Northampton Park

On Sunday morning Amy and I had planned to take a bike ride.  The weather was questionable and the temperatures were in the low 40's so we decided to check out the hiking trails in the local county park.  Roughly 3 miles north of us is Northampton Park with hiking trails and other attractions that we have never really taken advantage of so I figured it was a perfect opportunity to go take a walk in the crisp autumn air and play around with some more camera gear and accessories.  For those that have been following the blog regularly, the Super Moon posting with the farm was photographed in this park.

Trail in Northampton Park

While cleaning out some old camera bags and in particular the one I had my Nikon D100 stored in I came across a lens that I must have purchased in the early days of owning the D100 or even before then when I was still occasionally shooting film on my Nikon 8008s film camera.  This newly rediscovered lens is a Tamron 28-300 zoom lens.  It is not a DX lens which means it will cover the full frame sensor of my D750 through out this relatively large range of zoom.  I figured I would put this on my new camera, carry my new GPS tracker device to log my every move for eventual merging into the photos taken while walking the park trails.
The weather held out and we had occasional breaks in the clouds where the sun would shine and brighten the colors of the trees that were just beginning to change.  I would say the leaves was probably at 30-40% changed, if that.  We chose to hike a trail that went along a stream but the stream did not really have a lot of water in it so it did not offer much in the way of photographic subject matter.  It seems that the recent rains we had only managed to make sections of the trail extremely muddy and did nothing to raise the level of the stream.

Leaves changing on the trees from top to bottom.

We parked our vehicle in the parking lot of Springdale Farm and found the trail head for the looping trails we wanted to take.  I quickly learned one of the things I had disliked about the lens I was using. Its speed of focus is extremely slow as it does not contain an ultra sonic motor for focusing like that found in all modern Nikkor Lenses and in most modern lenses by other manufacturers as well.  This would not be an issue for the hike unless I wanted to try and capture some animals or birds at the long end of the zoom (300 mm) and I needed it to focus quickly.

Checking out the Macro capability of the Tamron lens.

The other thing I noted about this lens as we were walking is that it claimed to be macro capable.  This prompted me to stop and try it out on some wild flowers along the trail and in the fields where we walked.  Curious as to when I last used this lens and how often had I used it in the past I used the meta-data capabilities of Adobe Lightroom to search my library of >40,000 pictures and only found ~600 pictures taken with this lens.  The most recent one prior to this hike was in 2008 and was taken by Amy as we hiked Mendon ponds with my then new D300 and she used the D100 with this lens on it.

B&W conversion of the dead trees in Northampton Park.

One thing we learned about the trails in Northampton Park is that they are not well marked at all and this became an issue at times. We were not too worried about getting lost because the section of the park we were in was relatively small and surrounded by major roads (see map image).

One particular area of the hike was completely covered in fallen trees.  I tried to capture the eerie feeling we had while among the fallen trees and didn't really quite achieve the results I wanted.  Converting one of the images to black and white helped some.

Results of GPS tracking and tagging my photos.  Yellow tag is where
this week's featured photo was taken from.

Overall it was a pleasant hike and I was able to reacquaint myself with an old lens (not sure I'll use it that much going forward) and tried out my new GPS tracker (results are shown here).