Holiday. Now. I have been sooo tired lately, chronic tiredness that no amount of sleep or coffee can cure. My brain is tired, my body is tired, I even fell asleep on the bus. And I never sleep on the bus (or train or airplane or anything that moves, for that matter). For the past weeks all I’ve been wanting to do is to scream ”I don’t care” to everyone who comes asking for anything. I didn’t quite scream, but I think my colleagues heard me say it a few times or many. That week’s holiday I had in May, it didn’t even make a dent. But now I have three weeks (and one day)!

I kicked off my holiday by searching for bog orchids. The book said that they are plentiful on this marsh, so I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to find them. As it turned out, it was. I didn’t find any. Plentiful? That’s just mean. I wasn’t seeing any orchids at all, just a few early coralroot in a forest next to the marsh and nothing else. Until this white thing poked out from the grass. The first white early marsh orchid (Dactylorhiza incarnata) I’ve ever seen! My disappointment at missing out on the bog orchids was immediately swept away. I had a look around but this was the only orchid I could see. A bit later I came across a normal coloured early marsh orchid, and then a bud of the same, but that’s really all I could find.

In the image, I experimented with the foreground. Instead of weeding out everything, I left some grass between the lens and the flower that created a texture around the orchid. I figured it works ok as long as nothing stands out, but I’m not entirely sure if I like it or not.