Yawn

My newest fixation is sitting around with my camera trained on a dog, waiting for it to yawn.

I know.

But it's fun.

A few rueful words from The Chairman of the Board, dedicated to my two favorite downtrodden artists -- Me and Toots

Toots has been going through a bit of artistic anguish, as related in a thread below. And tonight, through a variety of events I won't bore you with here, I helped a bunch of people get their photographs published. Except me.

I'm frustrated, folks.

This song came on the iPod just after I tossed my Crackberry down in a fit of pique after reading the relevant e-mail.



That's life. And I can't deny it.

But if there's nothing shakin' come this here July....

Rejected by my stock agency

This is going to be a new category. Because once an image gets dinged, this is a way to soothe my injured artistic feelings. Since it's just stock, some images I have no emotional attachment to at all (like the eggplants in the sidebar). But the ones I am attached to in some way will go here.

I really like this one, even though it's outside my standard nature photography. The eagle looks so indignant. It could have been a technical reject -- the light is marginal and the exposure tricky. I'll probably try the same shot next year in better light.

Update: Eh, my sister just responded saying, "I'm not sure I get it." Well, I guess that's the reason. It's one of those things I see that no one else does. Which happens from time to time. **Cough**

Stock photography

As you can see, I've just put up a thingie displaying some of the photographs I've placed with my stock agency. The "buy this image" button is prominently displayed, but please note I am not intending to hawk my photography to my regular readers. Stock photography is generally purchased by more commercially oriented outfits anyway.

The purpose of the thingamabob is twofold: 1) to remind me to get my butt out and shoot and 2) occasionally purchasers of stock photography will trawl the web looking for certain images. I don't usually post the better high-res stuff here (I need to get a watermark going so I'm more comfortable doing that), so if you are interested in what I'm shooting, feel free to click through and take a look. And if not, you're quite free to stay here and read my scintillating thoughts about moose, otters and my occasional existential crises.

What we did Sunday or, Why the long face?

How many times have I driven around the back corners of northwest Montana, keeping my eyes open for a moose? And then in the last month I've seen three, all in fairly well-traveled
areas of Idaho. The first was along the highway south of Bonners Ferry about three weeks ago. The other two we saw today, a cow and her yearling, pictured above. They were munching on some plants just off the side of the road, near the Spokane River in Post Falls. Next to a house.

(Out of about 150 shots, I got one worth keeping. The ones above aren't sharp enough, and the snow is overexposed.)

The Year of the Rat

Chinese New Year in the conservatory at the Bellagio.

Staredown

I can't be the only one who hears The Good, The Bad and The Ugly when I look at this picture.

Christmas Eve, Cabinet Mountains

Hope you're all having a grand time. I know I am.

Solstice Moonrise

There was a huge, beautiful moon rising on my drive through Northern Idaho Friday, but alas, there was no way to stop until it had shrunk significantly. So it's become the image I missed, now stored only in my own memory. I have many like that, and I treasure them, too, even as I grieve that I'm the only one to ever see them.

But I like the one I actually captured, too.

Frost on the woodpile

It'll be more than frost next time, no doubt.

A photo of your blogger

No, I'm not the horse. Hint: I'm wearing an orange Please-Deer-Hunter-Don't-Shoot-Me vest.

Endangered Species Thursday: Sea otters

I need a break from tales of doom, so I offer you, for this Endangered Species Thursday, the sea otters I photographed on Saturday before our pellet adventure. I got no marketable images of these guys, but I didn't spend very long photographing them. I did, however, get more used to how they act and the things they do, which will make photographing them easier every time. Here are some of the "outtakes."






Sea otters are, of course, endangered. This organization has a wealth of information.

A traveler makes his way back home

From last week.

Latest favorite photo

Here. A vertical is here.

I took these in eastern Oregon on the way back from Montana in late May. I made Mr. T pull off the highway (he's used to this sort of thing) while I spent half an hour trying to find an acceptable composition. I've been wanting a photo from this angle for a long time, but I'd pictured it very differently in my mind's eye. Essentially what I want is this composition, except taken from the middle of the river.

Hmmm.

We have before us a photostream

You know how I'm always babbling about my photography but I never post anything but snapshots? Well, as you can see from the flashy-thingie on the right, I've finally created a flickr account. Click on it if you want to see more of my stuff.

The first page is a bit boring so you'd do better to venture into the other pages or my photo sets. I'm going to be uploading my new stuff to this account as I get it, and I'm still - still! -- working on scanning my slides in for posting. So it's a work in progress.

Hear ye, hear ye

Let it be known that I have purged my bank account of that troublesome substance called money, and in exchange have received two things: 1) a set of plane tickets to Indianapolis for next week, which trip I must make for work, and 2) a newly minted Nikon D2oo camera body.

It's a whole new world. Goodbye Fujichrome Velvia, hello 10.2 megapixels.

Tulips and a confession

I still shoot transparencies on my SLR. Yes, I know. I might as well have just told you that I own a Betamax or an 8-track player. This is attributable mostly to money, though there are other factors. I anticipate making the leap to digital soon, but for now I use, for the purely documentary purposes of this blog, a tiny little digital point-and-shoot. So the "good" photos from my trips are often not available for several weeks after I shoot them, and in the interim I rely on my point-and-shoot to convey the general idea. It's possible to take a good photograph with it, but I would never rely on it for my "good stuff."

This weekend was the third year I've photographed the tulip fields here in Oregon. I made extensive use of this wonderful tree, shooting it from all angles, with different colors of tulips in the foreground. Here's what I was working with:











I used my long lens and homed in on the tree, an effect I obviously couldn't capture in the digital images above. The place was teeming with visitors, and I stood for thirty minutes waiting for the tree to be clear of people for one of my shots. On average, I waited about fifteen minutes for every image. But that's all right; much of photography is about waiting, and I was nearly out of my senses with pleasure at the colors and lines of this place. This is the third year I've photographed this field, and I believe it may have been the most beautiful this time:



April may be the cruelest month somewhere, but not here.