Here we have South Creek. This location is a boat launch for people wanting to pack up their canoes and go camping on Middle Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. The weather was pretty much terrible today, but I ignored it and went out exploring. I almost drove right past this spot but caught the view out of the corner of my eye and quickly turned around to go back. I'm glad I did.
Technically, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about this shot other than I took my time to get all the details right. Also, because it was raining, I had a towel over the camera and constantly used it to wipe the lens clean. This was about the sixth version of this shot before I got one without big obvious raindrops on the lens.
This is probably the hardest I've worked for a photo in this series. It involved climbing a mountain. Okay, not a big mountain. Certainly not one that required any special gear to ascend. But still, it involved a mile long hike up a mountain with little kids. But the view was certainly worth it.
I took many other shots from the top of the mountain, some of which feature better views than this one. But this was my favorite shot because it included my family sitting back and taking in the beauty of that view. That gives it a lot more emotional resonance for me. Maybe not for you, because you don't know these people, but for me it makes it a lot better.
I used one of my favorite photographic techniques for this shot. I adjust the camera for the sky primarily and then used the flash to light up the people in the foreground. Usually if you adjust for the sky, anything in the foreground becomes a silhouette. But using the flash corrects for that, usually resulting in a pretty dramatic image.
This fun fellow is a huge fan favorite at The Wild Center in Tupper Lake, NY. Those rocks at his (her?) feet are his toys, which he will bat about like a cat chasing a bit of string. Otters are great fun to watch. They rarely sit still and when they get in the water, they are incredibly nimble and acrobatic. No exaggeration, I could watch otters play for hours on end.
It rained all day. And then it rained all night. But then I saw some flashes of lightning out the window so I quickly got out on the porch and set up the camera to take some long exposures, hoping to capture lightning on film (memory card?). There was no further lightning, so that was a bust. But that's not to say the results were bad. Quite the opposite really. Much to my surprise, since it looked pitch black to my eye, was this eye popping lake view. And I mean eye popping. What I've posted here has actually been tweaked on the computer to tone down the color of the grass. It was actually bordering on garish before that.
Parasailers, landing on their towboat.
This was taken a little after the sun came up. I always love the way the light at that time of day filters through the trees but I've always struggled to capture it properly with the camera. This is one of my best attempts. The detail is still preserved in the one leaf but I was able to get the feeling of that golden light washing over them.
Maggie has had enough of my pointing the camera at her. Here she shares her opinion of my hobby. It clearly interferes with my more important duties in life, like feeding her, petting her, making a lap for her to sit in and changing the water in her dish about every 15 minutes for maximum freshness.
Today was a rough one for the photo blog. I had plans for a trip to Albany to watch Giants training camp. But they fell through when my son woke up with a high fever. So I stayed home and tended to him all day, which rather severely limits to picture taking. Naturally I turned to the more obvious targets in the house, the cat and dog.
Maggie is very tough to take a decent picture of. First off, her coloring makes her blend in with pretty much any background and it also tends to obscure her features. On top of that, she's a very affectionate cat and so if I get down on the floor to take her picture, she promptly gets up and comes to see me.
The look she's giving me in this picture really comes from having chased me back and forth across the living room several times as I kept trying to get some distance to take a shot. And since it was in the living room, the light was terrible. Which means I shot at very high ISO, causing a lot of noise in the image. I tried to turn that into a plus by converting to this harsh black and white. That had the effect of making her look even more annoyed with me, so it all worked out.
Some sort of dried out plant. Possibly queen anne's lace. I don't know. Anyway, what made me take the picture wasn't so much the plant as the ability to create layers of patterns. On top is the dried out wrinkly bulb thingies. Then there is the tripod shapes of the plant's structure. Then there is the rusty fence. And finally, the green plants in the deep background. Taken all together, I found it pleasing. Hopefully you do as well.
This little fellow was crawling around on my grill. A little research tells me that it is the caterpillar of the hickory tussock moth. And while it is certifiably adorable, it's also poisonous. Not deadly, but for a lot of people, handling one will cause a painful rash. So if you spot one, the smart move is look but don't touch.
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