Gray Areas

Raining all day on Sunday I thought I'd set the camera for black and white only, and get some practice in on the world of gray tones, since there wasn't much for color going on anyway...We transported ourselves to a wet and foggy Quabbin Resevoir for a post-lunch walk-around.



Kelly needed to feed the baby before we set out from the car, so I took a quick plunge into the woods nearby looking for stuff to shoot while she took care of business...



Right nearby us was a cool old foundation that I suppose dates back to the pre-flooding era...



...as do some of the gnarlier old trees that had fallen here and there...





By this time Kelly was done feeding baby-girl, and we got the battle stroller set up and rolling in no time.





It's a short walk past a picnic area and down to the water's edge. The reservoir levels are pretty high right now; I've been at this spot before when the water was receded far enough to expose a long wide beach of rocks. I was hoping to be able to step out farther and away from the tree cover for a mega-cool reservoir shot, but it was not to be...



We did luck out heading back up to the car though, when we came upon a family of five or six deer munching at the other side of the meadow we were on...







Kelly headed back to the car with the pea-pod while I tried to carefully inch closer and closer to the now very alert deer, who began themselves inching closer and closer to the nearby woods. I remember reading somewhere that the best way to approach wild animals is to move in a slow, zig-zag, stop and go motion, like a grazing animal would. This takes a lot of patience, at least more than I'm equipped with. So I kind of sped up the process, and soon we were both in the woods, moving, pausing, and staring at each other.



Obviously they were pretty well acclimated to human presence, because I never would have gotten this close to 'wilder' deer outside the Quabbin...



But even these guys had their boundaries, which I apparently crossed; they suddenly leaped away in unison, and disappeared like ghosts into the forest...