Someone Else's Photograph

The Elder Daughter and her family took a mini-vacation over the weekend.  She sent me a buch of photographs this morning, mostly of fish with various members of the family, but some of scenery.  And this one blew me away. 

It is a source of both pride and embarrassment to me that my daughters are so much better at things than I am.  Better photographers, better cooks, much better athletes, better records in university and beyond, better at home design and decoration, better dressed.  Well, sometimes.
 I guess I did something right.

So, I blinked and a whole week disappeared...

During the last week I have returned to my usual complement of meetings of the volunteer organizations I work in and, as well, I have been co-opted into a group of folk who are trying to provide tools for a civil debate in our upcoming municipal election.  Our township council has been split four to three for much of its last term and the result has been in-fighting, chaotic or no decision-making and a wild assortment of letters to the editor of our local paper.  This paper is published weekly and does not have a lot of space and so, in the interest of keeping a good thing going, I volunteered to run a 'forum' type blog for a while.

Although the group has decided not to endorse candidates openly, I am comfortable in giving advice to the people we think should win.  I have been editing letters and putting together election material, printing stickers and getting the publicity out for the blog.  Meanwhile, my camera has been sitting around, whining that no one is playing with (him, her, it?  Does anyone anthropomorphize a camera? And is is 'z' or 's'?).  Is that even a word?  By the time I finish putting a candidate's thoughts into succinct bullets, my brain is like jellied aspic.  The green kind, with marshmallows.  As we all know, marshmallows can't spell.

However, we did have another day of alternate rain and sun, and late in the afternoon the sun shone through the rain and I had a tiny rainbow in my front yard.  Alas that it did not photograph at all well.  However, the cold rain on the hot rock in the back produced lovely mist. 

041/365

I also got this.  Grasshopper floats in space.  Kind of neat, eh?

042/365

We have had a young pileated woodpecker squawking around the place for the last week or so.  It's at the stage where the parent is leading it to a food source, feeding it once and then leaving it to continue finding the food on its own. Over the weekend, the food source was the wild cherries ripening on the black cherry trees along our side yard. The youngster eats a bit, slips off the branch, yells for a bit, eats a bit more, moves to the tree trunk and tries to find a bug.    Having listened to the wretched bird yelp and squall and whine for mommy most of the day, I took my camera out onto the kitchen porch, cranked up the telephoto lens and got these results.

043/365, 044/365, 045/365, 046/365.

And if he isn't pretty, he sure is dramatic. 

Olio

I have been trying to get the photo a day thing under control and have ended up with this weird, weird mixture. 

037/365.  Summer Rain.

The object was to get the raindrops as close to in focus as possible.  ISO up as high as it would go.  Alas, the result looks more like snow.

038/365  Puddle.

Our deck railing is made from slightly cupped 2 x 6's.  I took a whole series of these and none of them worked all that well.  Hard to decide where to focus and not enough light to get an infinity focus.

039/365  Corners
I am still playing with the porch screen and light effects.  Here I like how the pine branches look through the shadowed part of the screen.  Note that the weather has improved.

040/365  September 2nd.
The first hints of fall colour in the stressed trees (water levels are high in the ponds because of a lot of rainfall).  The white stuff all over the water is seed fluff.

I am thinking that I may do a series of vegetation shots, maybe from a set point, to document the colour change this year.  I've got a pretty full calendar for September and if I take my camera with me (anyone have a way to permanently attach the camera to the dumb, forgetful photographer?) it might work out.

Love this project, I really do.  I am putting up failures as well as successes because that is what makes sense to me.