Scattered Thoughts . . .

Unfortunately, the consequences of the work I accomplished on our wildflower gardens and landscaping over the weekend has caught up with me.  Saturday was a productive few hours for some much needed yardwork. I felt pretty good on Sunday... only relatively minor spinal pain... but, apparently, the inflammation in my spine was slowly building over the course of a few days because by Monday I could hardly walk and the pain was stingingly brutal. I spent Monday and Tuesday doing whatever I could to alleviate the pain and inflammation. This mean occasional stretching but mostly staying off my feet. It meant extra anti-inflammatory medications. It meant extra water intake. It meant occasional icing of my spine... and I truly hate using ice at this point! After almost two decades of struggling with spinal injuries, there are some things which really get to me and ice is one of them. It just bothers me to even think about applying ice to my spine. That being said, when the pain gets to

I shoot a lot of photographs... I mean, a lot of photographs. If I were to guess, I'd say I shoot about 10,000 photographs each year.  Many of the photos are photos of every trip we take... hundreds of photos each day while out and about on vacation or around town. I could easily shoot a couple of hundred photos at a single family event. This adds up quickly and it also means that I have a lot of photos that I've never shared with anyone. Some of these photos are not the greatest because of poor timing... poor light... missed focus... or uncooperative subjects. Some are okay but are a bit boring. Many are exceptional though. Here are two photos that I've never shared before that fall into the "I love them!" category... both from the lake...  I like the warmth of this scene... the calm waters... reflected warm colors... the sun flare... the deep shadows of early morning... the overall softness... On another day nearing sunset, while we were out kayakin

Snow lightly falling and covering my sailboat. It looks like I'll be indoors again today since it is snowing out there again. One of these days I'll be able to pull my tools outside to get some carpentry done! I also need to get the sailboat and kayaks ready for our journey to the lake house in a few weeks. Today, since it is cold and snowy, I'll be looking for things to keep me occupied indoors... which should be easy...  My desktop computer started whistling again late last night and fixing this is a project I've been putting off for about six months. The whistling comes and goes and gets annoyingly loud. In fact, it gets so loud that it is even tough to hide the whistling by playing music.  I'm fairly sure I've isolated the problem to my power supply. My plan is to order a power supply this morning... and, while I'm ordering parts needed for my computer, I'll also order a graphics processing unit.  I'm taking a course in videography

After turning over the ground in the front flowerbed... I had a good day of health yesterday and it was beautiful outside so we spent the day out in the yard doing our first day of landscaping for this year.  As I've written many times before, it is a rarity when my health cooperates with the weather... good health coinciding with good weather... so, after two weeks of pretty lousy health, it felt awesome to be doing something physical and being productive for a change! We cleaned up the flowerbeds... I turned the ground over... weeded out clumps of weeds... raked... weeded again... leveled... added wildflower seeds... lightly raked again to cover most of the seeds... while Sheila pulled weeds and rearranged plantings in another flowerbed.  One of the flowerbeds, weeded and seeded... I got the weedwhacker running and knocked down some of the longer grass where the mower can't access... I also got the lawnmower running and cut the lawn.  The yard is looking much

...other than sharing very similar palettes. I shot each of these three photos a number of years ago. Two of them were actually shot with very old point-and-shoot cameras before I started buying used (but better quality) digital SLR cameras. I can see the flaws with these photos but I'm a perfectionist and most people probably can't see them. I thought these old photos were worth revisiting. I've never had any of these three photos printed but I think the first photo (the colorful springtime image) would make a nice print.   I shot the spring photo while out on a walk about five years ago almost to the day... it was May 6th, 2011... I can tell you it doesn't look anything like this out there this May! The lack of a normal winter and having continuous unseasonably warm weather has taken its toll, I do believe. I definitely prefer the bright, sometimes pastely colors of springtime over autumn foliage and this photo is a good example of springtime color...  Th

So, while I am still recovering from another week or two of lousy health, I'm revisiting photos of events, vacations and wildlife I've shot. Since the lake is now on our minds, this blog entry includes photos I like from our times at the lake.  I have this first photo in two versions... I shot it in landscape orientation (picture frame in horizontal position) but also took a shot in portrait orientation (framed in the vertical position). I will sometimes take a shot of a subject both ways so that I have the option of displaying it on a wall either way depending upon the circumstances. Truth be told, I actually prefer the landscape version of this photo but I'm on a search for photos in the portrait orientation to hang in our living room. (I occasionally rotate photos through our frames on our walls and I have three frames to fill which are in portrait orientation.)  This was one of those "last night at the lake" times... it was our last paddle around the lak

The other night while sifting through old hard drives in search of nice photos, I found a photo of a duck that was...  well... not so great but it had potential. I loaded it into my editing and post-processing software... I still wasn't too optimistic that I could save the photo or make it interesting though. I shot the photo one early morning while out on my kayak... it was foggy... the duck was hiding in the dark under some brush hanging out over the shore of the lake... there was very little contrast and almost no color... but, when I zoomed in to view the duck's head, the focus was pretty good considering the amount of fog and lack of contrast and color. I had a digital negative to play with though so I wondered if I could make something of this image.  After using a few different techniques over the course of about an hour or two, I managed to find a way to produce an acceptable image. I don't have too many good photos of ducks so I was excited to have found this o