Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.

Tag Archives: Photography


by 34 Comments

The birth of summer

Katie and I went on an early morning walk around the yard today. It was already hot, the kind of hot that reminds me of summers growing up. Some of you remember those days, oppressive heat pressing down on you even early in the morning. Sweaty sleepless nights with a rattling box fan ineffectively moving the stifling air.

Morning light slices through our backyard.

As kids all four of us got to spend a week at grandma’s house on the farm each summer. No air conditioning there either, but I don’t remember being so insufferably hot in the big old farmhouse. We each got to choose the week, though I remember in later years my uncle requesting my brothers during certain harvest weeks.

Neighbor’s flag celebrating in morning light.

I usually tried to be there when the wild black raspberries were in season. They grew behind my grandpa’s work shed and every morning I’d go out and pick a small bowl of them, and grandma and I would put them on our breakfast cereal. So good.

Katie and I shared these in the backyard.

And I remember the summers when I was much younger and my folks bought a lake lot with the intention of building a cabin someday. I remember the orange lilies blooming in the ditches on the road to the lake.

Bringing back memories.

They always represented summer to me. Now when I see them I am instantly transported back to that lake lot and the summer days spent swimming off the dock and rowing the big green rowboat.

Queen Anne’s lace getting ready to spring into summer.

This morning while Katie was busy sniffing I was noticing so many reminders of summers past, right in my own back yard. Lots of evidence, too, that summer is progressing regardless of the craziness happening in the world.

Looking for something to cling to.

Even as we stay home, curtailing plans, missing family, time is moving and mother nature is pushing forward. A lesson, I guess, for all of us not to give up hope either. For more than sixty years I’ve watched summer unfold, leaf by leaf, petal by petal.

I guess I should stop worrying about what tomorrow will bring and just let it be.

Sneaking quietly into summer.


by 37 Comments

I bet you miss me

Katie here. I know it’s be quite a long time since I’ve visited my mama’s blog. It’s not that I haven’t had plenty of stuff to talk about. I’m a sheltie. I always have something to talk about.

Wonder what’s over there?

Nope, it’s all mama’s fault. See she got a new ‘puter and she’s been trying to figure it out. Mostly she’s had a problem getting her pictures to download to the new laptop, and mama said I couldn’t talk about our latest walk in the woods unless she could add the pictures she took.

Of course.

After all, what’s a blog post without pictures of me? What? You say you’ve seen plenty of posts that weren’t about me? Huh. That just boggles my mind.

Ahem.

So a couple of weeks ago mama said it was nice and cool outside, maybe in the 50s (10 C), and did I want to go for a walk in the woods? Silly mama. She keeps forgetting I’m a sheltie. Of course I wanted to go for a walk in the woods!

Mama said she was going to drive to the back of the park cause it was a weekend and there were too many people at the front. But the road was closed where she was gonna go, so she parked in a different spot. I should have started worrying right there.

You can rent this cabin. Mama wants to find out how.

We explored a bit and found a trail. Mama figured we’d walk along it for awhile and then turn around and go back the way we’d come.

But it was so pretty, and I was so happy we just kept on going.

And eventually the trail turned back in the direction we’d come so mama figured it would be shorter just to follow it back out to the road and then we’d just walk up the road a bit to where we were parked.

Yea. Good plan mama.

Cause, as you guessed, that trail didn’t go entirely back the way we had come. No it wound around another little lake and up and down hills. Mama thought we were still going in the direction of the road, she was keeping the sun over her right shoulder, but she had no idea how much longer it would be before we saw the road. She did, however, know it was a long way back if we turned around.

Mama likes light on stuff in the woods.

I, however, was blissfully oblivious to the whole dilemma.

Luckily mama had brought me lots of water and I drank it every time she offered it to me. I drank a lot, but mama didn’t, she was afraid she’d need it for me later. She’s a good mama, other then her propensity for getting lost.

Finally, a long time later mama caught a glimpse of the road through the trees and she hauled me over there even though that’s not where the trail went. I tried to tell her we were supposed to be following the trail, but she said she was the mama and we weren’t going that way.

Mama said we were getting our feet wet. I would like to say I did not. Silly mama.

But once we got out to the road mama wasn’t 100% sure which way we should go to get pack to our car. She used the sun again to make a guess, she figured we weren’t that far, and she had a 50% chance of guessing right.

She began to doubt herself after we walked up and down hills, in and out of shade and the road just kept going. She didn’t think we had walked that far in the woods, and she was worried about me walking in the sun. If she had guessed wrong we were going to have to walk all this way back and then who knows how much further. Still…there was no proof, yet, that we were going in the wrong direction.

So we kept on walking. Mama would stop when we got to shade and give me more water. I still thought we were on a grand adventure but mama was getting stressed.

Me sitting on a big log. Cause it made mama happy.

Finally a red car went zooming by, and then came back the other way in a few minutes. The lady driver wanted to know where the beach was. (The beach is way up at the front of the park, and mama knew we were parked way at the back of the park.) So mama told the lady the beach was up where the guard shack was…and then she asked, just to be certain, if the lady was currently now facing the front of the park? The lady said yes…so we knew we were still walking toward the back of the park.

We walked some more, up and down more hills, around more curves, each time mama thought she’d see the parking lot where we parked. But she didn’t see anything but more trees. Finally we came to a fork in the road and she had no idea which way to walk. She didn’t remember driving by a fork when we first drove through the park.

As we were standing there trying to figure out what to do a park truck drove by! Mama flagged that young man right down and explained we’d been walking for a long time and we needed to know if we were going in the right direction, toward the very end of the road. He looked confused, then said yes we were.

So we started to walk again. And do you know what? Around the very next corner, only a few yards away, there was the end of the road and our car! Mama was so relieved.

Me? I thought the whole thing was a big adventure. Mama was proud of how well I did on a long walk. And our way out of the park mama stopped at the place we usually walk and took a picture of the map so she could figure out where we had been.

Yep, we were in the woods for a long time.

She’s been studying that map and she still has no idea. My advice for mama is maybe we should just stay on the trail we already know. And to always bring lots of water. And maybe bug spray.

Just sayin.

Mama says to let you know that her new ‘puter doesn’t have her photo editing software on it yet. So these pictures from our walk are straight out of the camera. And to top it all off WordPress changed their format and she had to figure that out too. So far she can’t figure out how to change the size of the images so they’re all huge!

Mama says it’s almost too much that her laptop and her blog software has all changed at the same time. After all, she says, change is hard.

See you all later. Just telling you about this adventure has worn me out! I need a nap!


by 33 Comments

Smiling in the night

Katie and I have been camping, though it’s just been in the backyard during these Covid-19 days. She starts crying and circling near the backdoor around 8 every evening, so excited to sleep in her tent. Of course that means she goes to bed early.

Mama was a little slow.

So she gets me up between 3:30 and 4:30 every morning. We wander back into the house after she does her jobs, and then, usually, I go back out to the tent to finish sleeping.

Sleeping under the stars.

But the past two nights I’ve spent about an hour taking pictures of the night, honing my night photography skills before I head back to sleep.

The neighbor’s house with a couple planets above.

Last night was really, really cool.

I was taking a picture of the house with a band of clouds and a couple stars overhead. The camera, sitting on it’s tripod was going through the 25 seconds shoot and then the lengthy noise reduction process, and I was staring at the sky directly above me while I waited. And the most spectacular shooting star blazed across the sky. No, it didn’t cross into my picture, darn it, but I saw it and that made me smile.

A layer of clouds was beginning to obscure the stars.

The next shot I pointed the camera straight up, knowing there wouldn’t be another shooting star right there, but wondering what I’d capture. And while the camera was going through it’s process I was watching the cloud bank climb higher in the sky just above the house.

And that’s when I saw the oddest thing.

The sky above.

A line of small dots, lights about the same size and brightness as a star, were moving from south to north, right above the cloud bank, quite fast, but slow enough for me to blink a couple times, adjust my glasses, and process that I was seeing something strange. I had time to consider whipping the camera back from it’s upward image capturing, and to swear at myself for moving it away from the house in the first place, but not long enough to actually do anything but watch, fascinated, until they all moved off into the clouds.

There were probably at least 20 lights, a long straight line of them, then a break and then 5 or 6 more. It was 4:20 in the morning. I’d been shooting the sky since about 3:45. I wasn’t sleepy and I wasn’t hallucinating. I don’t know what they were, but I’m hoping someone else saw them too and has an explanation.

Meanwhile, I’ve figured some more stuff out about night photography and someday I hope I’ll be able to stare at the stars and whatever else is up there from a more exotic location than my backyard.

And then I’ll really be smiling. Guaranteed.

Edit: I found out what it was! Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink Satelite Train. You can put in your data and find out when it will be flying near you!

Gee, I always miss the good stuff.


by 36 Comments

Bird brained

When I left you at Kensington last week I promised to show you some of the craziness happening in their giant heron rookery. The heron babies are now teenagers and I think they’ll be flying free any day now.

How many youngsters do you see in the image below?

Here’s a shot of just one side of the rookery. You can click on any picture in the blog and make the image bigger, I’d do that if I were you to see all the detail. And do this on your desktop or laptop or something with a bigger screen than your phone.

I don’t know either, I think around fifteen. I sure would like to see a few of them leave the nest for the first time. Talk about suspense!

I’m so certain they’ll be leaving soon that I went back to the park, even though it’s 40 minutes away from where I live, the morning after my last post. And the morning after that.

I was hoping to see an adult feeding the teenagers. I’ve seen it once before and those young adults can get pretty aggressive with mom or dad. I remember thinking that somebody was going to fall out of the nest there was so much tugging and pushing going on.

Some testing of the wings, getting ready for takeoff?

But the second morning I got there a little late, more like brunch than breakfast, and I think I missed all the action. There was some sibling pushing and showing off, but mostly everyone was just waiting for the next meal to show up.

Yep, it’s pretty boring around here.

There was one flyover of an adult heron. That was exciting for those of us waiting on the boardwalk. After all there are only so many pictures you can take of a bunch of herons standing in a tree.

Accompanied by a harassing redwinged blackbird.

I was about to give up, figuring all the adults were napping after feeding their hungry broods earlier in the morning, when a mama or a daddy showed up to a very excited youngster.

One very happy camper waiting in the nest for a snack.

Everybody else, in the neighboring nests, had their hopes dashed again.

Disappointment down below.

Yep, now things were getting interesting up there!

Hey Jerry! Look at that!

But that was it for the excitement; I figured I was too late to see the show, so the next morning, when Katie got me up at 4:30 I stayed up and got out to the park before the moon had even set.

It was a lovely morning. Doesn’t look like anyone’s awake up in that tree yet.

The light was wonderful.

The usual suspects were standing around waiting for a meal to arrive.

In fact I was so early, and so sleep deprived that I forgot to check the camera settings.

I like this shot anyway, even if it was an accident.

Which is how I got the above image. My ISO was still set at 100 which is nowhere near high enough for the low morning light and a sandhill crane flying right by me.

Meanwhile a heron landed at the very top of the tallest tree in the rookery.

Make way, I have arrived!

He (or she) appeared to be giving a lecture to the captive audience below.

Pay attention kids, I have things to tell you about the world out there.

He or she sat up there for a long time.

“Talk, talk, talk, these older folks don’t have a clue.”

After awhile the kids all started looking elsewhere for a snack.

“Hey! Is that mom coming this way?”

And finally he or she gave up and flew away.

“You can’t tell this younger generation anything.”

After all that excitement it was quiet again. I decided to take myself for a walk to see what else I could find. Want to come with me? I’ll try to keep it short as you might be bird-fatigued already.

Oh, there was this other artsy-fartsy image I kind of liked, though it wasn’t what I intended.

Sort of Edgar Allen Poe, though this isn’t a raven.

I fed a jay from a bit of seed I had in my pocket.

“Thanks lady, most people ignore us jays cause we won’t come sit on your hand like those annoying little birds.”

He seemed to appreciate it.

And there was a plump female bluebird way up in a tree watching everything.

“What’s going on over there?”

I had a red-winged blackbird follow me down the path and perch noisily in a tree about 3 feet from my face while I was changing from my long lens to something shorter. I asked him what he wanted and he looked at me like I was crazy. Of course. He wanted something to eat. So I offered him a bit of seed and he came down and took both peanuts and flew off. Little pig. No picture of it, but you can imagine.

Rounding the next corner I saw a sandhill crane couple looking beautiful in a meadow.

Posing like she’s getting her senior year photo taken.

She and her mate and I got up close…

“If I show you the top of my head can I have another treat?”

…and personal.

Such pretty birds!

They were both interested in having a little after breakfast snack…

This feels somewhat scary, their beaks are so big, but they are very gentle.


…though only one wanted to take the seed directly from me. I left some on the ground for both of them to share and moved on down the path.

“Bye lady! Thanks for sharing!”

There were other things in the forest that were calling my name.

“Hey! You got anything left after those big birds held you up?”

I began to move along faster, I’d already been out there longer than I expected. But it was such a lovely morning and I knew how lucky I was to be able to walk in the woods instead of hunker down at a desk on a Monday morning.

Sure beats going in to the office!

Retirement is a wonderful thing.

Yep, nice to get out of the house and spend the morning in the woods.

Around the other side of the lake I saw a complete sandhill crane family. Dad was standing guard and mom and baby were off in the tall grass. I didn’t get a good shot, but this is the baby, all legs and long beak.

Pretty baby, as soon as it got too far away from it’s mom it scurried to catch up. Dad never took his eyes off them except to shoot me a look.

Almost back to the rookery I stopped to contemplate this plaque on a bench.

Born 6 days after me, died one week after my wedding day.

It made me realize all over again just how lucky I am.

Then, back at the rookery where there was more horsing around and wing flapping.

“My wings are bigger than your wings!”

But there didn’t seem to be much else going on so I decided to head home. I didn’t get the shots I had come for, no parents feeding their youngsters. None of the teenagers took a leap into adulthood and flew away.

“Come back any time, lady!”

But I saw a lot of really interesting and pretty things. And, as always when I walk in the woods, I came away grateful.

Isn’t this swallow beautiful?

And that made me smile.

Contemplating the good life.


by 37 Comments

Multiple objectives on a walk in the park

Katie gets me up early every day and today I should thank her because I used her motivation to head down to Kensington, my favorite park, which is about 40 minutes south of where Katie and I live.

The woods was full of light and dark images. Should this be the “one” for the weekly photo challenge? No…I don’t think it’s quite right.

You’ve been on walks with me there before – would you like to come along on this one? Are you sure? It’s going to get a bit long, but there are benches strategically placed along the way in case you’d like to stop for a bit.

This is a pretty bench, should I convert it to black & white for Cee’s challenge? No, I don’t think this is the perfect bench shot yet.

Speaking of benches, that was one of my photo objectives because benches is the subject of Cee’s Black & White photo challenge this week. And Nancy’s Photo a Week Challenge is all about light and dark.

Plus I needed something for Trent’s weekly smile challenge.

Surely that drop of early morning mist will make you smile.

So I headed into the woods hoping I could find beautiful things that would satisfy those three challenges. Because when you go into the woods you just never know what you’ll find…but you know you’ll always find something.

This is light and dark, but so much like my Wordless Wednesday post, maybe it’s not ‘the one.’

Truth be told I headed to the most remote trails first thing this morning hoping that I’d see some deer and maybe even some fawns. I got to the park at 7:30 and almost wished I’d arrived earlier, though it was hard to keep an eye out for deer when the path was so full of roots and rocks just waiting to trip me up in the dark, damp woods. I sure didn’t want to fall, so I was being extra careful.

Lots of places for a person like me to trip.

But I did catch this doe. (6/6 edit: Let’s thank Linda for noticing that this ‘doe’ has the beginning of antlers! You can enlarge photos by clicking on them, and apparently she did! This is a he, so I’m changing all the shes and hers to hes and his) He seemed to be alone and I wondered if he had a baby or two somewhere nearby. I only got one opportunity to get his picture, then he dashed away. I liked how the light made his ears pink. I looked hard for a fawn hidden somewhere near but I didn’t see one.

Get your shot lady, I’m not sticking around!

Eventually the soft forest trail turned into a sort of mowed pasture path. The grass was long and wet. I stopped and tucked my pants into my socks and sprayed my ankles with deet. I’d never been on this part of the trail and I was curious what might be ahead.

Turns out the path went right by this small pond with it’s accompanying….bench.

A good place to rest if you have bug spray.

Yes, I thought to myself, now this is the perfect bench for Cee’s Black & White challenge. I stayed there for a bit, trying different angles, but eventually the mosquitoes made me move along. Mosquitoes are like that.

After a couple of miles the trail headed back and reconnected with the more popular paths. I figured I wouldn’t see any more deer. But I was wrong.

She was busy watching another woman who was coming toward me on the path.

A woman talking on her phone was coming toward me and she captured the doe’s attention.

I edged closer.

I cropped this so you could see her eyelashes. She looks surprised but she didn’t mind me at all.

She let me take as many photos as I wanted as long as I didn’t move fast. In fact it seemed like she was posing.

Did you get my good side?

She was definitely a nursing mom, but I didn’t see a fawn hidden anywhere nearby, and she didn’t seem nervous, so maybe it was napping further away.

Continuing on I heard a rustling in a pile of last year’s oak leaves. I expected another chipmunk or squirrel, there had been dozens of them rushing around the forest floor.

Mr. (or Mrs.) Snake went slithering off in search of breakfast.

Still looking for a perfect light and dark image, I noticed these ferns. Very pretty. Definitely light and dark there.

I liked the deep color and the repeated pattern, but it’s not ‘the’ image.

But maybe it’s not exactly right for the challenge.

Moving along, still on the lookout I noticed this perfect dandelion sitting in a puddle of sun.

The light made the seeds glow against the dark background. Still…it’s not quite what I wanted.

But I’ve done a post about dandelions. And I was hoping to find something new.

Definitely light and dark. Hmmmm…maybe it’s the one.

Meanwhile I was pretty much smiling the entire walk, but these guys, grooming themselves and oblivious to me made me grin.

You’d think we could get some privacy here.

And the light off this opening blossom made me smile too.

Pretty in yellow.

But what would be the perfect light and dark image for Nancy’s photo challenge? There were so many to chose from.

In the end I loved this one. One of the first images I took at the beginning of my walk when the sun was barely up…the dew lining the edges of the leaves.

This one met two objectives – light and dark and it made me smile.

After I got out of the woods I wandered over to the boardwalk that lines the lake where a giant heron rookery lives. The baby herons are now teenagers and huge! Mom and dad herons are very busy trying to feed their demanding children. There is a whole lot of activity, and even though I had already met my objectives I couldn’t help but stop for awhile and watch the goings on.

But this is already long enough. If you want to see the craziness that was visible from the boardwalk you’ll have to wait for the next post. In fact I’m thinking about going back tomorrow morning, getting there earlier and spending more time watching the rookery and the lake that surrounds it.

Wait. What? You say you want to see the herons now? Well here’s a taste.

Incoming parent, hungry teens wait for lunch!

But there will be more. I promise. You never know what I’ll come back with!

Very cool tree art.


by 33 Comments

It’s hard to smile

This week it’s been hard for me to find something to smile about.

So many families with broken hearts this week.

The news was filled with awful things. The virus killing over 100,000 Americans. The protests and violence stemming from the death that reminds us of other similar deaths.

No, this week I didn’t feel much like smiling.

And then my silly girl wouldn’t sit pretty for a picture and I had to smile…just a little.

Reminding us to stop and smell the flowers.

Yes, this week I looked really hard for something to smile about.

Oh, all right mama. I’ll look at your silly camera. Sort of.

And I found it right here at home.

I hope I made you smile too!