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James Hill > Contemplating the next BIG step. I was going to post an asparagus abstract, but I have an awful lot of green in my dailies right now so here's a cool little bug. He appeared to be thoughtfully considering if he should walk all the way around or just make a leap for the next petal down. He eventually took the leap but not before I bumped the flower with my lens and sort of gave him incentive. I've been playing with an extension tube on a wide angle lens, which means the focal distance is VERY close, so the lens was practically resting on the flower for this shot.
James Hill > March 30, 2009 Wow, it's hard to believe March is gone already. I've been cleaning out tons of image folders all day, so I didn't even pick up the camera except to put the batteries on the charger. What I did do was look through all the shots I've taken throughout the month of the corkscrew willows planted beside the cabin. I love these trees - they have such interesting branches that twist and curve every which way, and they grow really fast too. But the darn things are really tough to photograph well, especially when bare. I picked these five images of the willows to sum up March - cold rain, snow, blue sky, new growth, and of course more rain. :) The originals can be found in my What's New gallery. And I finally got around to putting the March snow gallery up too. That only took a month! I also really need to reinstall some editing software other than Lightroom, since Lightroom doesn't do text or collages (it was a major trick just to get it to do this simple one) but after using Lightroom for all of my editing for almost two years, Photoshop just feels like a major hassle anymore. Any suggestions on a lightweight editor with simple layout capabilities (preferably free or cheap) would be appreciated. Update: thanks for all the suggestions everyone. I thought I'd let you know about a free editor I just ran across. Photoscape appears to be a pretty cool little editing program with a bunch of built in collage (Page) options. Warning for US folks - a lot of the settings/measurements are metric only. :) It has your basic editing functions and seems to be fairly intuitive to use. I'll probably use it just for collages, but it's free and fast (I put together several in just a matter of minutes) so I thought I'd throw it out there for anyone interested. www.photoscape.org
James Hill > My Neighbors Garden-2460 This guy will be a part of dinner Monday night - a few of his older brothers made the table tonight.. Anyone care to guess what it is? Edit: Yes, it's a yellow squash blossom. I learned just recently that they are not only edible, but very delicious, also. This was shot with my 70-200 and a 36 mm extension tube. I put another example in My Neighbor's Garden gallery.
James Hill > Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) This young guy hung out with me during a downpour this afternoon. I had seen him land on the swing a few times this week but he never stuck around long enough for me to get a shot. Today he took shelter from the torrential rain and proceeded to clean my front porch of any bugs he could find. It was quite comical watching him inspect every nook and cranny along the floor and roof rafters. He came out of several spots with cobwebs clinging to his head. I took this shot after he made a quick dash to my shed and back, which game me an opportunity to set up the camera right against the window. He shook the rain from his feathers and then sat there singing for a while. Wikipedia says these birds are noted for their loud calls, and I believe them. It was amazing to hear such ear-splitting volume come out of something this small. We hear them all the time in the woods but, until today, I never knew what kind of bird was making all that racket. Whatbird.com has a pretty good audio clip of the calls for anyone interested. I just discovered that site and it made identifying this bird pretty easy, even for me.
James Hill > Dogwood Blossom This is from the dogwood tree growing right beside the cabin. It's a beautiful tree but surrounded by so much clutter that I haven't been able to get a wide shot that I liked. It has a storage shed under it, a power line above it, and it's really tall (and straight) for a dogwood. Not able to get the wide shot I wanted, I decided to go in for the closeup and ended up liking what I saw. For those of you still curious about yesterday's 'fire shot', I updated the commentary and added a link to the original image. I also rolled around in the weeds again today, but haven't finished going through the images yet. More weeds to follow. : )
James Hill > Eggland's Best Eggs Love 'em or hate 'em, there's no denying the EB guys have left their mark, quite literally. Personally, I like the EB eggs and usually have a carton on hand, but every single time I open a carton I am reminded of the following exchange from an episode of Futurama: LEELA: Didn't you have ads in the twentieth century? FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio... and in magazines... and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree. I had breakfast for dinner tonight - now I'm wondering what I might dream about...
James Hill > 20100218-4728 Absolutely adorable at 8 months and from only ten feet, isn't she? I spent part of the early afternoon wandering the back forty, looking for someplace other than my porch to ambush the deer. Turns out it was colder than I expected once the sun drifted low in the sky, so I returned to the cabin for thicker gloves. As (bad?) luck would have it, I ended up being invaded by the entire cavalry, in a classic flanking maneuver and in broad daylight, exactly when I didn't expect it. They moved in quickly and in silence while I was distracted by a brief video someone was yammering about on Facebook ;-) Truth be told, I probably ended up with more interesting frames by not being outside making the deer nervous. They are scrounging so desperately for food right now that they were literally inspecting the porch and compost for crumbs from my lunch. Overall I'm pretty happy with several images. I've posted a bunch to my Daily Visitors gallery. Link goes to a shot of the advancing formation. There is also one in particular that's pretty funny. It almost made it as my daily pick. Think of a memorable scene from 'A Christmas Story.' And, as usual, these were shot through double pane windows, hence the funky bokeh with that slight psychedelic vibe to it.
James Hill > 20091005-2827 Dried Pears I've had these pears drying on my window sill for quite a while, waiting, shrinking, accumulating strange growths; essentially begging to be a photo. Little did I know that this project would end up consuming the better part of an evening, and even then I still didn't get exactly what I had planned. That's what I get for thinking a one light setup should be easy. Maybe what I really needed was a third pear standing in the rear, deep in the shadows and barely visible. There is a lot of cool texture in the skins, unfortunately all my macros were either out of focus or underexposed too much to make a decent image. I'll play with them some more I'm sure. Strobist info: Flash set on 1/64 power, shoved into a large white plastic bowl with diffusion material over it, (which became like a giant softbox for these little guys) held just out of frame top left. Used a white shirt-box as a fill reflector, just out of frame camera right.
James Hill > And it rained... quite heavily at times. I thought briefly about running to the car to take a few of those artistic blurry shots through the windshield that everyone but me seems to get so right. Then this happened and I thought better of it. This continued most of the night with intermittent thunder in the distance. It made for great sleeping weather with the windows opened enough to hear the sound of the rain hitting the tin roof. They're calling for more of the same today.
Dogwood Blossom

This is from the dogwood tree growing right beside the cabin. It's a beautiful tree but surrounded by so much clutter that I haven't been able to get a wide shot that I liked. It has a storage shed under it, a power line above it, and it's really tall (and straight) for a dogwood. Not able to get the wide shot I wanted, I decided to go in for the closeup and ended up liking what I saw.

For those of you still curious about yesterday's 'fire shot', I updated the commentary and added a link to the original image. I also rolled around in the weeds again today, but haven't finished going through the images yet. More weeds to follow. : )
James Hill > Dogwood Blossom This is from the dogwood tree growing right beside the cabin. It's a beautiful tree but surrounded by so much clutter that I haven't been able to get a wide shot that I liked. It has a storage shed under it, a power line above it, and it's really tall (and straight) for a dogwood. Not able to get the wide shot I wanted, I decided to go in for the closeup and ended up liking what I saw. For those of you still curious about yesterday's 'fire shot', I updated the commentary and added a link to the original image. I also rolled around in the weeds again today, but haven't finished going through the images yet. More weeds to follow. : )
Dogwood Blossom

This is from the dogwood tree growing right beside the cabin. It's a beautiful tree but surrounded by so much clutter that I haven't been able to get a wide shot that I liked. It has a storage shed under it, a power line above it, and it's really tall (and straight) for a dogwood. Not able to get the wide shot I wanted, I decided to go in for the closeup and ended up liking what I saw.

For those of you still curious about yesterday's 'fire shot', I updated the commentary and added a link to the original image. I also rolled around in the weeds again today, but haven't finished going through the images yet. More weeds to follow. : )
See photo in original gallery.
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