The swan lake
As getting up early counts to me as a very sinister kind of self-torture, series like this one are pretty rare for me. However, the specific quality of the morning light seems to outweigh such ordeal. I have to admit that I simply love the softness and colors it creates in the photographs. The Sun together with morning mist give the pictures additional “production value” which cannot be obtained on any other time of the day.
This time I headed to the Velký Tisý pond, which is surrounded by beautiful landscape with old oak trees, reeds, meadows, smaller ponds and marshes. No wonder, that the whole area is protected as national nature reserve. I am no expert, but the whole ecosystem there seems to be so rich and thriving.
Photography-wise I have to say that I took some of the pictures above just on my phone (“Path to light” and “A piglet's butt“). As many photographers I sometimes also suffer with terminal laziness when it comes to changing lenses during photoshoot. And in a good light the phone cameras can do a pretty damn good job these days. That is why I sometimes use it to take wide angle shots, because I don’t want to take down the telephoto lens from my camera. I like to say, that I do that also to prevent missing opportunities of shooting wildlife, because the animals don’t tend to wait till I get ready my gear.
However, it doesn’t always work that way, which leads me to the biggest disappointment of the morning. If you look closely on the photo called “A piglet's butt“, you may notice young wild boar crossing the road (yes, those three or four brown pixels in the middle). As a matter of fact, there was a whole family of them with the mother being about three times as big as the boar on the picture. Why I didn’t take a photo of them? Because before they appeared, I just put away my camera with the telephoto lens just to take some landscape pics on my phone. The boars caught me by surprise and since they can be quite dangerous (especially the mothers when they think their young ones are in peril) I wasn’t feeling particularly courageous to make quick movements and grab my camera and shoot. When I finally convinced myself to pick up the camera, they were gone. But it wasn’t all for nothing. At least I learned something new about them, because I saw them cross the road straight into the pond where they swam to the nearby island. Yes, swam! I didn’t know they could do that… Too bad I could not at least take a picture of that because of all the reeds obscuring the view.
Shortly after that I found my main photography topic of the day - the marvelous family of mute swans accompanied by several Eurasian coots. When I first passed by them the water surface was still covered in thin layer of mist and they all seemed to be not very impressed by our encounter and swam immediately further away. So I decided not to bother them and just continued strolling around. That is when I found that little Eurasian nuthatch jumping on and off an old oak tree. But on my way back, when the Sun was a bit higher, the swans seemed to be more accustomed to my presence and let me spend about half an hour in their close proximity. What a lovely morning it was!
On my way back to the car I also met a bird I have never photographed or even seen before - common sandpiper. This little fellow gave me a hard time to shoot, since he never let his guard down and whenever he spotted me approaching, he just flew further away and landed somewhere else on the pond’s bank. So it took several attempts and some serious ninja sneaking skills to get close enough to take at least the picture shown above. Better than nothing, though.
