Trillium Time

It is trillium time once again; our provincial flower is blooming with abandon: that is if you know where to look. I have learned to look along the shadowy, forested edges of some of our rural roads. The spot that I have returned to for several years is not a great spot, and I will go elsewhere next year,  should I want to photograph trilliums again. In truth my best trillium photos were taken years ago at another spot. Maybe I should have quit while I was ahead.

However, I found myself back to this recent spot yet again regardless and I also found myself regretting my choice almost immediately. The trilliums are some distance off the road, and I can only get to them with a telephoto lens, which is not ideal. On the east side of the dirt road, it is scrubby and the flowers lie in a dip. On the west side of the road the vegetation is closer to forest, and the ground slopes upward over there. 

Here ↓ I look down on a patch down the eastern dip. These flowers are perhaps 15' away. I took a photo just to show you the mass of blooms in just part of the whole patch and also how it would be difficult to get close to them down the slope and through the bramble, even an able-bodied person.

So, I look for individual blooms that I can pick out from the crowd. This ↓ one was about 8' away from the road and also several feet down the incline. I zoomed in a lot but still had to crop in to isolate on this flower. Even though it was my first time out this season, the flowers have already peaked, but they are still in pretty good shape.

On the western side of the road, I found some flowers way in the background near a tree trunk. They were back a long way, maybe 20', but I took the photo as best I could. The blotchy area to the top left is just a leaf that was close to the lens and, therefore, out of focus. I don't mind it for an internet image, but I sure wouldn't print it. Still, I like it well enough.

So that's my trillium outing for 2024. To repeat: I will  not return to this patch again; the conditions are too difficult, and I don't get the very best photos, although with much editing these two photos turned out not too badly.

Nevertheless, it was an outing that has become a tradition for me in the last decade or more, and I am glad that I made the effort  

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After finishing the post, I had a thought and wondered if AI could substitute over that bright patch. Here is what it did.

I think it is a pretty impressive outcome. As much as I might have tried to fix it by conventional methods, I don’t think that I could have come remotely close to doing this well. In point of fact, I would not have tried.