Today's walk in Oak Ridge, Part 2

The walk at Melton only took me 45 minutes or so, and it was around 5:45 when I got back to my car. Traffic really stinks getting from Oak ridge back to Knoxville around that time, so I packed up and headed down to the UT Arboretum. It's just down the road a couple of miles from Melton, and is usually a pretty peaceful walk. I brought the camera out with me since I had it along anyway.

I didn't think there'd be a lot going on at the Arboretum, but turns out I was wrong! Saw a groovie caterpillar right after I got out of the car, and decided to try out a macro shot or two. Probably the best one:

From Oak Ridge Walks - 2010-04-29

Unfortunately, as I was swapping the macro ring out right after that picture, I dropped my freakin' lens on the pavement. The lens seems to have escaped unharmed other than some scratches, but it was still frustrating. Being clumsy sucks sometimes.

After the caterpillar, I headed toward the trails, and stopped by the visitor center on the way. Lo and behold, they had a flower similar to the ones we couldn't identify!!

From Oak Ridge Walks - 2010-04-29

After snooping around a bit, I found a placard labeling these as American Columbine (actually it may have referred to the red ones, but close enough). That makes a lot of sense, since they look very similar to the Wild Columbine we saw out at Fall Creek Falls -

From Fall Creek Falls Wildflowers - 2010-04-17

Upon a little further research, they all seem to be species of Columbine. The purple ones, and the white ones, seem to be introduced species. Mystery solved! With that out of the way, I headed up into the woods. I got some other shots that I'll post later, including a pretty bad-ass beetle.

Near the end of the walk I spotted some inch-worms on a bench and decided to try out the macro again. I'm pretty pleased with some of the results. I really needed to de-stress some today, and I found that during my walk, it was really nice to just slow down a bit. I started looking for the random sources of noise from out in the leaves, and got to see a bunch of cool little bugs and whatnot. It was great to just be out in the woods and not really worrying about work or crap for a little while.

Here's a shot with the 18-55mm lens with no macro, fully zoomed:

From Oak Ridge Walks - 2010-04-29

And now, the macro versions of the same inch worm:

From Oak Ridge Walks - 2010-04-29

From Oak Ridge Walks - 2010-04-29

And a couple of others:

From Oak Ridge Walks - 2010-04-29

From Oak Ridge Walks - 2010-04-29

The macro work really is difficult because you get so little depth of field. I really had to work hard just to get what little parts of the bugs I did into focus.

I shot a ton of other pictures, but again, these ones stood out as pretty good without any editing having to be done. I think this weekend I'm going to look into cropping some of them, fixing the colors, etc. For some reason, a lot of the shots I take are turning out very blue when in Auto mode. If I'm in "Flower" mode, they look fine, and I think they're also pretty decent in the manual modes. Need to look into that.