Dragonfly posing

Blue sky, and then...

Today was a day when the weather wizard got the better of me.

I rolled out on my bike under blue skies studded with white clouds. But - uh oh! what's that dark gray spot? The forecast called for thunderstorms in the afternoon, it was still morning, and most of the sky was inviting. So - I chose to ignore the gray patch. As you'll soon see, that wasn't a very good idea.

Pedals turning, wheels rolling, I was a short 2 miles from home when I started feeling raindrops. Rain, light rain, getting heavier, heavier...

I stopped, waited for traffic to clear, then turned toward home. That was apparently a signal to the weather wizard, and water stopped falling from the sky. What to do, what to do? I was damp but not totally soaked. The temperature was quite warm, so I decided to turn around again and continue my loop.

It stayed dry for a bit. Then the rain started. It wasn't too heavy. It was still OK for riding, but I cut may planned loop a bit short and headed towards home - just in case. Closer, closer, closer still... the rain started to get heavier. Oh! The skies have opened up. Waves of rain, harder, harder. It was getting difficult to see, but I was within a quarter of a mile of home. I pushed on.

Home again...

Do you want to know how much water there was? I took my cycling shoes off to find a puddle inside!

Birds? Hiding!

I headed out seeking birds, but the birds apparently didn't want to play today. They were hiding in the trees, chirping, singing, not making it easy to capture them with my camera.

There were other living creatures who were happy to pose though...

Sparkling moving water

Sunshine drew me outside this morning, two wheels rolling, no destination in mind... The sight of flowing water in a park in the center of Lawrence called out to me, a fascination with flowing water made me stop.

Did you know that Robert Frost lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts when he was young? This wonderful fountain, perhaps a form of poetry in water, wears his name.

Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope, a continually shifting pattern of shapes and colors...

Life is a sort of a kaleidoscope, isn't it? It occurred to me recently that my photo galleries are another sort of kaleidoscope, ever changing. While I know where I stashed the latest photos, I suspect that the people who wander there may not know where to go to find the latest additions.

I've added a new page, accessible via the Kaleidoscope menu entry, that is intended to highlight new and changing galleries. There are also links from that page to "maps" of my cycling and hiking trips.

I plan to update this page on a regular basis. Galleries that are highlighted on this page are each represented by a single (changing) photo. Clicking on the photo will take you to the gallery.

Enjoy! And I'm sure you'll let me know if you see room for improvement, won't you?

Do you want to pose for me?

One more toy jumped into my camera bag this week, a Kenko 1.5x Tele-converter, for use with my new telephoto zoom lens. Adding the teleconverter to my 70-300mm lens gives me a one and a half times boost, allowing me to get closer to the wonderful creatures I encounter without stepping closer and invading their territory.

I headed out seeking birds, and hoping to capture some of those fast moving chipmunks and red squirrels too. I could hear the birds, but most chose to stay hidden. Most, but not the bird posing below, who was scampering across a field, shrieking, following its partner, scurrying. At first I didn't know who this was, but it didn't stay a mystery for too long. (An email from Stephen from Australia pointed me in the right direction, to the plovers page of a bird book.) It appears that my mystery bird is a Killdeer. Here's the description from my bird book:

KILLDEER

The common noisy breeding plover of the farm country. Note the two black breastbands.

Voice: Noisy; a loud insistent kill-deeah, repeated; a plaintive dee-ee (rising). Also a low trill

No chipmunks, no squirrels, but the rabbits were happy to pose. Fun!

I'm having a great time playing with my camera. I hope that the wonder of capturing beautiful but fleeting moments never goes away.

Blue?

...blue, blue, is my world blue?

As I look at things with my eyes, my world sports what I would consider to be normal colors. But as my camera has been viewing things over the past couple of weeks, the world wears a tint of blue. Is that because I've been playing with a new lens on my camera? But the hues in the pictures I shot last Friday were consistent - and I used two different lenses. So it's definitely not the lens.

Ah, it must be the camera. I looked for hints of what would cause a blue tint to photos, and oops! it was a camera setting that some silly photographer (yes, me!) left on my camera. The white balance setting was totally wrong. I thought maybe I had the white balance set for a sunny day and I was shooting under cover of clouds, or on a sunny day in the shade of trees. That was close, but the setting was actually worse than that. Somehow, someday, I had apparently set the white balance to custom. Now that's a really bad choice if the meaning of custom isn't also indicated to the camera - and the day I inadvertantly set white balance to custom had totally different lighting conditions than my "camera days" over the past two weeks. I rode my bike to work today so exercise after I returned home was somewhat over the top. But - I needed to verify that my guess was right, so as soon as my bike and I rolled home, I grabbed a quick snack, my camera, and my walking shoes and headed out to play.

The answer? Yes, it absolutely was my brain-cramped white balance setting that was causing the blue tint. New photos carried reality in them, and I spent the evening fixing the photos that I'd taken over the past two weeks.

The good thing about this exercise is that I think (I hope) it will be a very long time before I forget to adjust the white balance on the camera again. And yes, I am smiling; it's absolutely silly to get upset about something like this.

Many thanks to Stephen from Australia who shook me into action via a question in an email. I was already thinking my recent photos were too blue, just hadn't taken the step to figure out why. Stephen's email gave me the motivation I needed to solve the puzzle.

Robin satisfied

This robin was so happy with his (her?) prowess at catching worms that he decided he had time to pose for me!

Beauty in wildflowers

From a new still-opening black-eyed susan to the edges of Queen Anne's lace, beauty in wildflowers...

Yellow bird flying

I had to look twice as I cycled past a patch of bright yellow flowers this afternoon. There were birds perched among the flowers, several bright yellow goldfinches. That beautiful sight was captured in my mind only; I was wandering with my baby camera, and the only hope to capture an image of those beautiful yellow birds would have been with my SLR with the long lens. It still would have been a long shot.

I stopped my bike and stood there watching for a few minutes. As soon as I took one slow step towards the flowers, the birds flew away.

The memory will need to satisfy me for now.