Autumnal bracken

click photo to enlarge
A warm, sunny autumn morning suggested a walk in the woods at Woodhall Spa. This location and time of year makes for a pleasant meander down the lanes, tracks and roads, surrounded as they are by an area of lowland heath. Yellowing silver birches and oaks, fly agaric and shaggy inkcap toadstools, and spiders' webs dripping with dew are all likely subjects to find at this time of year. However, I had a feeling we were three or four weeks early for the full-blown sights of autumn. And so it proved.

But, in places the bracken was turning from green to brown with hints of red, orange and purple, and I came upon this patch illuminated by a shaft of sunlight that was penetrating the still thick leaf canopy above.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Bracken, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire
Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 28.5mm (77mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:250
Exposure Compensation: -0.7EV

Photographic drought

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Most of the photographs I post on this blog are reasonably current; they appear rarely more than ten days to a fortnight since I took the shot. Sometimes, however, I break this self-imposed rule and post a photograph that may have been taken a month or two earlier, or sometimes six months to a year earlier. The circumstances that lead to this departure from usual practice are two-fold. Firstly, I sometimes decide that a photograph I overlooked is one I should have used. And secondly there are times when my life is so busy that I run out of new photographs - or rather, new photographs that I think suitable fro posting. Today's shot is one of the latter group.

It's a photograph I like, and had I not posted one quite similar last year, I'd have posted it around 27th October when I secured it. So, today it's here because I have little else to offer. My previous effort was posted later in the year so the silver birches have fewer leaves than those above and there is no green bracken to be seen (there are few such fronds in the shot above). So, to appease anyone who craves novelty above an attempt to produce a better shot of the same subject, today's image is bigger (1000 pixels across) rather than my usual 700 pixels. The size we view images is really important in our appreciation of them. Landscapes, in particular, benefit from bigger sizes. I'd love to post all my images on a larger scale but they just get used and mis-used without acknowledgement or permission when I do, so today's will be one of the few that get this treatment.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 45mm (67mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/180 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Bracken and silver birches

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The other day, while walking in the vicinity of Woodhall Spa, we passed Highall Wood. Not unusually for woodland in that area of Lincolnshire the two dominant species were bracken and silver birch. I stopped to take a photograph of the pale, flecked trunks of the slender trees rising out of the blanket of brown bracken, plants that only a couple of months ago would have been a sea of green. A few pale, yellow leaves still clung to the thin branches of the trees, though as I write this, a couple of days later, I suspect the recent stronger gusts have brought even those stragglers down.

As I child in the Yorkshire Dales I loved bracken and played in it on the hillsides. We liked the way the individual fronds uncurled and the fact that it grew taller than children making it ideal for hide and seek. But, ever since I discovered that the plant has carcinogenic properties I've viewed it in a different light. Apparently the relatively high incidence of stomach and oesophagal cancers in Japan and Korea may be connected to a liking by those countries for the plant as a foodstuff. When I read this I wondered if I needed to be concerned by the plants' air-borne spores too. I'm not aware that bracken has ever been eaten by people in Britain, but I do know it was used here for thatching cottage roofs, as bedding for humans and animals, as fuel for the fire and as a floor covering. Today it is generally seen as an invasive pest that takes over pasture, something to be controlled and eradicated. In the wood above it appears to be growing wherever it likes. As I walked on I wondered whether the way in which it carpeted the woodland floor led to its roots reducing the already short lives (in tree terms) of the silver birches.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17.8mm (48mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/100 sec
ISO:125
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Micro and macro

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Do children ask their parents for microscopes these days? At one time in my life it was all I wanted. Perhaps if I were a child today it would be a games console or a replica soccer kit that I craved. But I like to think not! My desire to see the world that only a microscope can reveal was stirred by school biology lessons. The cellular structure of a plant, the teeming life of pond water, and the delicate framework of an insect's wing were unimaginable discoveries, and I wanted to know more.

When a microscope did come my way it was a small, inexpensive model, made mainly of plastic, with a relatively low magnification, probably a maximum of about 50X. But, despite being less impressive looking than those at school, it served me well. And though I longed for higher magnification, I appreciated my good fortune. I realise now that what I had was much more usable. Whether my parents appreciated the way the potted geranium decreased in size as I used a razor blade to take sections of its stem to view the cell structure, I don't know! But, I turned its gaze on anything and everything, and marvelled at the beauty that is beyond our casual gaze. The camera's macro lens doesn't take us quite into the microscopic world, but it does reveal the interest that lays within our wider field of view, and that is, for me, its main attraction.

I remember being told at school about the distinctiveness of of ferns, and looked through my microscope at the spores on the underside of the plentiful Yorkshire Dales bracken . This plant is a known carcinogen, often being implicated in the deaths of farm animals, and responsible for the relatively high incidence of stomach cancer in Japan and Korea where the young stems are eaten as a vegetable. My image of a winter-brown bracken frond from my garden was taken against the light of a window to reveal the detail of the interesting leaves.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f18
Shutter Speed: 0.5
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7EV
Image Stabilisation: Off