One day this last September, Katie and I, and Katie’s daughter and her best beau, spent the day in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone. We saw lots of wildlife, including a couple of grizzlies…….a long way off :-). The best photos I got were of elk–particularly two that I thought were going to stick their heads in the car window and bite my camera. Their facial expressions inspired this slide show.
Audubon announced the winners of their 2015 Photography Awards today. I did not win, but I now have a finer tuned appreciation of what they are looking for, so,….Next Year!
This is the photo of mine that was chosen as a semi-finalist in the “Fine Art” category–a new category for them this year:
Most of the the other images I submitted were new creations. This one I composed in 2011.
Here is a link to the Winners
You will have to scroll sideways (or down) to the fourth image to view the “Fine Art” winner. It is a Black & White of silhouetted gulls, cormorants, and terns. Very nice!
Here is a link to the Top 100 . All of them are awesomely spectacular bird photos. None of them come from the “Fine Art” category. It would be nice to see the other semi-finalists in the Fine Art category, but I can’t find a link to them.
“All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”
? Sean O’Casey 1880-1964
Voussoir Caché
In the audience
I am as cool as Sherlock Holmes
On stage, I sweat
The lights are blinding
Where are my lines?!!
……Your window was open
I looked in
drawn, moth-like, to all the possibilities
of what it is you are about
Yes, though your window was open
wontedly
I discovered only myself
looking out
An entire building abandoned
This is the second of two photo compositions I submitted for the Studio 360 Photo Remix Listener Challenge. You were supposed to incorporate one or more of the ten images they provided into a scene of your own. Here I used their pathway through the park, the crow, the marble head, the reaching hand, the derby hat from the man’s portrait, and some of their clouds (for the fog). I added some layers of my own cloud shots and my headless self running down the path.
……but I left without my……..Well, it wasn’t really mine to begin with.
I had the idea for this photograph almost a year ago, but at the time it was too cloudy. I finally got back to my Uncle’s ranch in the Sierra foothills of California for an all too brief visit a couple of weeks ago, and the sky was clear! Most of the Big Dipper was below the horizon, so it took me a while to locate the North Star–especially since I was searching the wrong part of the sky to begin with 
Seeing my initial results, I thought I had some nice shots, but not what I was going for. Next time I would need to spend a lot more time taking many more exposures to get the star trails I wanted. Then yesterday I discovered this little free program called StarStax. It proved to be the answer to my original vision. Most people go for continuous star trails, but I think the broken trails here work nicely with the blades of the windmill.
Notice the UFO (actually, an airplane) that tracked from the lower left up through the middle of the windmill. Also the one coming up from the same area and turning upward. That one is probably a plane as well, but I didn’t notice it while I was shooting…..Hmmm.
Well, I got a bit off track on the posts, bogged down in the mud, so to speak. I took a trip to California and then spent a lot of time figuring out the how and why of Pinterest (more about that later). Besides, I seem to move slower in cold weather. The above are words from a song I wrote for my mother’s memorial service a few years back.
I made a greeting card out of this with a slightly different angle on the sentiment. Click the image.
This is a shot looking across the valley from my place. My neighbors and I just triumphed in a two year battle to prevent the wetlands just below this scene from being converted to “big box retail, gas stations and convenience stores.” Well, we triumphed temporarily anyway, the issue may return — but it will still be a flood plain.
