The spider must have sat down beside her

as there were webs galore at the marina this morning, and not a single spider to be found. I went with the 70-200mm and a wide angle not expecting to finding anything out of the ordinary. The water was muddy from rain off following the heavy rains yesterday, and it was also filled with discarded plastic water bottles.

There were colorful leaves though.

No macro, so I shot this with the 70-200mm. I have to remember to take Canon close-up lens at all times.

A wide angle will focus close though. Here I stopped the lens down just far enough to see the autumn color and reflection in the trees behind the web.

Since I live only 3 miles from here, I ran home and got the 105mm macro and shot the three webs above. It wasn't as calm as when I had first arrived, which made it a little harder to maintain a close focus.

I don't know what you call that mess, but I thought the flower webbed over and covered with water droplets was pretty cool.

Dropped the "travel drive" three times......

so I thought I'd better post them on the blog before it gives up the ghost, especially since I don't know how I processed these:

Local water hole

I may regret it, but the air was still this morning and I headed out to the local water hole to do a little experimenting with color I knew would be there. I took the D-90, a 70-200mm and a tripod. I had other equipment along, but being lazy I didn't change any out. I know of one friend that doesn't even bother to take a tripod. Shame on her, she knows who she is. :-)

The D-90 only does three frames multiple exposures, which is what this is along with a little zooming back and forth. I don't think I had the gain set properly, but NIK brillance/warmth and glamor glow brought out the colors.

Single shot reflection of the opposite bank as seen from the boat ramp.

I think one of the rules of photography is not to split the scene. That's the way it was, so that's the way it is. One shot zoom with ducks sliding through top of the lower third.

A beaver was passing through this image of fall reflections. You can see him on the lower right hand corner. This is one of my favorite spots to shoot, and one of the closest. Driving around for something to shoot is for younger people. I'm lazy, and just want to enjoy the morning.

Reflection of the far, far side of the river. Why waste time and gas when scenery like this available virtually in my backyard. I would like to visit Alaska next summer though, and that's a haul.


".... and so it goes."

Harper's Ferry, WV

Today's weather forecast called for overcast skies and periodic rain showers, so I thought it would be a good time to check out the fall color at Harper's Ferry. It's not that long a drive from my house, but after running into workday traffic, detours, shovel ready job sites and "short-cuts," I arrived at the destination 1 1/2 hours after anticipated arrival time.

This tree was one of the few that had good color, so I worked it a couple of different ways. Over all I think there is more color at the local water hole than there is at WV. In my younger days I spent a lot of time at the local watering hole, but the scenery was a lot different. That's a whole different story, and besides, I can't remember most of it.

This is the other colorful tree in town. I guess I screwed up because from this angle you can't really tell that rock building is really a building/house within a building.

The globe really needs to be cleaned out before it's turned on since it's full of spider webs and dirt.

A lot of photographers like to include s-curves, c's, v's, angles, lines and such within their images. This looks like a rooftop to me. I just like to take pictures.

Looks like a BMW prototype hanging outside a local restaurant. That's for my BMW motorcycle owner friends. They'll probably claim it's a Harley. :-)

I'm pretty sure I know what the phrase "red light district" means, but I'm not too sure what the red curtains imply. Perhaps this house hasn't had electricity wired yet. Notice the absence of color over the rooftop.

Local city laundromat?

I carried two dx camera bodies with me, one with a wide angle lens and one with a 70-200mm. All the images here were taken with the body that had the 70-200mm on. I find that not only am I getting too lazy to change glass, I'm too lazy to take one camera body and lens off the tripod to put the other one on. Hey, I'm not a paid professional photographer, I just want to have fun and enjoy the day outside.

All in all a nice morning out. At least the trip back home went quicker than the route up. Could be I didn't take any short-cuts on the return trip, although I did get turned around in Leesburg. Don't let me get started on all the new traffic circles that have been installed instead of traffic lights. I'm still dizzy from going around, and around, in circles trying to find my way out and back to the route I was originally on.


and so it goes...........

New external hard drives, and downloaded images are going somewhere.

I swapped out external hard drives yesterday and thought I had the new one set up the same way as the one that was replaced. Wrong. Apparently I didn't have the Raid management set up the same way as before, so when I adjusted Raid management this morning, images I had already downloaded were erased. Luckily some of the images were still on the compact flash card, while others were deleted/reformatted and most likely gone forever. A backup external drive has been added to the system, but I can't find a durn thing on it. Live and learn.

While Lightroom doesn't appear to be set up the same as before, I am able to find some of the images that were downloaded.

There were two bald eagles hanging around pre-dawn, but well before the sky lightened they took off. One eagle was that was hanging around two days before pulled the same stunt by circling low overhead and then bugging out before good light. Herons have been noticed by their absence, possibly because of the eagles?

Geese were flying overhead, as they usually are. Fun to practice birds-in-flight with, but not very exotic.

When all else fails, shoot some upended canoes.

More captive canoes.

Time to get the Lightroom book out and see what I've done wrong this time. I thinking maybe I should take up fishing, and swap gear with the disgruntled fisherman from the other day.

The morning sky looked promising....

but the sky never turned red. I think maybe the clouds were too low on the horizon.

There was a weekend fishing contest going on at the marina. I didn't see my friendly fisherman/photographer friend James in the crowd. James recently got married in Hawaii, so maybe his fishing days are over with? :-)

Not exactly Swan Lake, but pretty just the same. I was still waiting on the red sky to develop, but it just wasn't happening. Fog was hanging low on the water and the scenery was still beautiful.

I believe this place to be one of the most beautiful in the area, but houses built close to the waterfront can create a problem if one's not careful about shooting around them.

Here's a couple of fishing boats in the fog on the other side of the point. I overheard one fisherman across the water saying the fish weren't biting, and he'd been out there every bit of 15 minutes. Maybe he should try photography?

Still no overwhelming sky. There's a boat crew shelter behind me where high school kids, and other "mature" children, participate in rowing for sport and exercise. I could hear a bull horn from across the tree line so there must have been boat races today. I'm sure the fishermen enjoyed that.

A smaller boat returning from an outing. Weekends are always busy here and I never saw them leave the dock.

This guy was waiting for a ride. Once when I was out "birding" a fisherman asked me if I had a big enough lens. I thought about asking this guy if he had enough rods, but he's much larger and younger than I, and I can't run that fast any more. I let him get in his buddies boat without saying a word to him.

All in all a pretty good morning even though the sky never did develop the way I wished it would. NIK brillance/warmth and glamour glow plug-in filters rock!