More Tales from the Dust

I took so many pictures this weekend, but I am making a balance between sharing with friends and slowing down their browsers to a crawl.

As you may know, if you have been surfing the Internet a bit, adding many pictures to one web page may slow things down a bit.  So I do a happy-medium: I add a few images from day to day, and if you go directly to the page then you have a quicker load, and if you go to the main page every day it will also load quicker (some of the images will already be in your browser cache).

If you haven’t seen the other photos you can do so by clicking the following links: more photos from the desert, and a few from the marsh.

So… without further ado… Some more pictures from the desert…

I really do enjoy taking pictures.  Especially when I can take my time…

Lately, other than my few thoughts about color, I try to really just relax while taking the photos.  Just trying to practice being present while taking photos.

When taking the photo of the ground above I was capturing a little bit of was happening, this case in the environment.  Here again we have more of the tans and grays of the desert.  The extreme dry still gives way to evidence of moisture in the orange-tan growth on the rocks.  If you look deeply into this photo, you can begin to feel the dryness.  It is a even more clear when you see the images at a higher resolution.

The giant juniper in the picture above is quite a difference from the bonsai’s we saw a few months ago.  Under this giant juniper our friend showed us the evidence left by various owls on his land.  The owls go a-hunting little rodents, come to this tree, and regurgitate all of the parts of them that they were unable to digest.  We looked carefully at what they left under the tree and found these little hairballs. Much like the hairballs that you find left behind by cats, these hairballs had one difference, they had little skulls and bones all mixed in with the matted fur.

A more from the marsh…

And some of hummingbirds …

I’m getting better at catching these cute little things.

I wonder if these are different sexes of the same type of hummingbird…

Take a real close look… I bet they are.

What’s left? – The Parade

While we stayed in small town Oregon, we got to see a small town Oregon parade.   It was kind of interesting.  I’m working a bit more on taking pictures on people, especially people.  This weekend I will be headed off to another festival and it will be fun to take pictures of people.

Parades are a little different.  Unlike in scenery, people and vehicles moving can make taking photos a little bit more challenging.  Since I was taking pictures from only one perspective it makes the pictures a little more limiting.  This is even different than those photos of hummingbirds above.  Taking clear pictures showing the hummingbirds took many shots, but there is a little bit more forgiveness in natures shots I think.  Parades are a little more random.

One difference between most of the photos that I have shown on this site, there has been little or no cropping.  None of the photos I have shown from my desert travel have any cropping and are the original photo taken.   There may be some good photos of the parade, but I may be tempted to crop some to get better shots.   I’m not sure that any modern digital photographer would frown on cropping, but I dunno… maybe I’m just lazy. It certainly is easier just to scale existing images down, than scale and crop just right.

The other thing I wonder about is placing pictures of people I don’t know out there.  I certainly don’t get permission to take the photos, never mind publish them.  I’ll need to do a little research too.

I do have some really fun photos of some older women giving out wonderfully large helpings of strawberry shortcake.   I’ll see if I can find some rules about this and maybe I will publish them soon.