Scattered Thoughts . . .

The other night went scrolling through an old hard drive of image files.  I came across a folder of bird photos from when I was testing my new little Sony a6000 camera three or four years ago.  I scrolled through the entire folder before realizing it was difficult to choose just one photo so I simply went back to the first photo in the folder.  There are a few things to point out about this particular photo: 1.  Song birds...  in this case, a Dark Eyed Junko...  flit around quickly, unexpectedly jumping from branch to branch so they are difficult to capture even when seemingly statically perched on a branch.  These birds are never static even if they appear that way in a still photo. 2.  Getting a camera to focus on something jumping around quickly and taking flight unexpectedly every couple of seconds is difficult enough but having to focus on this bird when it is hiding behind twigs, leaves and branches is even more difficult.  The camera often will focus only on the neare

Actually, this month's Pink Moon isn't named as such because it appears pink.  It is named the Pink Moon for the April blooming of the Ground Phlox which is a pink flower.  Anyway, tonight's moon was quite colorless from our neck of the woods as it rose over the Worcester Range.  It was, however, quite large.  I think this is the full moon that is closest to Earth for this calendar year, if I remember correctly, which would make it a so-called supermoon.   I shot this photo through our opened living room window.  Convenient, huh?  Since it was a last second decision to shoot this full moon, I didn't quite get all my camera settings set correctly.  Within a couple of minutes, the moon was moving behind some utility lines and then trees.  This image will have to do... For those interested in the technical aspects of this image...  I shot this with my little Sony a6000 camera body and my Canon L 400mm f5.6 lens mounted on a tripod.  I shot it at f8, ISO 100, with a

The other night, I went looking through old hard drives where I store old photos to look for something.  Instead, I was distracted as I came across a different photo that I found interesting.   I usually try to capture at least part of the eyes in my people photos because that is where emotion and the soul is typically found.  On rare occasions, however, a different approach may work.   In this particular photo, Lukey and Kenzie are turned away from me with their backs to me...  no faces, no eyes.  The photo still manages to tell a story and capture some feeling...  a feeling that they were cold...  huddled up close to the wood stove trying to get warm...  dressed in a way you typically only see kids under five years old...  in their underwear and shirts after a day in the water and on the beach...  the fire was just starting so there still were no open flames... their hands out in front of them feeling the little bit of warmth...   I can't believe it but I actually vividly r

Sheila and I are still quarantined at home as Sheila continues to work from home and the numbers of people infected around us multiplies.   Even before this virus, we very rarely wandered from the house for social things anyway so this new quarantine and 'shelter in place' order hasn't changed our daily life much at all.  By early to mid-January, it became abundantly clear to us that the virus was gaining a foothold in the US so we immediately stopped visiting restaurants, canceled all future travel plans for the foreseeable future and began cutting out our weekly shopping trips.  (This is when the Federal government should have began a serious attempt at containing and minimizing the effects of this virus.  We knew it was coming at this point so we immediately changed our behavior...   the White House, well, this White House only helps the wealthy so it would have been silly for anyone to seriously believe they would come up with an effective plan to minimize and contain

I'm still see-sawing between halfway decent health and rather crappy health.  It seems that this has become my typical winter routine.  I seem to get through Christmas feeling "okay" but then I develop the flu or a cold by New Year's Eve and it lingers until Spring.  This year has been just like that as I continue to oscillate between mediocre health (occasionally) and rather miserable health (usually) which borders mostly on the miserable end of the spectrum.   I think the most difficult thing about this long-term, lingering 'cold' is that even on the few short-lived relatively good days, I am ready to head back to bed by 9am.  The fatigue I am experiencing is absolutely brutal.  The next thing worth mentioning is bone and joint pain as well as a general malaise.  The pain is brutal too but this is a common complaint throughout the year anyway.  Experiencing this pain when feeling lousy in other ways, however, takes a bit more out of you than usual. Anywa

I suppose the title of this blog entry could lead people to believe I am referring to the weather but, unfortunately, I am referring to my health.   The weather is indeed still unseasonably warm with rain, sleet and ridiculously heavy snow like we are living in a coastal area hundreds of miles south of here so saying that the cold has returned would be appropriate if a normal northern mountain winter climate ever returns.  In this case, however, I am referring to a cold that I have had since just after Christmas! I've been feeling halfway decently for the past week suffering only from my primary illness and some lingering remnants of this season-long cold.  My nose had mostly dried up, finally...  cough mostly gone...  no sore throat...  aches and pains were more related to my primary illness at this point.  I still had a bit of gunk running down the back of my throat but the little bit I was experiencing was hardly worth mentioning.  I had thought (and hoped) that this two-mon

As I've mentioned in previous blog entries, I've been trying to recover from two months of illness progressing from a cold, to flu, and with a stomach virus bug developing sometime in the middle of all of this nonsense.  I've also had some issues with recurring headaches and focus issues which, I assume, are due to my mild TBI from this past summer.  The headaches I've had recently were the same as the headaches I experienced from the TBI so...  it is a fairly safe assumption that these headaches were due to lingering TBI problems.  I have had, however, a couple of hours here and there of decent enough health to start working on some small, light projects. One project I keep putting aside and then going back to is restoring a folding medium format film camera I recently picked up.  I did a lot of clean up already and this antique camera looks great but it still needs some work before I can load it with some medium format film and give it a whirl.  Shortly after pur

Another little project that I've been working on little by little is making some shelves for my cameras.  Camera and lens storage has been a problem for me for quite some time.  I have some cameras that I would like to display so some open shelves seemed like a good idea.   At some point down the road, I will need to build some sort of built-in cabinet for lenses and adapters.    I decided to make some floating shelves for the living room as well as for our bedroom.   What moved this project to the front burner was having our old surround sound somehow getting toasted due to a brown-out or surge.  The old surround sound was a sound bar that I had mounted rather inconspicuously on the wall underneath the television.  It was very compact for a home theatre sound package.  This new surround sound is better than the sound bar with many more options and has five separate speakers and a large receiver so it takes up more space and can be rather conspicuous and difficult to blend i

The blog has taken a backseat to my health in recent months.  I haven't had the energy to write at all.  As a result, I am way behind in keeping this blog even slightly up to date!   I shot a bunch of photos of Kenzie the other day (over 2000 photos!) so I'll start with a new blog entry about her.   We spent some time the other day being entertained by Kenzie at her last figure skating lesson for this season.  We had watched her a few weeks ago and I really need to mention that she has improved significantly in the past few weeks.  Actually, she has improved so much in just three short weeks that it came as a bit of a pleasant shock when we watched her the other day.  Both Gee and I were quite impressed.   Kenzie had some alone time on the ice before her lesson.  The ice was clean and fresh and there were only a handful of people here at the rink during her warm-up time doing laps around the rink.  It was obvious that she was working on one thing at a time as she did her d