CONSWORLD

It’s spring break here and the weather is springlike, too. Warmer temperatures quickly melted the last snow of only an inch or so. Banks of snow in the shade shrink smaller every day and most sunny spots are clear of snow.

The mountain chickadee below is enjoying a bite of homemade suet.

I saw four bluebirds in an old wildfire burn area yesterday, but they were too far away for a close up portrait. I looked for spring birds around my home today but all I found were the year ’rounders like the chickadee above.

Snow falling through bright, cloud-filtered sunlight today

A chunk of suet, happy stellers jay

Black swans, a peacock, and my friend in the primate house were some of the images captured at the hotel lake and the nearby mountain zoo on my recent stay in Colorado Springs.

The arrival day, I was there just after sunrise for the lift-offs of several groups of geese from the lake.  I practiced panning.

I tried to vary the shooting locations and subjects to get as much out of the short trip as possible. I visited three area parks, a canyon park, a creek park, and the big rock garden of my previous posts. I also spent part of an afternoon at the zoo photographing animals and a little time around the lake at the hotel with the beautiful black swans.

The last day there I spent an afternoon hiking along a creek on a birding loop trail but the afternoon yielded little other than exercise and some random shots of ice in the creek. An unfamiliar bird song was heard faintly as I was getting in the car, She’s leaving, twee-hee.

About the image:  Garden of the Gods. I think this formation looks like a giant campfire. As with many of the other formations there, I don’t know it’s official name. I do wish I’d included something for scale. The “campfire” is large enough for people to hide in the spaces between the flames, there were two adults in there when I photographed, but it isn’t as large as some in the park.

Consumed with blogging changes, web hosting changes, and all the work involved in making those changes, I am questioning my sanity or, at least, questioning my commitment to the blogging improvement project I’ve begun.

I wanted the ability to post date my posts so that I could write before traveling and have the posts appear on the blog while I’m away. I also wanted static pages, not a link to one of my posts, but true static pages.

I switched from Blogger to Wordpress.com, found a template that would work well with my material and imported my old blog posts from blogger to wordpress. I had to move the link list separately. A little time consuming, but not hard.

I know I’ll have to eventually upload the photos that go with the 50+ posts I made on the original Blogger site if I remove that site on Blogger since the photo files aren’t imported with the blog posts. The photos are still in googleland somewhere and the new site just gets them from there.

I also wanted the word “wordpress” (or blogspot) out of my url. I could have pointed one of my urls to the blog on blogger or wordpress to achieve this, but I’d been reading about the satisfaction of users who installed wordpress blogging software from wordpress.org in their web hosting accounts.

I decided to upgrade my web hosting package to increase space and get the requirements that support wordpress blogs and in the process decided to change hosts.

The change in hosting meant spending time setting it all up, e-mails, passwords, downloading a new ftp client, uploading my photography website, and installing wordpress to a directory in my new site.

I used Fantastico, available on the new hosting account, to install wordpress. After the install, I played with the wordpress software and discovered using it to be very much like the wordpress.com experience.

I imported new my wordpress.com blog to my newer hosting site by making an export file and then importing the posts my new blog site. I created an opml url for my links with a tool on another site to import the link list (my blogroll).

I confidently began downloading themes to try. This involves searching for themes, downloading the zipped files, unzipping the files and uploading them via FTP to the proper location in my site.

I had an evening of fun trying out themes, but many of them distort my imported posts and will have to be customized to be usefull. But hey, that’s what using wordpress is all about, yeah? Having it your way.

Then I see I was too hurried and have a problem. The fantastico installed the version of wordpress prior to the most recent update. Reading about the upgrade, I find it’s needed to fix a security problem. We all want security, yes?

I upgrade by first creating a backup file and then removing most of the many wordpress files from my site and uploading the upgrade files (download the upgrade, unzip, upload the upgrade files to specific locations in the remaining wordpress files).

After a few days of stumbling around figuring out what I wanted from my blog and how to get it, I can now be happy, right?

Well, somewhat happy.

I will need to customize a theme, not too hard if I want to spend some time learning how to do it. I know some html and css, the php and rss and other things I need to know are new to me.

And, there is still the old daily photography website to update and oh(!)wouldn’t it be nice now to have an integrated look with website and the blog so that the two, website and blog, can be as one?

I’m wondering how much a web designer would charge to finish this project! I want to spend the rest of today taking photographs.

It isn’t a recipe. The Bird was doing the grilling, or hiding, or something in the grill. He winked his grey eyelid at me and I caught it in mid wink. Then he flew away. Image from a morning walk through a picnic area in the Garden of the Gods.

For another large rock from the Garden, click the thumbnail below. I don’t recall the name. I’m more interested in the direction of the sunlight on them than the names given to the rocks. This one’s huge and close to the road, you won’t have to look for it if you visit the Garden.

The “twins” in bright morning sunlight.

Click on the thumbnail above for my early morning view of Pikes Peak from the Garden of the Gods. I was there at dawn, but the mountian was hidden by clouds. I captured this image as the clouds began to lift after sunrise.

This is my first post on wordpress. I’ve imported all my previous blogger posts and plan to use wordpress for future posts. I like the static pages available on the wordpress blogs and may eventually combine my website and blog. Sorry for the confusion, if any. Please update your links and feeds, but know that this may be a temporary change of address. After I get my hosting issues sorted out, the website and blog should be at one address.

A few days in the Colorado Springs area gave me the opportunity to photograph something different. Garden of the Gods is a free city park uplifted 25 million years ago and eroded to the present beautiful formations. I’d been there before, but never had time to explore all the trails and walkways.

Scouting the park for shooting locations the first day and returning a few times during my short stay enabled me to capture several images. I arrived before dawn to capture an image with Pikes Peak in the background only to find the mountain hidden by clouds until well after sunrise. It’s only a 2 hour drive from home, so I’ll be returning and perhaps get that image I wanted.

This mountain chickadee holds a sunflower kernel between its feet while it eats.

Shooting the moon again. This was a couple of days ago, the 24th, just after sunrise. Capture at 1/50 second, f/29, ISO 400, focal length 100mm. The rocky hilltop in this image is part of a future state park, still in the planning phase, not yet open to the public. Forbidden, while I grow old. CO State Parks, are you reading this? Hurry!

Bird lovers can take an international birding trip sighting birds in Australia, Japan, U.S., Ireland, South Africa, and Sri Lanka when they read edition #67 of I and the Bird hosted by Trevor’s Birding of Australia. Trevor invites us to travel round the world on a birding holiday with stops at blog posts submitted for this edition.I was happy this morning to see my recent post on the mountain chickadee was included as a stop in the tour. I slid my submission in on the deadline date here, but by Trevor’s time in Australia, I was late. Create your bird related posts and submit them (on time, please) to nds22 (at) cornell (dot) edu by Tuesday, February 5th for edition #68 of I and the Bird at Biological Ramblings. Aren’t blog carnivals fun?

The little mountain chickadee is often a photographic subject for me in winter. This one posed for a portrait view behind a rail covered with snow. Then, it perched on the feeder hook as the little nutchatches often do. The mountain chickadees seems comfortable with me and the camera as near as about 8 ft. Any closer and I send them flying into the nearby trees. Both of these images were captured with a 100 to 400 lens from about 10 feet.

I’m not really a birder, I just like the challenge of photographing them. I have to keep the field guides to birds at hand to look up any unfamiliar species. I also search for information about my feathered subjects online. In a recent search, I learned that the mountain chickadee stays only a short time near the nest where it hatched. It then moves to a new location and spends the rest of it’s life there. No migrating away from winter weather for these little birds. No wonder they seem so appreciative of the seeds I put out for them.

This wide angle image was captured in early morning sub-zero weather from just outside our room at the hot springs the last week of December. You see part of Mt. Princeton on the right and Mt. Antero on the far left with the chalk cliffs of Mt. Princeton at the center and the moon above. The moon called to me to come out with the camera and tripod in the wind and cold. Fingers and toes cried for me to go back inside even though I wore boots rated for the temperature and ski gloves while out. You may click the image to see it a bit larger.

When I saw the image above was not the best of my color shots from a recent trip, I decided to do a b&w conversion for Trina, my friend who loves black and white photography. Mt. Princeton is one of our favorite mountains and this capture shows a cool snow devil swirling into the air above the mountain. The time was mid-day, not the best for the landscape shot, and the cold and wind were fierce. I had spent a few days in the area hot springs, but didn?t take many photographs as the night temperatures were well below zero and the days were not much warmer. It seemed wiser to soak in the hot pools than to freeze out in the snow and wind. I drove into a roadside park when leaving the area and hopped out just long enough to capture the scene.

The photos in this post were all taken this morning within about two hours time. Up before dawn and watching the pretty clouds in the west, I thought it might be a good morning for a colorful dawn light glowing on the clouds and Lions Head. I put the wide angle on the camera and positioned the tripod as the first of the pink began to show up in the clouds.

Later, with early sunlight on Lions Head I changed position to photographed trees still in shadow against the brightly lit rock of Cathedral and Lions Head. Where the earliest sunlight on Lions Head produces red and orange, a bit later the light reflected from the rocks is more yellow in color as seen below.

An hour later heavy clouds almost fill the sky and filter the light. The color in the photo below is so muted I could have got almost the same shot in black and white.
Yet, the day is still good for color photography. When zooming in to photograph birds or flowers, or just about any close up of a subject, better color and detail is possible with overcast skies or filtered light rather than direct lighting. I put the wide angle lens away and switched to a macro lens to photograph orchids blooming in the house in the soft, cloud-filtered light from a window.