Monthly Archives: December 2008

riding shotgun with canons

I rode shotgun (in the front passenger seat) to and from Steamboat. Rather than gaze out the windows at lost images streaming past, I practiced firing my canons at the landscapes through dirty glass and snow showers. I focused out and beyond the the spotted windows, adjusted settings quickly, made each image and then looked ahead to find the next view.

This sort of practice can be good for me. Don’t think, just do it fast.

In some captures I allowed a fence post or tree to blur in the foreground as we raced by. In others I went for the more distant view without the telltale blur of foreground objects.

Favorites are in the gallery below.  Some will be kept to remind me of places I’d like to return to when I’m driving and the purpose of the trip is to hunt images and make frequent stops.

Click the first photo to start, then click next.

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Snowshoeing at Steamboat Lake

You can’t see the lake under the snow, but it’s there. This image was made the same day (winter solstice ’08) and location as the one in my previous post, Hahn Peak.

I went to the park expecting groomed trails, but the ranger said there was not enough snow yet with only two feet or so on the ground. He marked the park map for me to show the location of a trail.  I broke a trail through soft deep snow in that general direction enjoying the quiet solitude and beautiful views.

Yes, it was as cold and cloudy as it looks in the photos, but not too cold and dark to enjoy the exercise and capture a few images.

In Texas

December moon,
Birds, Beeves, and Trees,

The Dodge again . . .

Last week on a trip to visit my husband’s parents I was able to photograph the old Dodge again. I also captured birds, beeves, trees and the moon in between our visits and family celebrations.

A cow blocked my way at the gate. She was so close I was afraid to turn my back on her horns to latch the gate. But she quickly lost interest in me.

I loved photographing the trees, so different from our trees at home.

I captured several images of the Dodge, like this one at sunset.

A few autumn leaves still clung to the trees at the river.

At the nearest point to earth in its orbit, the full moon appeared larger than any this year.

I liked the sky’s color at sunset the night before the full moon.

That’s all!

my portfolio is down

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Trying a new plugin for wordpress. Picturesurf, a gallery plugin. If this works well for me I might replace my old porfolio with picturesurf galleries on pages of this blog.

I’ve been using zenphoto gallery software for my web portfolio for several months and upgraded to the latest version at the same time I upgraded my wordpress software for this blog. (See previous post) Apparently my FTP client upgrade was bad and my uploads were missing critical files.

I think I have all my wordpress blog issues sorted out, but the upgrade of zenphoto for my portfolio still isn’t working correctly. I liked the simplicity of the zenphoto galleries and am sorry I’ve broken mine. With limited time this month to spend trying to fix my zenphoto installation, I’ve decided to test some other options for photo galleries.

I’ve tried coppermine. It’s gallery design is too busy and would require much of my time customizing to get the simple look I desire. Still, I see what others have done with coppermine and might consider it.

Anyone have suggestions for simple and clean design gallery software?

stormy upgrade

This is a test post. The storm photo is from a trip through South Park in late July this year. The trip was as stormy as last night’s wordpress upgrade to version 2.6.5.

I’m having problems with the visual editor and the file uploading tool. At first, the upload tool didn’t show up at all so I found the missing files and uploaded those. Now I can upload, but can’t check what I’ve done with the visual editor, can only see and write in the html editor.