Photo of the Week

I took today's photos at Celery Bog, a wetland preserve in West Lafayette. It's a great little park with a variety of terrain. Most of the time you think of Indiana as flat and open, but there's surprising variety in this little park. Aside from the obvious wetland area, which despite the name is actually a marsh, there's wooded area (Indiana used to be mostly forested believe it or not), and a section that's been allowed to revert to prairie grasses. This is what the bog looks like right now. This is why wilderness exploration is slow!

Celery Bog in August

Most photographers that visit the site focus on waterfowl. I've seen the usual geese and ducks, plus bald eagles, osprey, assorted herons, kingfishers, woodpeckers, and a host of others, but without a long lens most bird photos turn out pretty bad. I tend to go smaller, like this little dude. Found him in a small stand of milkweed just at the edge of the marsh. Sadly he was all alone.

Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar

Finally I decided to play around with Gimp and G'MIC again, using the bog image above. This is the result of applying pencil sketch to the image above.

Sketch Mode

Images copyright Mark A. Thomas
Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0