SoFoBoMo - Prairie Wolf Park

With SoFoBoMo coming up about two weeks away, I've picked my first subject. It will be a park a couple of miles away from me called Prairie Wolf Park. A 45 acre passive use park that was formed out of farmland, it's surrounded on most sides by still working farms, though the township hall is on the north boundary and there is a small housing development to the west.



As you can see the park is pretty much open space. It runs to the back set of trees in the above photo. Things have started to green up since this was taken, hopefully the trees will come out soon.



Not well used yet, but there are people out in the park on nice days. I expect once it gets warmer, that I will see more people in the park.

One reason I picked this park is that I've pretty much discounted areas like this in the past as not interesting enough to go out and photograph. A lot of the area near me is like this, rolling hills, broken up by trees, usually planted with corn or converted to housing developments. They seem boring from a landscape type view.

While I may not get landscape type shots, after spending some time in this park, there will be enough to photograph. There are the typical wildlife usually seen in the area, deer, small animals and birds. There is also a so called stream that looks more like a irrigation ditch, along with a wetlands area and a small pond. At the front of the park is a small orchard that hasn't been trimmed in a long time, the apple trees starting to take menacing shapes in the early morning light.

The people I've seen so far using it have primarily been walking their dog. There have been a couple of skaters using the short paved walkway as well as the lady painter shown above.

My plan so far is to spend an hour a day at the park for a good portion of May. Still fuzzy are my plans on what the final subject will be. I'm wondering if I want to focus more on the wildlife in the park, or do I want to focus on the people using it? I don't know, I'm thinking I'll probably merge both into a "day in the life" sort of thing. Or maybe do both subjects. I'll have the photographs after all.

I'm looking forward to starting this.