Day 12. Smile.

People do great things.  I'm driving along a local highway, when I round a bend and out pops this fabulous, happy face.  It's just sitting out in the middle of a field.

Who comes up with the idea to paint a big smily face on a metal drum?

Well, whoever they are, they are AWESOME!  Made my day.

Smile on...
Julee

Day 11. Bridge. Or new home of my lense cap.

I'm (unfortunately) the kind of person who can get so wrapped up in thinking about something, that I forget about everything else.  Once this led to my visiting Wal-mart with my pants on inside out.  I noticed after I had been shopping for like 15 minutes, and then I stood stymied in the DVD aisle trying to figure out exactly how to remedy the situation.  Another time in the grocery store, I noticed I had my coat on inside out.  High class right?   (I honestly try very hard to prevent things like this.)

Well, this ability to think about just one thing at a time also leads to trouble with losing things.  If I'm thinking too hard about a project at work, or about travel plans for the weekend, and I happen to take my glasses off  somewhere random - a massive search will be required to find them later on. 

Last week I lost one of my camera lense caps, but didn't notice until a few days later when I went to switch camera lenses.  I had no idea where I might have lost it.  Luckily, since I only have two lenses, and one is always on the camera, and this lenses cap covered the part of the lense that connects to the camera, I only need one at a time, and the loss wasn't a big concern. 

To prevent constant losses of things like car keys and cell phones, I use routines, and I have specific places where everything belongs.  (Car keys, for example, go either in my pocket, in the designated spot on my work desk, or in the key bowl at home.  Sometimes my husband drives my car, and I get a little panicky as soon as we get home about getting my keys back so they can be in the 'right' spot.)  My routine with lense caps is to put them in my back pants pocket. 

During the outing where I captured this neat, old bridge, I managed to lose another lense cap.  I noticed within about 10 minutes, and I had only stood in two places during the time I could have lost it.  I went to retrieve the cap from my back pocket, and realized in horror, that this back pocket had a button - yet I hadn't opened a button to put the cap in. 

So the only thing I can figure is that I went through the motions of putting the lense cap in my pocket, only to drop it on the ground behind me. 

Nice!  (If the good Lord watches me, I bet I give him a good laugh sometimes.)

And despite a twenty minute search of the field and street around the bridge, no lense cap was found.  A search of the car and camera bag also came up empty.  Some nice old guy, who was curious what I was doing, said that at least it should be cheap to replace.

Oh, but the search of my car did turn up the first lense cap I lost, so that was a plus.  (It had fallen between the seats.)

So here is the bridge.

 

 

Adding injury to insult, I am not sure I really love any of the pictures.  (These were my best two.)  But maybe I'm just bitter about my loss.  Thank goodness Amazon will happily send me a replacement lense cap for $8.99.

 

And yes, I realize this not really a bridge bridge, it's for water drainage.  But it is still some pretty fancy concrete work for water drainage.



 

Day 10. Bendy and green.

So, for those of you keeping count, my 365 day challenge is going to take me a few extra days.  I've missed two days already...

Life has just proven too chaotic to find a picture I want to take every single day.  And I've decided that rather than simply have my goal be taking a picture, any picture, every day, that I actually want my goal to be to look for pictures that excite me, and help remind me of the amazingness of life.

I still maintain my goal of looking for a picture every day, but for those days when a 30 minute search is all I have time for, and when nothing catches my eye on those days of little free time, I'd rather not just shoot and post whatever happens to cross my path.

I know there are some who would be able to find something every day, even in a short time, but apparently I'm not at that point yet.  Others might say I'm not meeting the spirit of a 365 day challenge.  But at the end of my 'year' I want to have a neat collection of photos.  

Today I drove north of town just to see what I could find.  (The irony of today's picture is that I found this spot out-of-town with just a 12 minute drive...)  I turned off onto a road where I'd never been before, and at one intersection was this dramatic branch.  I got a few shots showing the complete branch, but as I went to leave I saw a bit of green moss.  At least I think it's moss.  So I put on my telephoto lense and got a close up. 

I'm a total fan of close-up photography, and I think I did good with the second shot below.  What do you think?

 

Big bendy branch on the prairie.

 

Color found!  (It is so brown this time of year, that this bit of color was definitely a highlight.)

See on!
Julee

Day 9. Frosty morning.

A glorious frost greeted me first thing this morning.  My first chance this season to get some true winter shots.  I scurried into the ditch at work, and to the farm across the road, to take advantage of some beautiful views.

(Side note, my almost brand new HP desktop computer broke - won't start - got the blue screen of death when I turned it on tonight.  The computer is less than 6 months old, doggone it.  And I pretty much only use it for photos.  No kids or wild adults surfing sights where I could have gotten a virus, plus I have virus protection.  But after the blue screen of death showed up, the computer said it could repair itself.  Yeah, right.  It spent a while 'fixing' itself, and now told me I'd better backup my files.  So I suspect a visit to the computer shop will be in order.  Luckily, my 8-year-old laptop is still hanging in there.  Although it has a mysterious whirring noise that gets awfully loud sometimes.  Hopefully it can hold out until my desktop is back up and running.  But if I disappear, or start posting only middling shots taken with just my smartphone, you'll know the worst has happened and I'm computerless.)

Should I have gotten a Mac?

Well, enjoy the brilliant frost.  The beauty of ice.  (So long as it's not on the roads.  But that's a long, sad story for another time, a story about my new car and a big rock.)  Beauty for now.  That's what I'll focus on.

The Lone Frozen Weed

Evergreen in white.

Natural monochrome.

(These pictures were all taken in full color, but showed up completely colorless. Weird.  I had to double check my camera since I was not expecting the shots I got.  Neat though huh?)

Day 8. Colors, colors, colors.

My first posting from my smartphone.  We will see if I manage without lots of spelling errors. I still find the tiny keyboard a bit of a challenge.  But I totally love the DROID RAZR Maxx word suggest system. It almost always has the word I want and I don't have to type but like the first two letters of a word.   Plus I don't have to think about spelling.   Totally cool.

My picture today, taken of part of my fabric stash.  I love walking through a fabric store. All the bright colors, muted colors, shimmery colors, bold patterns,  holiday patterns...
I rarely leave without at least a fat quarter that caught my eye and made my brain feel happy.  Unfortunately, I rarely do anything creative with them. Maybe a topic for my next 365 day challenge.

Enjoy the color bouquet.
Julee

Day 7. Waiting for snow.

It's the end of November, and yet measurable snow has yet to find its way to us.  However, I found snowblowers, all in a row, like soldiers standing at attention, patiently waiting for their chance to shine.

(Finding this bit of gorgeous yellow, like liquid gold, gleaming and new, certainly brightened my day.  For a few brief minutes I forgot all about the piles of data analysis work stacked high on my desk.)

I couldn't decide which picture I liked better, so figured I'd post them both.  The head on shot gave me the brightest yellow, and the least disruptive background, but their steely toughness comes across better from an angle.

Or

I figured a year from now I will recognize which one is the better picture.  (Or my Photoshop skills will have improved enough that I can get rid of the background I don't want, and create the picture I want despite interferences.) 

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."  Confusious.

See on...
Julee

Day 6. Night Photo Try 1.

In my few attempts at taking a night photo, I've ended up with either all blackness, or with a photo that looks like it was taken in daylight.  (This was always from my use of the all powerful 'auto' mode.  Obviously auto wasn't working for me.) 

I have now read about manual mode, and thought that if I played with shutter priority and used a tripod, that I should get a usable picture. So since I felt strong and refreshed from a relaxing holiday weekend, I decided I would head to the top of hospital hill and tackle the darkness.  With the lack of snow, one might not know that it was a brisk 25 degrees out, however I donned a winter hat and gloves this trek out, and barely even noticed the cold.   (A far cry from how I felt during my photographing expedition on Friday when I went sans hat and gloves - brrrrr.  Lesson learned. Hat = Heat = Patience during photographing.)

Photograph was a moderate success! 

My tripod is my husband's old tripod, and I could not get it to stay locked in the tallest position.  The camera would wobble a bit and the tripod slipped down as I pressed the shutter button.  I also had trouble figuring out which of the knobs would tilt the camera to a slight upward angle.  I ended up decreasing the length of the back legs on the tripod, which seemed to help, although there has to be a better way.  It was pretty awkward, lots of messing around to get the view I wanted in my viewfinder.

But since I actually achieved a picture where you can tell it is nighttime, and I can pick out a few trees and the street below, I'm calling it a success. 

Watertown, SD, looking northwest from the highest view I've found so far in the city (the hospital).  Not as spectacular as the night skyline in big cities probably, but it's what I've got in my backyard.