Spring at the Creek

In my post Month in Review:  April 2025, I mentioned my late month trip to Blanchard Springs.  Well, I finally got through the images I made that morning.

I’ve been to Blanchard Springs many times over the years, but I’ve never visited so early in the Spring.  I really don’t know what to expect, but I considered that to be a good thing.  I decided to follow my usual routine and start by walking the path along Blanchard Spring.  Afterwards, I would go over to the campground to check that area out.

When I arrived, I noticed a number of trees that had been snapped off or uprooted and remembered an EF-4 tornado had gone through the area a few weeks before.  When I discovered the campground was closed because of damage from recent flooding, I began to wonder if I had made my trip in vain.  But, I continued on.  Upon reaching the Blanchard Spring trailhead, I was happy to see my concerns were unfounded.

One of my first images was this of the walking path that winds its way through the trees covered in lush green Spring leaves.  This image is actually a focus stack of four files because I thought it was important to have everything in focus from front to back.  The path that morning really was as quiet as it seems in this photograph.

As I started to pack up my gear and continue down the path, I glanced over and noticed this group of leaves.  They looked so green and fresh with the droplets of water being a wonderful addition that I had to photograph them.  The only problem was they were on the outside of the stone wall that ran along the pathway.  I tried to use my tripod, but leaning it over the wall destabalized it.  I also couldn’t set it up on the outside of the wall because that would have disturbed the leaves.  My only option was to turn on the camera’s image stabalization feature and handhold it while leaning myself over the leaves.

I used a shutter speed of 1/15 of a second at a focal length of 120mm, and I was holding the camera no more than two feet from the leaves.  There is a little bit of softness in some of the leaves, but this is probably because of other factors, not the least of which is my limited experience with handholding a camera.  However, there is no way I could have photographed these leaves handholding my old Canon 5D Mk IV and achieved this level of focus.  Overall, I am very impressed with the image stabalization capability and will certainly use it more in the future to open up even more opportunities.

I continued walking along the path with my eye on the creek bank to see what might catch my attention.  Eventually, I made my way to the bank to check out the creek.  That’s when I noticed this decaying tree trunk with its incredible texture and moss beginning to grow on it.  I set up my camera and tripod and quickly realized I could not maintain sharpness in the entire image in a single image.  With the focus shifting feature activated, I captured 50 frames of this scene, though I ended up using only about 25 of them to create this final focus stacked image.

I finally reached the end of the path where the creek begins from a waterfall that flows from the hillside.  I stood there for a few minutes enjoying the peacefulness and quiet of the area.  As I turned to head back, I noticed the rippling of the creek’s water as it flowed over the rocks in the creekbed creating a very abstract scene.

I took several pictures of the scene; none of them impressed me when I looked at them on the camera monitor, and I was sure I would be deleting them when I got home.  But, when I reviewed them on my computer, I began to see colors and textures I hadn’t noticed before.  As I looked closer at it, I began to see what to me looked like a painter’s brush strokes on his canvas.  As it turned out, this ended up being my favorite image from the trip.

By this time, the sun had risen above the hillside, and the light was getting more contrasty.  That’s when I noticed these tree trunks silhouetted against the bright backlit leaves.

About halfway back to the trailhead, I noticed an old tree trunk that had grown on top of a rocky outcropping just above the rushing water of the creek.  Despite appearing to be dead, the tree refused to loosen its hold on either its precarious perch or this earth.

After nearly three hours, I finally made it back to my truck, loaded up my gear, and headed for home.  I have to admit that Blanchard Springs was not my first choice of places to go that morning.  Rather, it was the one area that I thought would be less affected than most of the other places I considered going.  In other words, it was a backup plan that I didn’t feel very confident would be productive.  I was wrong and happily so.