly common. But in Michigan, if you ever catch a glimpse of this plant, count yourself fortunate indeed. The images in this post are a prize, and it was a double blessing that I got to share the experience of capturing them with Lisa, who loves the outdoors as much as I do.

But enough eye candy. Turning from wildflowers to weather, Wednesday looks to be shaping up as a chase day in Illinois. It’s nice to see the action coming close to home. The question right now isn’t whether there will be a severe outbreak, but where will be the optimal chances for tornadic activity. With a strong cold front moving in, a squall line seems inevitable. But with the winds veering strongly from the surface up to 500 millibars, hodographs are nicely curved and helicities ought to be formidable. Play the warm front? Maybe. It’ll certainly be a tempting target, within easy reach of Grand Rapids. But I want to see what happens with clearing. It would be nice to see a buildup of CAPE in northern Illinois.

Wait and see is the name of the game. Right now all eyes are on the NAM and GFS. But Wednesday morning will tell. I’m crossing my fingers and toes and hoping to see signs of clearing on the satellite.

May 11, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Nature, Outdoors, Photography, Storm Chasing, Weather Tagged With: cold front, helicities, Michigan, Michigan Nature Association, Outdoors, painted trillium, red trillium, squall line, tornadic activity, trillium undulatum, warm front, Weather

Hiking at the Virginia Bluebell Plant Preserve

After over a week indoors in the throes of an ugly chest cold, it felt wonderful to finally get outside today and take a hike out at the Virginia Bluebell Plant Preserve on the Coldwater River. This location, a cooperative between Trout Unlimited and the Michigan Nature Association, is one of my favorite places. It’s got nothing to do with storm chasing or jazz saxophone, but I’m okay with that and you should be too. It can’t hurt to broaden out in this blog every now and then, and there’s nothing like a beautiful natural setting to refresh the soul.

The Virginia bluebell is rare in Michigan, but where it does grow, it tends to grow abundantly, and this preserve is a prime example. I’ll say no more, but will let the photos tell the story.

Sunlight plays on a clump of Virginia bluebells.

A bumblebee busies himself with a cluster of bluebell blossoms.

Virginia bluebells carpet an open woods at a Michigan Nature Association preserve in southeast Kent County.

The beautiful Coldwater River borders the eastern side of the preserve.

May 4, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Nature, Outdoors, Photography Tagged With: Coldwater River, Michigan, Michigan Nature Association, photos, plant preserve, Trout Unlimited, Virginia Bluebell

Winter Has Ended. Welcome to the Spring!

In a few short hours, it will be spring. To be more precise, at 7:44 a.m. Eastern Time, the vernal equinox will occur. In a moment of time, the exact center of that enormous ball of gas we call the Sun will cross Earth’s equator, and in that second, winter 2009 will die and this year’s spring will be born.

To celebrate, I thought I’d post a couple of photos. The first is of a medley of pine cones and twigs, artfully woven together by Mother Nature on a bed of needleleaf duff in a grove of evergreens. The forest floor can render some surprising and sublime collages; this one, covered by the snow until only recently, is one of the finest I’ve seen.

Pine cones turn the ground beneath an evergreen grove into a work of art at a roadside park near Ionia, Michigan.

Pine cones transform the floor of an evergreen grove into a work of art at a roadside park near Ionia, Michigan.

The following is a sunset image that I took Wednesday evening at Shaw Lake, just south of Middleville. The lake is surrounded by an incredible example of a rare wetland known as a prairie fen, inhabited by wild orchids and carnivorous plants. It’s an otherworldly place, truly beautiful, and unfortunately, also terribly abused by fishermen who have enough energy to bring in their bait containers, beer cans, and other trash, but evidently not enough muscle, brains, or strength of character to carry their empties out.

Excuse my mini-rant. The photo is of the next-to-last sunset of winter, 2009. It feels more like a sunrise in a sense, with its promise of lengthening days and the rebirth of the green months.

A plume of cirrus lights the sky at sunset at Shaw Lake in northern Barry County.

March 19, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Nature, Outdoors, Photography Tagged With: bait containers, carnivorous plants, evergreens, fishermen, forest, forest floor, Ionia Michigan, Middleville, Mother Nature, pine cones, prairie fen, Shaw Lake, snow, spring, sunset, vernal equinox, wetland, wild orchids, winter

A Beautiful Day in Michigan

IT’SSPRINGIT’SSPRINGIT’SSPRING!!!

It’s SPRIIIIIIIINNNNGGGGG!!!!!

Okay, maybe it’s not quite spring officially–still another five days before the vernal equinox–but when I see skunk cabbages blooming in the swamps, then as far as I’m concerned, spring has arrived. Everything else is just a formality.

Skunk cabbage, earliest of the Michigan wildflowers.

With its odd-looking purple cowl shielding a flower spathe within, the skunk cabbage is nothing you’d want to put in a pot on the windowsill, but it’s nevertheless one of my favorite wildflowers. It’s a quirky little plant with plenty of character, plucky enough to lead the procession of the spring wildflowers in Michigan.

I came upon the one above while hiking a wetland trail in Yankee Springs the other day. The afternoon was beautiful, a bit chilly but on the leading edge of a warming trend that will put the temperatures into the fifties by today and as high as sixty degrees by Tuesday.

On a broad, blue day filled with the promise of warmer seasons to come, even last year’s vanishing remnants were transfigured by the sun. A bough of old beech leaves hung like Japanese lanterns in a shaft of sunlight.

Old beech tree leaves catch the sun.

Of course “the kids”–my collection of carnivorous plants–are out on the deck. I removed them from the refrigerator three weeks ago to boot them out of hibernation, and they have responded with a vigorous rush of flowers and leaves. The Venus flytraps are now open for business, and the Sarracenia oreophila isn’t far behind, with an exuberant array of young traps already ten inches tall and nearing the point when they’ll pop open.

White mold wiped out most of my flytrap seedlings during the winter, but a good hundred or so have survived. It’ll be interesting to see how much they increase in size this growing season.

All that to say…YAHOO!!! It’s SPRIIINNNGGG!!! Maybe not by the calendar, not quite yet, but don’t tell that to the robins because they don’t care, and neither do I. Just take a walk in the woods and you’ll know. Spring is here at last.

March 15, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Nature, Outdoors, Photography Tagged With: carnivorous plants, Michigan, plant, Sarracenia oreophila, skunk cabbage, spring, Venus flytraps, vernal equinox, wildflowers, Yankee Springs

First Storm Chase, 2009

What a memorable way to kick off storm season 2009! Yesterday, I chased supercells in Kansas with my buddy, Bill Oosterbaan, and today we attended Tim Vasquez’s severe weather forecasting workshop in Norman, Oklahoma. I’m writing this post from a Best Western Hotel maybe a mile north of where the 1999 Moore tornado crossed I-35. All in all, not a bad past couple of days for a lad from Michigan.

Yesterday’s chase began with a visit to Picher, Oklahoma. The southern portion of this tiny town got wiped out last spring by an EF-4 tornado. Today, a year later, that desolate landscape shows scant chance of recovery. It’s a sobering place to visit.

But that’s another story for a different post. Right now, I just want to share a couple images from yesterday’s chase. The moisture was marginal, with dewpoints averaging around 55 degrees up toward the warm front north of Wichita. That’s where we headed, in search of the better helicities. A lot of folks questioned the setup, but it produced. The storm we intercepted put out four tornadoes, though those occurred before we caught up with it. We still saw some nice structure, including a nice wall cloud and a funnel. Check ’em out.

Funnel Cloud

Nice Structure!

March 8, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Band, Nature, Photography, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: dewpoints, forecasting, helicities, images, Michigan, moisture, severe weather, storm, supercells, tornado, wall cloud

Monte Montgomery Concert Tomorrow Night

Whew, I have let waaaay too much time elapse since the last time I posted an entry in this blog. Let me mollify you with a nice, bright, sunny image from this cold, early March day. The following photo is one of a number that I took out at Pickerel Lake near Grattan Township in east-central Kent County. It’s a beautiful area, and with spring rapidly rolling in, today was a great day to capture the beauty of the icy landscape while I still can.

Pickerel Lake

Cold as this day has been, there’s no question that warmer weather is moving in. By Thursday, temperatures here in the Grand Rapids area should be in the forties. But I won’t be here. I’ll be with my storm chasing buddy Bill down in Louisville, Kentucky, where he’ll be meeting with some of his clients while I do my own business on my laptop. Then from Louisville, we head out to Norman, Oklahoma, for an all-day severe weather forecasting workshop with Tim Vasquez on Sunday. I’m really looking forward to it!

On the way out there, I hope to catch some early season action. The GFS is calling for a low to be positioned in Colorado or somewhere out there, and with a little luck, we’ll see the right combination of moisture, lift, and kinematics to make life interesting somewhere between Louisville and Norman. Arkansas looks likely. We’ll see.

More immediately, and on the musical side of things, tomorrow night is the Monte Montgomery concert at the Intersection in downtown Grand Rapids. The concert got rescheduled from its original date last September due to illness, and now the time has arrived.

I’ll be playing with the Ed Englerth band as the opening act for Monte. We rehearsed last night and sounded tight, and today I took my horn to the shop and got a leak tightened down, so all in all, I feel good about playing tomorrow.

If you’re in the neighborhood, come on out to the concert. Ed’s material is strong, and if you’ve never heard Monte, prepare to be stunned. The man is a brilliant guitar player, rated one of the all-time top 50 by Guitar Player magazine. The show starts at 7:00 p.m. Admission is $10 (cheap!), and worth every penny. See my events calendar for more details.

March 2, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Jazz, Music, Nature, Outdoors, Photography, Saxophone, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: Band, blog, concert, Ed Englerth, forecasting, Grand Rapids, guitar, guitar player, horn, Intersection, Kent County, Monte Montgomery, musical, photo, Pickerel Lake, severe weather, Storm Chasing, temperatures

Sunset Photos and Sax Licks

We finally got a break in the gray skies and snows. Today’s morning sun rose into a flawless sky, and sunshine predominated all day long, along with warmer–which, at thirty-two degrees, is not to say warm, but an improvement on what we’ve had–temperatures.

I grabbed my saxophone and my camera and headed out to Grand Ledge this afternoon, and on the way out there, I grabbed my first workout in months. I haven’t been in the gym since last October, I’ve been feeling the lack of exercise, and I finally decided the time had come to get back into my workouts. So I dropped in at a modest but great little weight lifting gym out by Lake Odessa and ran through a quick, twenty-minute break-in routine. One set per movement is enough; I’ll be feeling the pain Monday when it comes time for my next bout in the gym.

Anyway…I took a number of photos out near Grand Ledge. The ones I liked best were of an old, deserted farmstead at sunset. Thought I’d share a couple with you.

Old Shed at Sundown

The Sun Sinks Lower

Afterwards, I found a place to park my car and practice my saxophone. It has been a while since I’ve spent time on my horn. I’ve been writing a book and have been singularly focused on that, and I need to exercise a little balance, tend to other things that are also important. Staying on top of my sax is right up there at the top. It felt good to limber up my fingers and run through some Charlie Parker licks.

It takes discipline to be a good jazz musician. Licks and ideas you think you own for keeps can desert you after a while if you don’t practice consistently. Fortunately, I’d only been away from my axe for a bit, not long enough to damage me. But it always feels good when I pick it back up.

January 31, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Band, Entertainment, Jazz, Music, Photography, Saxophone, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: camera, Charlie Parker, exercise, gym, horn, Jazz, photos, Saxophone, snow, sunset, writing

Lake Michigan Ice Formations

Ice Formations Along the Coastline

These past few days have been busy ones, but yesterday I took time to head out to Lake Michigan with my friend and fellow storm chaser Kurt Hulst to photograph the ice formations. They’re spectacular. If you’ve never heard of them, let alone seen them, I can assure you that you’re missing something. Ice forms all along the Great Lakes shores, but I have a hunch that the formations along the west coast of Lake Michigan are particularly scenic for the same reason that the sand dunes are: they’re a product of the prevailing winds that blow across the lake, whipping waves and spray across vast stretches to create, layer by layer, fantastic frozen sculptures of ice, sand, and snow. A more austere landscape you can’t hope to find this side of the Arctic Circle–otherworldly, almost alien in its frigid beauty.

I’m not going to write much about the ice formations here because I want to save my creative juices for my next installment on the WaterlandLiving blog this Friday. But I am going to share a few images to give you a taste of one of the upsides of winter in Michigan. And be sure to check out Kurt’s site, too; he’s a great photographer, and I’m sure he’ll have some very cool (pun totally intended) shots of his own on display.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse, Holland State Park

Kurt Out On the Ice

Crack in the Ice

Lake Ice

January 28, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Band, Life, Nature, Photography, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: Lake Michigan, Michigan, photograph, winter

Colder Than a Teacher’s Wit

For whatever reason, the above title just got hold of me, and it”s not going to let go until I do something with it. So here it is in print. Now it”s yours to deal with.

I will say that a few of the teachers I had back in my grade school days did have some pretty cold wits. Mrs. Flikkema could freeze you solid at thirty paces with a sarcastic remark. It”s hard to write a 500-word essay when your fingers are numb to the bone.

But I digress from my objective, which is not to write a lot of words, but to share more pictures from yesterday, plus a couple from today.

Qualitatively, the two days have been very similar, which is to say, just a couple notches above the point where molecules cease to move. Temperatures this cold make for very interesting pictures, and very interesting experiences taking pictures. Earlier, while snapping sunset photos out at Sessions Lake in Ionia Counta, I was distracted by a sudden, tinkling sound. My left earlobe had crystallized, broken off, and shattered into tiny pieces on the ground by my feet.

Okay, that didn”t really happen, but it could have happened. Enough on that subject. Here are some photos.

January 16, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Nature, Photography, Saxophone, Weather

Super-Cooled Outdoor Photography

Today has been brutally cold, but I returned triumphant from my photographic field trip. Something about not merely chilly, but truly marrow-freezing, weather changes the way things look outdoors.

I’ve already written a previous long post here today, and I’ve done plenty of other writing besides, so I’m not in the mood for many words. I just wanted to share with you one of the shots I took today, by way of giving you a sample. I’ll be posting more tomorrow, and you can also see a few images on the WaterlandLiving blog once Dave has got my Friday entry posted.

January 15, 2009 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Nature, Photography, Weather