Katy Trail at Hartsburg

I've been taking a lot of pictures lately and the Katy Trail is a great venue for taking a walk away from town -- but not too far to take up even half a day. Today I met Donna, my walking partner, at Hartsburg at 8 AM in about 33 degrees of cold Fall air. We had walked each week during the Summer but ended our walking when she went back to her school job in September.

Hartsburg is a Missouri River town and a farming community that hangs on to its quaint hominess inspite of floods and the popular annual pumpkin festival that brings thousands of people to town for one weekend.  The place is changing but very slowly. My uncle and aunt lived in Hartsburg for a while back in the 1980s and some other relatives lived there a century ago and are buried in the local cemetery.

On today's walk I ended up taking over 60 pictures. These are just a few.

We have had a very pretty Fall but we are about to lose the color as it all fades into brown.

KATY Trail - October 2011

I was so inspired by my weekend photo workshop that I decided to take an early morning walk along the KATY Trail and take some pictures and also find out more about the wild hops that are growing along the trail.   This was a Tuesday morning and not much was going on. One couple passed my on bikes and we talked briefly. A park ranger drove by and then turned around and drove back so I had to haul my camera and tripod out of the way twice for him and then a farm truck lumbered down the trail and parked by a field of soy beans.  More motor vehicle traffic than bike traffic.

Mainly just testing my camera

 

We are having such a pretty Fall this year -- probably because of all that rain we had in the Spring and early Summer.





Hops!!


A week earlier I hiked along this stretch of the trail and was amazed to see wild hops growing along the north side in the trees. The vines were so thick they looked like kudzu in some places but were also intermixed with grape vines and Morning Glories. This is between the trail and the rocky bluff and it is sort of a micro-climate...exposed to the south but protected from the north.

I took a few home and discovered that they have some respectable hop bitterness and some aroma. I guess that they escaped from a shipment heading to St. Louis breweries by train. The trains stopped running on this stretch probably 30 years ago. I can remember a derailment near Wainwright some time after we moved to Jefferson City in 1976. The hops have been growing here long enough to have established a sizeable patch that spreads 50 or 60 feet away from the trail (old KATY RR tracks) and alng the trail for several hundred feet. Hops are perennials so once established they will spread by rhizomes or by seeds.

Katy Trail, October 25th

We had our first frost last week but it warmed back up into the 80s. I took another walk along the trail this afternoon and it was a beautiful day but very windy. The wind was blowing out of the south so it was hitting the bluffs and then shooting up vertically. Two falocons were soaring on the wind currents over the face of the bluff...barely captured in the picture.

I walked a short distance up the face of the bluff to shoot a few pictures. Surprisingly there are a lot of maple trees along the bluff, possibly a product of the micro climate or a remnant of colder, ice age period vegitation.

After my last experience of falling off the cliff at Graham Cave State Park I decided not to climb too high.

Maybe, just maybe, I solved the puzzle of the hops. Not far from where the hops are growing there is a farm building. I'm not sure whyat it is used for now but it might have been a hop barn at one time.  If so, the hops just jumped over the track and escaped into the woods. Maybe there was no train transport required.

The cupola on the roof is normal for hop barns. I've never seen anything like the fillagree ornamentation along the roof ridge of the barn. There are no wires that I can see and it doesn't look like a lightening rod of any kind. Was it related to a former use of the building?  There are a couple horses in a nearby pasture but no other farm activity at present.

Photography Workshop - Fall in Missouri

Years ago I went to a photography workshop sponsored by the University of Missouri's Fine Arts Department. I decided that it was time to go on another workshop...almost everything has changed due to digital cameras replacing print film among most photographers. A two-day class was scheduled at the Shaw Nature Center and I signed up. Scott Avetta was the teacher and there were about a dozen participants.

I ended up taking over 300 pictures until my battery finally gave out. Most of the participants had much more advanced equipment than I did but I'm happy with my images and probably would not have done much better with another $1,000 of equipment. I will probably throw away 200 or more of the pictures as I go through and select the best ones.

We met at 7 AM each day and headed out to shoot our pictures for about two hours while the light was still good. Scott Avetta is an established nature photographer in St. Louis and he gave us some great advice and pre-scouted the areas where we would shoot. The light at sun rise is the best for this type of photography and the winds are usually calm.




Shaw Nature Center has a great deal of diversity in areas for shooting photos. We went to a wetlands the first day and a prairie the second day and ended up at a wildflower garden.







We did a lot of macro photography.








This was taken near the end of the second day when the sun was getting up pretty high....about 8:30

This was a fairly early picture on the first day. Normally we shot away from the sun or at 90-degrees.





This little guy was photographed several times and he never moved.  Probably too cold and wet.








We had a lot of rain in the Spring and early Summer and our Fall has been exceptionally pretty.

I didn't know some of the features on my camera and mistakenly set it for tungsten light during part of the second day which gave many of my pictures a blueish cast. Learning about the camera was very helpful on this trip.

 Lots of wildflowers and many shades of color. Asters were ranging from pink to lilac to blue.

Sumac and Virginia Creeper vines were deep red.

 Water droplets were on everything.

 White flowers were often a distraction and usually avoided in a picture but they are nice on their own.

Prairie grasses were bent over with the weight of the dew.

Virginia Creeper on an old Cedar tree near the Bascom house.

Seed pods of some sort. The difficult part of this type of photography is minimizing the background so it isn't a distraction. This was too crowded.

Wild oats in the wildflower garden. Cluttered background.

Scott was able to spend some time with each participant.




I was in such a bad mood the last few weeks and this two-day workshop really helped me to get in a better mood.