As I’m writing this we’re getting pounded by a blizzard here in southeast Minnesota. It’s hard to believe that just two days ago it was 60 degrees. I, of course, took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to grab some camera gear and go for a hike. I walked a portion of the Shooting Star Trail, which is an old railroad route that was turned into a paved recreational trail. After a short distance I entered Lake Louise State Park near Le Roy, Minnesota and spent the day hiking various trails within the park. The terrain is a mixture of woodlands and native prarie grasses and also is traversed by the picturesque Upper Iowa River as seen below.

I was also able to get a shot of a couple of Canada Geese.

I spoke in a previous post that sometimes ineresting images can be seen by looking down at your feet. This happened again when I saw, just off the side of the trail, a pattern in a frozen puddle that caught my eye.

I put the image into Photoshop, enhanced it a bit and cropped it. Then, as I’ve done with previous images, I joined mirrored copies together to make the kaleidoscope effect. The image below is what I came up with and I kind of liked it so I uploaded it to my Spoonflower shop which you can view here.

On another walk on the Shooting Star Trail a week or so ago I placed two of my beer can cameras for another attempt at solargraphy as explained in a previos post. One of them was set kind of low so I’m a little concerned that it could get buried by the blizzard we’re having today but I guess we will see. I want to leave them out for at least a month. Hopefully, the results will be interesting.