You might have noticed that mom is still missing. I’m kind of worried, even though daddy said it was all going to be just fine. But I’m also a bit miffed, cause mom has more beautiful pictures of me and she hasn’t posted them! So I guess I’ll have to do it myself.
Katie warned me there would be days like this.
So without further ado, here are the images from our second 4 season photo shoots! I think you will agree I am simply stunning.
Ahem.
November of 2023, where it all began:
Winter of 2024:
Spring of 2024:
Summer of 2024.
Fall of 2024! (My personal favorite.)
I hoped you liked my second set of 4 seasons images. Mom told me she had fun too, but NOBODY has as much fun as me!
Talk later,
Your professional model (who will be increasing her fees if she has to do all the work around here),
I’ve been down at the lake for a couple of days now, but for all you barn lovers I’ll do a short post from my second day of driving south.
I saw a promising area, with rolling hills and what seemed like a lot of barns somewhere in Kentucky off of I 65. I pulled off at the exit and turned onto what looked like a service drive to head back and look for the barns.
Even as turned I began to feel faint bits of recognition. It felt like I’d been down this road before.
Then I started thinking, ‘if the road curves sharply to the left and then goes up a hill I’ve definitely been here before.
And it did.
Even funnier is that I think this is the third time I’ve been down this road, each time on the way to Alabama, and each time enticed by beautiful barns visible from the freeway.
This year, not having a dog with me, I went further down the road and found some ‘new’ barns — structures I hadn’t seen before.
And as the sky darkened with an oncoming storm, I saw in the distance a white church spire that I had to go find. So I did.
I wandered around the cemetery a bit, and shot some barns off in the distance. Then I high tailed it back to the freeway for the rest of my trip home.
I’m going to try very very hard next time I’m driving down to Alabama not to be seduced by this road and it’s barns again. I think three times is plenty.
I’m headed for a short visit with family down in Alabama. Which means I’m driving through farm land. Lots and lots of farm land. I’m beginning to think you could throw a dart at a map of the US Midwest and there’d be a great barn to photograph right there.
A rest stop floor.
Yep, everywhere I look I think, “I need to come back here, find a campground, and spend a couple days hunting barns.” Sort of like looking for places to shoot the Milky Way, but I’d get to be out with the camera in the daylight instead of tromping around in the dark.
Yesterday’s hotel carpet.
Just before I crossed from Michigan into Indiana I saw a barn out of the corner of my eye…and since there was an exit right there I took it.
These aren’t the barns I saw from the freeway, but they made me smile.
I never did find my way back to the barn that caught my attention, but I found this one.
Not the one I was looking for, but it is beautiful.
I thought it was beautiful, the white of the barn and the gold of the tree.
And, while going around the country block to find my way back to the freeway I found this one…
More a corn crib and a shed than a barn.
….and this one.
Used to match the tractor, I’m sure.
AND, my best find on that little side trip was this:
Just sitting in a field near the road.
I LOVE it. Old trucks rank right up there with old barns in my book.
And just so you can enjoy a little more fall color, this was at the last rest stop before I stopped for the night near Louisville KY.
There’s still lots of color down here.
Tomorrow I hope to get all the way to the lake. We’ll see. It will depend on whether I take any more barn hunting side trips.
What are the odds I make it all the way without straying?
A year or so ago Karma, over at Karma’s When I Feel Like It, suggested we work on getting 4 seasons of an image from a single location. That means it’s a year long project, one you have to be conscious of as the seasons change. It requires some planning.
I knew when I saw this location that I had found my spot. Penny agreed.
Our first visit to this part of Penny’s park was in November of 2023, so technically this image is late fall. Or early winter.
And then I waited for some snow to fly, and we went back. Snow made it officially winter, at least in my mind. Penny said snow makes everything more fun.
It wasn’t long until winter gave way to spring. Spring was so pretty over in Penny’s park.
And then it was full blown summer, hot and muggy, but still fun.
I could hardly wait for fall, and I wasn’t disappointed. Penny and I went over there more than once, it was so pretty.
I guess, that makes five seasons, but I just couldn’t leave that first image out. I hope you enjoyed this series….because Penny and I have another one to show you soon.
She’ll probably do the honors because she is, after all, the star of the show.
Where to go for my Walktober, where to go? It’s been weighing on my mind.
I’ve done so many, taken you to visit all my local favorites, some of them multiple times. You and I have walked in Detroit along the riverfront, and in my own backyard, and on the beach of Lake Michigan.
This year I wanted to take you somewhere we hadn’t been before, so how about Tawas State Park? It’s on the eastern side of Michigan, on Lake Huron and only about three hours from me. Plus it’s ‘up north’ so it’s just got to be beautiful by definition.
I decided to do a combination walk and drive for this annual Walktober post. That way you’ll get to see the most stuff from my 6 hour adventure.
I left on the spur of the moment, last Sunday afternoon, after I had attended a Fun Run rally competition with Penny. It was our first together and deserves a whole post to itself. Let’s just say after that experience I needed a good, long, pretty drive.
Without a puppy.
Initially the trees weren’t that colorful, mostly yellow, and I was concerned that I had missed the show. But as I got further north, and stopped at a little roadside park, I noticed things were looking a bit better.
And by the time I could actually see Lake Huron the color was starting to pop!
When I got into the park I noticed there were a lot of cars in the lot given it’s definitely off season. But as I climbed over the low dune to the beach I could see why.
The place was crawling with kite boarders!
I walked on the beach for a bit, braving the brisk wind and blowing sand, watching the kiteboarding folks skim over and above the waves.
That was fun, and made for some challenging photography, but I had planned on walking the birding path I’d heard about, up near the lighthouse. So I headed over that way.
The wind was so brisk that I doubted I’d see any birds, but I stubbornly headed up the path because that was why I had come!
It led me right up to the Lighthouse, which was pretty, but I wasn’t, for some reason, excited about exploring that.
I kept along the birding trail, never hearing or seeing a bird of any kind. In fact the trail was becoming quite boring. Then I spotted a narrow footpath heading back through the beach grass.
That was definitely more my style. The wind had played sculpture with the day’s footprints, and I liked how the lowering sun made the sand look, so I stopped for a moment to take a picture on my way back to the shore.
Coming off the dune and back onto the beach I saw there were even more kiteboarders riding the wind.
And I couldn’t help but notice how the sun made the water silver.
Up ahead of me was a little spit of land, poking out into Lake Huron. Last time, more than 15 years ago, when I’d been on this beach there had been many, longer spits of sand, but this year there was only this one that I could see.
If you stood at the base of it you could see the water being blown into shore from both sides. I thought the combination of waves, light and sand was just beautiful.
But what about the kiteboarders, you say? What were they doing as the wind kicked up higher and the sun began to descend?
Well, they were doing what kiteboarders do. They were racing back and forth across the water and leaping high above the waves.
It was sooo much fun to watch.
But after awhile I realized I needed to head home, even though I was having too much fun watching all the action. So I said goodbye to the lighthouse and Tawas State Park and got back on the road.
But wait! Is that the end of my Drive/Walktober? Is that all there was to see? Well of course not! There’s still that three hour drive through farmland on the way home. What do you think I’ll see?
Here’s a hint:
Well, this is getting long. Maybe you better take a break now, at intermission so to speak. Or get a coffee. At least stretch a little.
I’ll wait.
Welcome back to Part II of my 2024 Drive/Walktober. On US 23 the trees were glorious. So pretty I had to stop a few times and pull over to admire them.
And the folks that live here? I’m only a little jealous of the fact they live among all those beautiful trees while looking out the back of their house at Lake Huron!
Of course I had to turn off US 23 a few times because I saw pretty barns in the distance. In the fall sunlight they were even more beautiful than they’d be in the summer at noon.
And sometimes it was just the light on a field that caught my eye.
But to be honest it was mostly the barn.
Or sometimes an old house…
…or the sign at an abandoned speedway.
I turned around to get that image. I just couldn’t NOT!
I had to go around a few blocks to get back to this grain elevator too. Something about an old truck under the grain chute.
So that is the end of my Drive/Walktober. Almost. By the time I shot the old truck it was getting late. The sun was definitely on a quicker slant to the horizon. Plus I had to go to the bathroom. So I stopped at the Bay City rest area. And there, I found the most magical ending to my Walktober adventure.
I bet just about anything that this last image made you smile. It did me then and it does today. After all that driving and walking and shooting I found my image in a rest stop on the way home.
Isn’t that just the way it goes.
If you have a Walktober in mind, go out and take a few pictures (or a lot) and post your blog linking to the original post about Walktobers and I’ll gather them all in early November and share them all with everybody!
Not only have there been lots of colorful lights in our night skies, there’s also been a comet. Or so I’m told. It’s not the kind of comet that shines brightly in the sky, it’s more reticent than that. Less showy.
Hanging out on a country road waiting for dark.
Of course that makes it all the more alluring for night photographers, professional and armature alike. I went out on two successive nights to try to find the comet.
The moon came up as the sun went down.
The first night neighbors and I met on a dirt road outside of town with an unrestricted view to the west. It should have been perfect. But though we stood out there, eyes turned toward the sky, scanning back and forth for over an hour we didn’t see it. We did however figure out we needed a heavier coat, hat and gloves if we were ever to do this again.
Over processed image to show you how big the moon was that night, rising in the east.
Oh, it was there all right — plenty of people posted images from that night. But we didn’t see it. Perhaps it wasn’t dark enough where we stood. Perhaps those clouds hanging low on the horizon obscured our view. Perhaps the nearly full moon rising behind us as the sun set was to blame.
Or maybe it was all of that combined. Regardless, we headed home empty handed. And very cold.
Nope. No comet that night.
The next evening I met a fellow Milky Way student out at my favorite park, where we planned to show her daughter the birds that come down to eat out of people’s hands, and then head to a dark place along the lake to look for the comet.
Scouting potential comet viewing locations, I ran across some color.
Before we even headed out to look for the birds we got to see other flying things.
It was a beautiful evening for a flight.
I rarely head out to feed the birds in late evening, but we tried. She did get a few birds to come down from their sleepy roosts to get a bedtime snack, but not many.
A sleeping mourning dove. He declined to come down for a snack.
We didn’t see many birds that evening, but we did see other things flying.
What is this, anyway?
Though at first we weren’t quite sure what it was.
A perfect night for this.
Meanwhile, my friend’s daughter’s new best friend was a chipmunk who stuffed himself with seeds, ran off to deposit them some safe place for later and ran right back to get more seed multiple times. I think he has enough provisions to get him through the winter now.
Did I hear you have a snack for me?
As we were driving to our chosen comet viewing location we noticed the big orange moon was rising. I made a hard, quick right and we pulled in along a couple dozen other photographers, focused on the beautiful rising moon.
It was really much prettier than this.
You’ll have to take my word for it. It was bright orange and rising up above the trees, reflecting in the lake. I didn’t have my camera set up for a moon shot, it wasn’t on a tripod. As I was messing with all of that the moment passed, as it does so often in photography.
The moon was sooooo beautiful that night, even if we never found that comet I knew I’d still be happy.
As the sky turned red and then darkened we hurried to the spot we hoped would be perfect for comet viewing. A beach, deserted, gave us a perfect view of the night sky. But where was that comet?
Another sunset, another night of searching for the comet.
We had come armed with instructions from other, successful, comet photographers — descriptions of where it was in the sky, how many degrees from this star or that formation. We tried it all, pointing our cameras in all sorts of directions, hoping.
And then my friend’s 22 year old daughter, bored with the old folks and their expensive equipment, raised her phone to the sky, shot one image and said…”It’s right there.”
Do you see it? It’s right there!
And bingo. Knowing exactly where to shoot, even though we couldn’t see it, made all the difference. We couldn’t even see it in our images, unless we zoomed way in. So we might have gotten shots of it and not even known, would never have known, without the young women’s gift.
It’s long tail extended, flying right over our heads all this time.
So there you have it. The comet who’s name I can’t pronounce or even spell. The elusive, sneaky, fading comet who will be back to visit in a mere 80,000 years. Or is it 800,000?
Sunrise, sunset, the time slips away.
I’ll have those camera settings down by then. How about you?
We have been so lucky, up here in Michigan, (and sometimes all the way down to Georgia!) to be able to see the Northern Lights quite frequently this past summer and into fall.
May 2024, somewhere in Michigan farm country.
Of course even if the lights are dancing, the weather doesn’t always cooperate. Lots of evenings the skies are obstructed with clouds and you can only dream about what might be happening up there.
May 10, 2024.
And of course you have to actually go outside to a dark place to see them. And even then you mostly can’t see them with your naked eyes, you need your phone or a camera to get a better view.
Amazing color in May.
In May there was a huge aurora storm above us and I was lucky enough to take my sister and head north to see them. We ended up on a random dirt road in front of a farmer’s house shooting the amazing lights as they danced across the sky.
More of the May experience.
Last weekend there was some evidence that a big light storm would be arriving, but night after night nothing happened. Then Wednesday night, with clouds rolling in, people in my general area were starting to post pictures they’d taken from their own yards of colorful northern lights.
I leapt out of bed, and headed to my own back yard. There were clouds, but enough open spaces that I saw this.
October 6, from my yard looking over my neighbor’s house.
It wasn’t beautiful, no special location, the lights of my neighbor’s house spread across the image. But I saw them. I saw them in my own backyard without driving across the state.
I was thrilled.
I was especially thrilled because I took that shot with my phone, and had only just learned how to use my phone at night. My regular camera had been shipped back to Nikon as a trade-in for a new version of the Z series.
Thursday of last week my new camera arrived, and coincidently notices of potential northen lights grew louder and louder as the day went on.
I tried to learn all the differences between the new camera and what I was used to using. And when it got dark I went over to Katie’s park and set up near her pond.
I was hoping for color reflected in the pond…but a layer of invasive plants covered the surface of the water.
I was not disappointed. There was a definite pink tinge to the northern sky.
It wasn’t always bright, but it was pretty and surrounded the Big Dipper.
There were obnoxious lights in the parking lot, and I lowered my tripod as low as I could to minimize the light pollution.
But mostly I just watched the sky. As my eyes adjusted I could tell the lights were there, but I couldn’t see much. Sometimes I could see a few pillars of light.
Sometimes the colors obscured the stars.
And once I turned the camera over to the east a bit, because I thought maybe something was there. But looking on the back of the camera, I didn’t see anything interesting, so I turned it back to the pond.
See that green waving at me from over there on the right?
I was wrong. There were actually green waves over there, but I didn’t see them until I processed the images days later.
I was out there from 8 until shortly after 9. I wasn’t prepared with hand warmers, or a hat or gloves. You wouldn’t have thought you’d need them, but on this clear night as the moon came up behind me, the air chilled.
The lights began to fad. I didn’t realize the green was ramping up.
By 9 I was cold and my husband and I ambled back to the car under the fading colors that still filled the sky. I went to bed and dreamed about starry nights and dancing lights. In the morning I found out that Mother Nature has a sense of humor, because she put up a magnificent light show with curtains of color that started about 10. While I was sleeping.
Yep.
In order to really see the northern lights you need to prepare, take warm clothes, bring extra batteries, some snacks, a chair and your good camera and on top of all that, hope for clear skies.
When I got home I went out back and took a picture of the moon. Because it was beautiful too.
And if all that lines up…you’re gonna see a real show!
I’m not disappointed, I was so happy to be out there at all. I’m thrilled to have had the experience and to share it with my husband.
Right overhead, in May.
But I’m secretly hoping to get one more chance this season.
You know how sometimes you sign up to do something and when the day and time comes around you sort of wish you hadn’t because staying home and doing nothing in particular seems so much easier than getting up and out?
Yea.
Saturday morning I was signed up to go on a guided hike at one of Katie’s parks. I have been on a couple of these walks, and I always enjoy them, usually learn something, and am always glad I went.
Still.
Saturday morning it seemed to take a gargantuan effort to get myself up and fed and showered and out the door in order to meet over at the park by 10 a.m. Seriously, 10 a.m. seemed early to me. Even though for 30+ years I was at work every weekday and often weekends, by 8.
This is what retirement has done to me. It has turned me into a sloth.
Anyway.
By 10:00 a.m. Saturday morning a group of about a dozen people had gathered in the designated parking lot. We all set off up a hill to our first stop on the hike, the Davis Lake overlook. Our guide, the manager of parklands in our township, explained how the lake was formed and the importance of the hills and wetlands to the formation of the Shiawasee River which begins in our township.
At this park we have something called a ‘fen’ which is somewhat unusual. That’s a wet prairie-like landscape which is host to any number of rare insects, plants and even fish.
The park manager talked about all the partnerships our township has with researchers at universities around the world, adding that the research grants helps to pay for managing the land.
We went further into the forest where we stopped and looked at the tree canopy and the understory and the ground cover. He talked about different plants that grow in the forest when they have enough light and space to thrive.
He said a healthy forest would have a variety of trees, and within a variety, several different ages. He’s working to make sure we have young trees coming up to replace the older ones that have been around for over 100 years.
Then we moved out onto the fen, where we took a quick right, off the path, to see a wildflower, the gentian, a small, blue, fringed flower that blooms in the fall. I’ve seen other blue gentian flowers, growing on rocks along the Great Lakes, but I had no idea we had them in my very own neighborhood!
For me that little blue flower was the highlight of the walk, but we saw lots of other plants too. Our guide showed us the dying plants, the seed pods, and those hanging on with a bit of color. He described what they would look like next spring, and urged us to come along on the spring hike next year.
I, of course, have visited this park often, with Katie and now with Penny. It’s a beautiful place to wander through woods and meadows, around glacial lakes and up and over hills. The part I hiked Saturday, with the group, is unofficially named after Katie around our house. Penny has her own part of the same park, just a bit north of where we were. I took her there Saturday afternoon and we had a great time. But I’ll let her tell you about that when she’s ready.
Saturday morning our group had a beautiful day, with a bright blue sky, warm temperatures and a little breeze. It was such a wonderful walk, fun to be out with other like minded people. We all learned a little something and had fun doing it.
It was a reminder to me that when you sign up for something, during an optimistic moment, you should follow through and get yourself to the event. Even if you have grown into a sloth.
Because if you do, you’re going to be sooooo happy that you did.
I guarantee it.
(Now. You might think this would be a great Walktober. And it would be, but it’s not. I don’t think anyway. We’ll see. I hope you are all thinking about where you’d like to take us on YOUR Walktober coming to a blog near you sometime between October 17 and the end of the month!)
Change Is Hard 