spring Archives - Sean Phillips Photography

Round Bale in Spring Color

Spring on the prairies in the Calgary region is a world of monotones. Monotonous browns and yellows that is. The fields are dull and boring and as a photographer it can be very discouraging at times. By this time of the season every year I am absolutely dying for a little splash of color in my world! While new signs of spring are appearing every day (there are lots of Canada Geese and Mallard Ducks in the fields, so the spring migration must be almost here), the bright colors of fresh new spring growth are still a long way off…

Fortunately there are still many interesting subjects to capture and I still find the agricultural objects littering the fields to be fun to shoot. There always seems to be lots of texture in the farms and the fields and there are many images within the images. And there are still lots of bales out in the fields that never got piled in the spring, and on partially cloudy days they practically glow while sitting in the fields.

Red-winged Blackbird on a Fencepost

This is another image I made way back in the spring when the Blackbirds had first returned to the prairies near Calgary. I was very excited to have them back in the area because they are very curious and even more fun to watch. They sing all the time and are never too shy to pose for the camera! I watched this one for a long time before we were both ready to move on.

Flowers in my Backyard

Although I don’t do it a lot, I really enjoy macro and close-up photography. Most of my subjects are flowers that I buy from the store, so it’s really nice when I have the real thing, live, right outside my door. Something about spring flowers in the garden just makes me feel good and I could spend hours out there making images. Of course if I spend too long then I start to feel guilty about how long the grass is, or how dirty the fence is, or that the garbage needs to go out, or…

Sing for me!

This is the first Kingbird I’ve seen this season. Although technically a songbird, their call is no substitute for a meadowlark! I’ve never heard one singing before though so this was a pretty cool encounter for me. And it’s always cool when a bird will continue to sing while it’s being watched rather than immediately flying away instead.

These are some of the later birds to show up in the Calgary area in the spring and their arrival is a pretty good sign that summer is just around corner. The main reason for their late arrival is that they overwinter in South America. That’s a long way to fly in the spring and the fall!

A Beautiful Song

I’ve been trying to find a Meadowlark that was willing to pose for me all through the spring without much success. I have actually seen a couple of the birds before now, but I hadn’t been able to make any good images. So I was very excited to find this one happily singing away on a fencepost. The sad part was that it stopped singing as soon as I got there. The song is even more beautiful than the bird!