Daily Image - May 2017 Archive

01 May Leaving the town of Ennis traveling along Hwy 287, you have miles and miles of scenic lands that snake along with the Madison River. About 45 minutes east of Ennis is located Beaver Creek and as a result of beaver activity there is a nice pond on either side of the road. It's up to interpretation as to whether the road split the pond or the ponds were created after the road was put in. There is no signage to help so you can tell the story either way. The northern side is more pure pond and the southern portion more of a marshy area. Both are beautiful although the marshy area is adulterated by several phone/power lines traversing the rear portion making photography difficult. The pond area however offers many photographic opportunities, today's submission of a nesting Sand Hill Crane included. We took this shot a couple years ago and it is the only time we've seen one of these birds nesting in this particular area although there is a large group that nest behind the condo. If you aren't paying close attention to the surrounds you would likely drive right by and not see this critter at all. I shot this at 300 mm standing right on the edge of the pond so that should give you some idea of where the bird is situated relative to the highway. From this spot on, all the way into the park, you need to be aware of animal activity starting with Big Horn Sheep about 5 miles from this location and then shortly thereafter American Bison. It's quite a treat and unlike many travelers on the road we find animal traffic jams both a real treat and wonderful photographic opportunities. Ive cropped a fair amount on needless stuff off the top, and that was it. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f / 8.

02 May 17 We are now about two months out from the annual lavender festival in Sequim, WA which we enjoy annually by visiting the day prior to its kickoff when everything is set up, the owners out and on hand to chat, and no crowds. An opportunity to learn something about the business, enjoy the fields of flowers and insects, and avoid all the traffic. Several years ago something came between the various farmers resulting in the closing of several farms and the remainder of the farms forming two different organizations fighting with each other. Prior to all this you could get a single map listing all the farms with directions to each; now you need two different maps to traverse the whole show. Silliness to the 10th degree. But if you go the day before you can just ramble around visiting as you wish with all the owners more than willing to chat with you as long as you forget the politics. We now have three favorite farms, down from the original five, but two of those closed. One of them, Jardin de Soleli had tried to create a french lavender motif but the most successful aspect of that idea is their name. None-the-less it is on our list of favorites if for no other reason than the have huge collections of poppies that adorn the lavender rows. Last year the poppies were totally spent by the time of the festival but most of the time they are right in time with the lavender so imagine purple rolls of lavender set off by areas of brilliant red poppies. It is quite lovely! Along with the flowers they have a collection of bird houses many of which have windmill-like blades attached to them. I have no idea why but the blades do make for interesting objects. Today we will look at one that I thought interesting as a drawing from an old notebook. We may see it again later in the week. I took the base image, cropped off a lot of needless generally blank sky, and then converted it to this old look. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/500 sec @ f /10.

03 May 17 For those of you who elected not to walk with me on the 6 mile Panorama Point loop this is the type of scene you missed. This image is a little interesting in that you are looking at rock, snow, and water, but the snow has the color of the rock and not white like you would expect. I have no specific explanation for the color of the snow, and it is not a question of white balance since the water looks natural, but it could be bits of rock lying on the surface. I thought the snow looked a little off when I took the shot, but my brain made it look much closer to what I thought it should (white) than it apparently was. Waterfalls like the one in this shot appear and disappear all the time in this glacier area and they can last from days to months. If you look closely you see the water seemingly flowing out of the rock and disappearing below into rock. Since they are not permanent they are not named which that just makes coming upon them all the more fun. You never fully know what you will experience on these mountain trails, and I can say I've never been disappointed by what I've experienced although some hikes have been better than others, but if you keep an open mind, you will always finds something special on every trip into these alpine regions. The is straight from the camera. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 400; 1/1600 sec @ f /11.

04 May 17 While changing oil and replacing brake pads this afternoon on the Trooper prior to our departure Monday for Yellowstone we were treated to a wonderful display of clouds that lasted for the better part of 40 minutes before dissipating and becoming a more traditional blah cloud formation. At one point in time the tire track like formation you see by the tree tops occupied most of the sky but I didn't think it as interesting a capture as the combination of clouds in this capture. The sun was trying to dry it all up and you can see a little of that in the bright area at the top near the right side. I thought about taking that out but then you would not get to see the full impact of what was occurring so I left it in the image. There is a visual stop (tree) at the bottom right that some will like and others find distracting so I left it in as well and you can crop out if you find it not to your liking. As I was watching all this take place I couldn't help but think that this is what it must be like if God had an etch-a-sketch. I took the base image and added a wee bit of contrast enhancement to bring out the texture in the clouds. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/2000 sec @ f / 9.

05 May 17 Some of you may recall that I've mentioned Far Reaches Farm nursery a time or two and for this last mailing before we depart we are going back there. While we were chatting with one of the owners last week and not knowing it, another individual came up to me and started a conversation about what I was photographing. He turned out to be the other owner. In conversation with him I learned that there were dozens of trillium many of which are not from the U.S.A. Today's submission is one such. Turns out that the name of the nursery comes from the fact that he travels all over the world looking for rare species which he brings back to his farm - thus Far Reaches - and attempts to get them to propagate. I saw one small seedling with typical white nursery stick with its name on it but also the numbers 70 - 40 - 70 - 40 on it. I curiously inquired if that was a specific potting mix and he said no, that what we had to do to get it to sprout: 2 months at 70 F, 2 months at 40F, 2 months at 70F, and 2 months at 40F. He was really pleased with it and said, "this really growing fast, we started it in 2012" -- it was less than 3 inches in height. Now that's patience!! He spent about 45 minutes showing us the private areas of the nursery and invited me to shoot anything I wanted as well as to return on any closed day and shoot unobstructed by myself. Pretty neat. We talked about trying to shoot the flowers in the crowded nursery and I suggest he use soft backgrounds on foam-board placed behind the individual flower of interest and shoot that way. He thought that was a great idea so today I sent him 300+ soft backgrounds to use in doing his photography. While we were chatting he told me about a coyote who lives nearby who likes to enter the nursery, pick out plants in pots, and take the pots out into an open field on the farm and arrange them in a semi-circle. It has occurred more than once and the coyote does nothing more with them other than the floral arrangement. Love to capture that with my camera. As a reminder, this is the final mailing until we return from Yellowstone. I brought this red trillium into the studio, shot it tight, too tight actually so I had to add a small amount of canvas to the bottom, and painted out all the background clutter with black. Other than that, it is straight from the camera. Nikon D300s; 200mm macro; Aperture Priority; ISO 200; 1/60 sec @ f /11 with fill flash to capture the rich red of the flower.

24 May 17 As you may recall in my discussion of the goals for this latest jaunt to Yellowstone, we intended to see some new sculptures by an artist we know and like whose work was, we thought, being displayed in an art walk in the town of Ennis, MT. We timed our visit to Ennis for dinner on the 3rd day out and while we had a nice dinner there, the art walk part of it turned out to be, to the best of what we could ascertain from the locals, only an annual timed event during late summer so it wasn't going to happen for us. However, our first stop on the first day of the trip, not counting the wait for the ferry, was for breakfast at the Issaquah McDonald's. We always make this our first stop as it has a very nicely decorated interior and is very convenient. This time we were pleasantly greeted by a new fountain right next to the main entrance.This piece of art is not something you would expect to see in front of a fast food establishment, but it fits right in with the interior design of the edifice and is very appropriate for the location. The fountain consists of a group of 10 salmon trying to jump over a group of rocks as if attempting to reach their spawning grounds. Not distant from this location is a salmon stream and in the fall you can watch as the fish return to their "birth" place so it is all very fitting. I believe this is the first time we've seen something like this and it was to be the first piece of new art we encountered on the trip. Nothing like what we had set out to see, but certainly the nicest piece of art I think we saw this time around. If you ever travel over I-90 heading east through Issaquah, do stop by the McDonald's there and have a look see. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. I've cropped the base image, removed a lot of guard rails surrounding the display (I guess they don't want you to fall in and drown) and straightened some perspective distortion created by the angle I had to use to get the shot while avoiding a lot of distractions in the parking lot. Then I used the Topaz plug-in Glow 2 to give it a bit of character. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; ISO 200, 1/100 sec @ f /11.

25 May 17 Driving home from church on the Sunday the day before we left, day zero so to speak, was when the trip actually began for me when I watched one of our local owls fly directly across in front of the SUV at a low level with a big squirrel in its talons. Now if I could just train it to hang out on our deck to remove a few more bird feeder robbers. That was to be the first bird of prey we saw but it certainly wasn't the last. In fact, the last one we saw was the day after we got back when a nice sized hawk landed on a chair on our front entrance, then perched on a hummingbird feeder pole before departing. In between these two local appearances we observed perhaps two dozen Bald Eagles (an event easy to do where we reside) and over 50 Ospreys perched in their nests, most of which were located on top of nesting poles, but one special one was sitting in aerie high atop a rock in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. This particular nest has been occupied by the same pair of birds for several years, and each time we see them their nest has increased in size. It is now large enough to be shared by perhaps three generations at the same time although I know that doesn't happen. It is this bird and nest I'm sharing today but the intent of the shot is not to show off the bird but rather the nest and its location. To get the bird I would have had to use a different lens which I had with me but I thought the location shot a better photo than one showcasing the bird. To the right of the shot out of view is the lower falls of the Yellowstone river whose outflow runs several hundred feet below the nesting bird. The blurred section of the image is the southern wall of the canyon with the bird and photographer on the northern wall. There is roughly a 50 foot separation between the rock on which the birds have built their nest and the rock behind them to the right. After that it is for the most part just straight down to the river below. Not recommended for your first attempt at rock climbing. Other than a small amount of contrast enhancement, this is straight from the camera. Nikon D500; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 125; 1/400 sec @ f / 8.

26 May 17 The record setting snowfall I mentioned back in February when I visited the park had many effects other than giving the animals a real challenge. One of them was providing for a very wet spring as the snow melted resulting in wonderful display of early alpine flowers. I only wish I was going back to visit in late spring/early summer to see the full effect but I'm not willing to deal with the crowds to do so. This visit we saw many wild flowers we've never before seen, and others which we see all the time. However, some of these more common flowers which we see regularly were far more abundant frequently carpeting the ground. One of my favorite alpine flowers is the Avalanche Lily and I found many, many fields of them. Most of the ones I've encountered in the Yellowstone ecosystem reside between 6,000 and 7,000 feet altitude, or at least that's where I've located them. In the past we've found them as individual plants in small groups of 3 to 6 or so. This time around we found them in groupings of hundreds. Roughly 4" in height, with an arched over blossom, they are easily missed and a bit challenging to photograph properly in the wild in their natural state. I got down prone on the ground to get this shot of an individual plant but you still can't see the face of the flower. That would necessitate either incorporating a mirror, "assisting" the plant to re-position the blossom, or bringing it into the studio to "adjust" its position to display. This is how it looks in the wild and you can imagine a field of these tiny plants showing off in the sunlight. This is a straight from the camera shot. Nikon D500; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/320 sec @ f / 8.

29 May 17 I set out Sunday afternoon to photograph one of our military centric cemeteries on our side of Puget Sound in preparation for creating the image for Decoration Day 2017. When we arrived there was a beautiful ceremony underway commemorating those who had given their lives in support of this nation. That put a bit of a crimp on what I wanted to do added to the fact that the grave markers are all flat on the ground and not vertical as is customary in purely military installations. When I got back home and tried to work up an appropriate image to recognize those who have fallen in our defense, I found that the material I had gathered was not of a quality I deemed sufficient. So I went back to a shoot I had done in 2010 at a cemetery with a dedicated section to military and harvested one of those shots for this year. As I looked at the image I thought first about what I had shared last year and how I could do better this year. As I get older I am more and more of the opinion that our country is rapidly forgetting about the what our freedom has cost not only in terms of dollars but in lives. So I took the image and faded it from bright representing now to dark representing those who have long ago paid the ultimate price and in the process have likely been forgotten. That number - of lives sacrificed - is approaching 1.4 million. That number, by itself, may not be as impressive as it should be, so I decided to list the wars by date, name, and the number lost, lest they be forgotten. I've alternated italics just to break them up. I've omitted about a dozen or so with numbers under 10. Should you like to see more, here is a link. 1775 - 1783, American Revolutionary War, 25,000 1785 - 1796; Northwest Indian War, 1,056+ 1798 - 1800, Quasi-War, 514 1801 - 1805, First Barbery War, 74 1800 - 1900, Other actions against pirates, 194+ 1807 Chesapeake-Leopold Affair, 3 1812 - 1815, War of 1812, 15,000 1813 - 1814, Nuka Hive Campaign, 5 1813 - 1814, Creek War, 875 1815, Second Barbery War, 138 1817 - 1818, First Seminole War, 47 1832, First Sumatran Expedition, 2 1832, Black Hawk War, 305 1835 - 1842, Second Seminole War, 1,535 1846 - 1848, Mexican-American War, 13,282 1847 - 1856, Cayuse War, 41 1851 - 1856, Rogue River Wars, 196 1855 - 1856, Yakima War, 34 1855 - 1858, Third Seminole War, 26 1856 - 1860, Second Opium War, 12 1858, Coeur d'Alene War, 36 1861 - 1865, Civil War, 750,000+ 1862, Dakota War of 1862, 70 - 113 1864 - 1868, Snake Indian War, 30 1865 - 1898, Indian Wars, 1866 - 1868, Red Clouds War, 126 1872 - 1877, Modoc War, 56 1875 - 1877, Great Sioux War, 314 1877, Nez Perce War, 134 1878, Bannock War, 12 1879, Ute War, 15 1887 - 1889, Samoan Crisis, 62 1890 - 1891, Ghost Dance War, 35 1898, Spanish-American War, 2,446 1898 - 1913, Philippine-American War, 4,196 1900 - 1901, Boxer Rebellion, 131 1904, Santo Domingo Affair, 1 1910, 1912 - 1925, 1927 - 1933,U.S Occupation of Nicaragua, 159 1914 - 1919, Mexican Revolution, 181 1915 - 1934, Occupation of Haiti, 148 1917 - 1918, World War 1, 116,516 1918 - 1920, North Russia Campaign, 424 1918 - 1920, American Expeditionary Force Siberia, 328 1941 - 1945, World War ll, 405,399 1950 - 1953, Korean War, 36,516 1955 - 1975, Vietnam War, 58,209 1982 - 1984, Beirut Deployment, 266 1990 - 1991, Gulf War, 294 2001 - Present, Afghanistan War, 2,356 2003 -2011, Iraq War, 4,497 It is often stated that there are no atheists in a foxhole; might that be a lesson for us all! I took the base image and overlaid it with a black to transparent gradient but that's all. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 640; 1/400 sec @ f /16.

30 May 17 Our arrival at the condo was basically routine except for one obvious distinction, all of our hard back books on the Yellowstone area had been stolen. We notified the folks who manage the condo rentals and they said they were very sorry. Not exactly the response we were expecting. In all fairness the owner offered to give me some of his collection, but this definitely wasn't the approach I felt appropriate. Oh well. So a couple of days later we paid a visit to the bookstore at Old Faithful Lodge and "restocked" the shelves with a new collection. This time we put a list of the books in the welcome binder with notice we are keeping track of them and if they come up missing the cost will be added to the rental fees. While we were in the lodge we noted the next time for the Old Faithful show and commented that she would blow while we were having lunch. That didn't occur however as the show was about 10 minutes late. It being one of those rare occasions, I had found a front row parking slot right at the far end next to the geyser seating area so as we approached the vehicle Old Faithful went off. I don't normally shoot this show but as it was happening right in front of me, I hoisted the camera and fired a series of frames. We were at the far side of the geyser in a location where it isn't usually photographed, so the view we had was a bit different than any I had shot before which made it more interesting. When we got back to the condo and I had a chance to look at what I had shot that day I noticed that with the new D500 body I could see the actual droplets of water that made up the spray. It was at that point that I decided to move over permanently to the D500. This shot is about mid-show show and with the combination that day of clouds, steam, and spray, it appears as though the geyser has reached the clouds. Zoom into 100% to see the water droplets making up the plume. This is straight from the camera. Nikon D500; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/1600 sec @ f /10.

31 May 17 Going with the same image from yesterday for today, but this time in B&W. I'm rather certain there isn't a single individual on these lists who isn't familiar with the work of Ansel Adams, and even if you couldn't identify one of his images, you could the name. Ansel was famous for his dramatic images, created primarily by a strong contrast look which he achieved through manipulation of both the negative in the developing and the print in the printing. While he taught his method to several individuals, and in particular his lab assistant, no one has yet to fully mimic his results. His approach has been nicknamed the Ansel Effect and there are many tiny programs available for use as plug-ins or scripts attempting to achieve his results. Some actually come rather close, but none have ever fully achieved what he did during the manipulation of both his film and his prints. Even with the help of two of his books, The Negative and The Print, we are all still wondering exactly what it was he did to get his results. At its simplest, the "Ansel Effect" is really nothing more than heavy contrast manipulation, but like Grandma's recipes, simple as they may seem, one never quite gets her results. Yesterday's image seemed to me to be a good candidate for trying to achieve the Ansel Effect and while I had fun trying to get there, the final result isn't quite the same as what Ansel would have achieved. Still, it is a good step towards getting there so I thought I'd share this one. This B&W version should elicit a stronger emotional response than did the color version of yesterday; or at least I hope it does. The base image this time received serious manipulation to get the end result. I primarily employed a series of curve and levels adjustments masking out portions of the image I didn't want effected. I also added some contrast enhancement to the clouds to give them greater impact. Nikon D500; 18 - 200; Aperture priority; ISO 200; 1/1600 sec @ f /10.