Pic(k) of the Week: Spring comes to Beaver Pond

The trees were blooming on Beaver Pond.

Clyde Shepherd Nature Preserve: DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 2 April 2025.

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As I was framing the shot, a bird photographer (aka 'birder') was standing nearby, wielding a 'bazooka-sized' lens. Unbeknownst to me, he had sidled very close.

"What did you spot?" he asked, catching me off guard. "A tree!" I replied. He smirked, saying, "There are many of those," and strolled off. Of course, that was the point.

Quam stulti isti mortales sunt. 

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Shirley Horn: A Lazy Afternoon

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Pic(k) of the Week: Woodland at Glenn Creek

Summer vestige versus autumn gamut: a woodland at the confluence of Glenn Creek with South Fork Peachtree Creek.

Ira B. Melton Park: DeKalb County , Georgia, USA. 8 November 2024.

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Pic(k) of the Week: A confluence of creeks

A confluence of creeks: where the six-mile Burnt Fork Creek (left) joins the fifteen-mile South Fork Peachtree Creek (right and foreground).

Peachtree Creek is a major stream in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It flows for 7.5 miles (12.1 km) almost due west into the Chattahoochee River. Its two major tributaries are the North Fork Peachtree Creek and the South Fork Peachtree Creek. The southern fork is 15.4 miles (24.8 km) long. The southern edge of its basin borders the Eastern Continental Divide.

— Wikipedia

Ira B. Melton Park: DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 2 July 2024.

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Seen from a rock ford in the South Fork Peachtree Creek, along the Three Creeks Trail: one in a "labyrinth of soft-surfaced trails" in and around a 120-acre suburban-Atlanta Piedmont forest.

The trail connects Ira B. Melton Park (south, to the right) to the larger Mason Mill Park (north, to the left). The third creek of the trail's name is Glenn Creek, a 2-mile creek that empties into the South Fork Peachtree Creek about 1/5 mile downstream of this image.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Arboreal chaconne

Looking for shapes (and imagined motion) in the winter woodland. An arboreal chaconne in Seminary Wood.

Legacy Park: City of Decatur, Georgia, USA. 27 December 2023.


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Pic(k) of the Week: Verboten off-piste

A trail heads off into an autumnal woodland. A trace of light kisses the canopy.

But...stay off, a sign cautions.

Nature Preserve Guide Hikes Only.
State Law 12-3-10B
Violators Prosecuted!

Why the ominous warning? The park's brochure reveals the answer:

Because of the rare species of plants that live on Panola Mountain, a guided hike is required to enter the conservation area and go on top of the mountain. While both Stone Mountain and Arabia Mountain are similar geologic features, Panola Mountain has never been quarried, making it one of the most pristine monadnocks in the southeastern United States.

So, respecting the environmental concerns (and the law!), I took this photo from the (legal) Rockdale River Trail, a paved hiker/biker trail that follows the South River for several miles in Rockdale County, Georgia (an outlying suburban and exurban county in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area).

But, oh, off-piste looked inviting!

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Pic(k) of the Week: Dead in fen

Even decaying and solitary, the dead tree can seem reborn when kissed by morning sun and mist.

Here, the headwaters of tiny Cecilia Creek meander into a marshy fen, that a wag once called Frog Bog. But, it's late autumn: the frogs are hibernating.

Legacy Park in Decatur, Georgia, USA. 20 November 2022.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Bruegel in the brewpub

While recently searching among older images, I discovered this photograph from a time not long ago (yet seeming far gone) when social distancing was not a thing.

It's a portrait of a bustling brewpub, its patrons and servers all gesturing this way and that, all enjoying the moment —some perhaps already lubricated by the in-house-brewed libations— all watched over by a large mural of a tilting beer glass, and all washed with a warm indoor tint. If you can forgive me, I think it a bit 'Pieter Bruegel goes to the city.'

I took the photo in March 2013. [See that: here.] For today, I've done a bit of touch-up: straightening the mural, adjusting shadows and brights, and cropping extranea.

In this time of coronavirus, most breweries and brewpubs have been closed to drinking on-the-premises. Some face extinction. Some are hanging on, still brewing and selling via a stretched supply chain, some are offering packaged beer takeout on-site, and some even providing home delivery.

The point of today's post is not of any particular brewpub but of the multitude of breweries and brewpubs nationwide...and a photo expressing the experiential joy they brought us, now missing.

So, please! Buy their beer. Drink their beer (not much of a hardship, there). Support them now so that they may survive later: zymur-agents of our great good places.

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