Ah, Spring! New life! New love! New possibilities! So many songs and poems and stories and paintings have been created based on the promise of renewal that spring brings. And rightly so! The snow and ice (though beautiful in their own right) are melting away to make room for buds and shoots and sprouts and all things green and growing. We get to plant fresh gardens and watch them grow, kind of like having emergency towing companies in Norfolk VA haul away the old to make room for the new. We get to watch flowers open their petals, tentatively, for the first time, and maybe, if we’re very lucky, we’ll have a little family of birds or rabbits in our yard, who will allow us to watch them grow up.

And what better things to take pictures of than little birdlings! Of course, you can’t get too close. Mama bird wouldn’t like that very much, I think. Even if you can’t get close to the birds themselves, though, with any luck, maybe a few eggshells will fall out of the nest when the birds are hatching. Some of those little eggs, especially from robins,  make for absolutely beautiful pictures, pictures that can really capture the promise of new life that spring brings to us. What’s more spring-like than evidence of birth?

And the same vein, pictures of budding branches are some of my absolute favourites. Bonus points if you can get water from recently-melted snow or ice dripping off the branch! Or even better, some snow still clinging on. And I know you may be thinking that kind of picture exists all over the Internet, it’s been taken before, blah blah, and yes, you’re right. It’s the same as the summer sunset issue that we faced in the other post. So, I give you the same advice. Make it your own! Don’t just take a picture of any branch, take a picture of a branch outside your house, so that it features in the background.

Or have one of your friends hold it, or be peeking out from behind it, so that you can not only have a beautiful, spring-themed photograph, but you can have a very personalized beautiful spring-themed photograph. And you can pretty much guarantee that there isn’t a duplicate out there. If there is, depending on what you decided to have in the background, that might be a little unsettling. Maybe you should look into that further. Just a casual thought. Don’t read too much into it.

Finally, one more of my favourite things about spring is melting brooks. I know, what? But hear me out. You know, when you’re walking down a forest path in the spring, for me, at least, one of first tell tale signs that winter is melting away is that I can hear the running water of little streams trickling somewhere in the forest. If you’re lucky, they might just cross your path. Snap a picture of those streams; usually, the contrast in those pictures is so beautiful. There’s still some snow, likely, perhaps still even some ice hanging on at the banks, or still formed on top of the running water. And then there’s sloshy mud, a sure sign of winter’s departure. The best, though, is if you can find little buds peeking up through the snow beside the stream. That’s the perfect picture.