Month: October 2017

As previously mentioned, my husband and I participated in the Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk this year. This was the 10th anniversary of the walk, which is funny, because I’m pretty sure the last time we did the walk was on the first anniversary. I guess that means we’re up to a photo walk once every nine years. Sounds about right.

The walk’s location was the Woodlake Nature Center. I went to Woodlake Elementary School, so I was a frequent visitor to the center during 4th through 6th grade. Happy memories, from what I can dimly recall. Then they tore down the school in the late 1970’s and built cheap townhomes. Not so happy memories.

So I was actually looking forward to the walk, which was probably a mistake. It’s always better to have super low expectations for these types of things. The weather was great, but that was about it. I didn’t really find the setting inspirational and the paths were muddy and flooded in a lot of spots.

I didn’t wear appropriate footwear, so I ended up tiptoeing around a lot of areas and skipping others. Still ended up with mud on my shoes. I  figured out pretty quickly that “normal” photography wasn’t going to get me anything worth processing, so I went right for abstract. I can’t say I got a lot of keepers, but I did get a few.

Yesterday was National Cat Day. Which is funny because most cats think every day is cat day. Ripley seems to have settled back in to his routine, following our return from Phoenix. He snuggled up against me several times and then demonstrated he had enough by biting my hand. Not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough to hurt. I have no idea what triggered that response. I wasn’t even petting him.

Last time we were at the zoo, the leopard was awake and in a relatively good position for photos, which is rare. It cracks me up how much the big kitty cats look and act like their domestic counterparts. There’s no real parallel to that when it comes to dogs.Oh sure, wolves, you might say. But there are dog breeds that are as large or substantially larger than wolves. If dogs only came the size of a chihauhau, I could buy wolves as a parallel situation. It’s sort of astonishing when you consider the number of dog breeds and their incredible variability. The differential between cat breeds is positively miniscule in comparison.

Of course generations of selective human breeding is responsible for the wide variety of dogs. Kind of makes me wonder how different cat breeds would be if humans spent that much time messing around with them. On second thought, never mind. Visions of a Saint Bernard sized cat are truly frightening. Nice kitty.

On Friday we received a special delivery – a piece of art glass that we purchased in Vancouver. We try to find one art piece as a memento when we take an epic vacation. I was actually planning to go to another gallery in Vancouver to see an exhibit by a different glass artist, whose work I covet, but is outrageously expensive. It wasn’t within walking distance of our hotel, so I decided to pass. Or so I said. In reality, I was a tiny bit afraid I might buy something.

Instead we found a stunning piece at a gallery on Granville Island that was a fraction of my coveted artist’s prices. We asked them to delay shipping until the end of October so it wouldn’t arrive while we were in Phoenix/San Diego. Lo and behold, the shipping company called the first day we were home to schedule delivery. Now we get to figure its place of honor in our new home.

On to the photos. I have this penchant for going to a place to photograph it and then creating a lot of images that aren’t part of the attraction. Take our September visit to the zoo, for example. I photographed leaves, trees and some cedar waxwings that were most definitely not zoo residents, but the thing that fascinated me the most was the splash pad. You know the kind – they shoot jets of water up from the ground in a random pattern and kids run around in them and get soaked. Nola ran through one while we were in Vancouver.

When you visit a zoo, you don’t usually think of photographing the splash pad water, but I could have stood there for an hour. It was impossible to predict what kind of results I would get, so I just fired away and hoped for the best. The best images had water that didn’t completely fill the frame and a clean, dark background. I did convert these to black and white, just to get rid of a slight color cast. The water reminds me of the glass art we just received.

I’m going to do one more post from my trip to the Arboretum and then move on to something else. But don’t fear, I will circle back and there will be lots more dahlias featured. I didn’t attempt a tremendous amount of soft focus images on this trip, because they tend to be pretty time consuming and I didn’t want to bore my mom to tears while I fussed with my camera.

I actually prefer to get more abstract these days, but as I’ve mentioned (repeatedly) it’s hard to find subject matter that works and I didn’t see anything at the Arb that seemed appropriate. How do I define the truly abstract? Basically, if I can’t identify what’s in the image, then it’s abstract. These three photos clearly fail that test.

I promised to focus on the positive (for now) when it comes to our new home construction. While the stucco is way behind, they did get another round of small framing changes done while we were gone. They also boarded up the opening for the front door and installed doors with locks between the garages and the main house, so we can start securing the interior. All good things.

But the biggest win by far was finding out that we no longer have to install an underground catchment system to manage the storm water on our property. The new engineering firm we hired came up with a plan that not only gives us a big flat area of artificial grass, it also replaces the huge pipes with two large fields of rock for filtration. One is under the “grass” and the other is under our gravel overflow parking area. This change will save a significant amount of money and eliminate annual maintenance. The plans were just submitted to the watershed district, but they are pretty confident we will get an approval. I can’t even begin to express how happy that makes me.

Our first stop yesterday morning was to check out the construction progress on our new home and we were incredibly disappointed. It looked like a day’s worth of work had been done on the stucco prep, despite having beautiful weather here the entire ten days we were gone. Next week the forecast is for highs in the low 40’s. They’ll be lucky to get the scratch coat done before winter sets in for good.

I sort of have a thing for decaying flowers, particularly roses. In the interest of sharing some non-dahlia photos from the Arboretum and in reflecting my current bleak mood, today I’m featuring some roses on the verge of death. In black and white, of course. I’m kicking myself for not getting more of these images, now that I see how they look after being converted. I guess I’ll have to wait until next year.

I’m so tired of getting my hopes up about making progress on the house and then getting them crushed again. We rush to make decisions and then those decisions don’t get acted on for weeks or months. It’s this seemingly endless cycle of frustration. I’m done ranting for now, going to try to focus on the positive.

We made it back to Minneapolis last night, barely. We arrived at the airport and got through security more than an hour before our scheduled 11:00 boarding time. The plane was already sitting at the gate, so no worries, right? It continued to sit at the gate while our departure time was pushed back to 1:30, then 3:00, then 5:00, due to some mechanical issue they had trouble first diagnosing and then resolving.

After the first delay, we decided to eat lunch at the only sit down restaurant in the gate area. Then we parked at Starbucks for several hours, keeping an ear out for gate announcements. Which turned out to be a good thing, because 10 minutes after we received the 5:00 departure estimate, they pushed it up to 3:40 and starting boarding just a few minutes later. We finally arrived in Minneapolis at 8:45 pm, four hours later than scheduled. So happy to be home.

Now to more pleasant things. As I’ve mentioned previously, I am a dahlia-holic. I paid a short visit to the Arboretum with my mom about a week before we left for Phoenix and the dahlias were at their peak. More than the leaves changing color, what I love about fall is the arrival of the dahlias. Sure, I photographed a few other things at the Arb and I’ll feature some of those images as well, but they won’t hold a candle to these beauties.

Consequently, I’ll be featuring a lot of dahlia images in the coming weeks, but I’ll try to intersperse them with other posts, so you won’t get bored, although I honestly don’t know how that could be possible. I just can’t get enough of these gorgeous flowers.

I achieved my goal of getting completely caught up with my image processing during our stay in Phoenix. Which means I have enough material in the queue for several months’ worth of posts.

That’s a good thing, because I have no idea when I’m going to get out with my camera again. Although, it is supposed to snow in Minneapolis on Friday, so it could be sooner than I think.

Today’s post features a trio of painted lady butterfly photos. I had no less than eight of these beauties land on one of the sedum plants in my garden, about a week before we left for Canada.

They seemed in no particular hurry to depart, so I took quite a few images. Enough that I got bored. Maybe because I’ve had some extraordinary luck photographing butterflies this summer.