This Labor Day was a glorious day. It rained almost all day today due to Tropical Storm Lee pounding up from the Gulf Coast. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to take at least part of the day off today it was wonderful. For a few shorts minutes this morning I was able to sit on my patio and watch the rain and do nothing. It was great, but a time of solitude took me back to thinking about those in Uganda, many who labor very hard every single day. Matthew says “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (11:28), and we came across many who needed a little rest over there, as we all do everywhere. Margin is such an important thing in life. So important in fact that God put it 4th on his important list of things for us to do.
The photo above was so typical of the people we saw in Uganda. Super nice, hard working people, many moving goods from one place to another, by foot. I had never seen so many crazy things being moved around on a bike and moped; like a full sofa, a coffin, a refrigerator, and all kinds of agricultural goods. At some point I’ll do a post with just photos of things we saw people carrying on bikes, for now, this guy is my honorable labor day photo. Something like 50-75 pounds of trees being pushed up a hill in the mud, pretty incredible.
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So we made it to Dallas, just a quick 12-13 hour drive and we arrived. The trip was pleasantly uneventful and after dinner I was thrilled our hosts wanted to stop at their favorite skyline view so I could take some photos. I love photographing traffic at night, it has a unique motion all it’s own, but being here in Dallas standing over the I-30 bridge with a large tripod looked conspicuous to someone driving by and it only took about 10 minutes before the Dallas Police Department showed up. For once the police didn’t make me pack it up and go home, instead she just wanted to know how much my camera cost? The three above were my favorite of that shoot. At dinner tonight I found out I am going to get to go to the PGA Byron Nelson Championship, so hopefully I will get my first decent PGA Tour shots while I’m there, after that it’s Polka time.
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The photo of the day today is another iPhone shot I took on my way home from work this week. Sometimes it is a real pain to live out in the middle of no-where but it has its benefits as well. This is the normal traffic I have to deal with on my commute, most of the time it’s cows and grass fields.
This iPhone shot from the drivers seat reminds me of a 1950’s shot of the Alabama dirt roads you see hanging on all the walls of the BBQ joints down here. My roads thank goodness are all paved but not without major potholes of course.
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On a side note, we will be at the Ole Auburn Ale House (who is in serious need of a new website, sorry) in Auburn tonight to listen to Rob and Jen with Martha’s Trouble, if you are in the area stop in and say hi.
This turned out to be one of the nicest days in months with a beautiful 75° sunshine with nice puffy white cumulus clouds and a soft breeze. I must read hundreds of blogs each week and hardly ever read them talking about the weather. Makes me wonder if I should just skip that as not relevant material to my blog or wonder if no one can take the time any more to appreciate a beautiful day… either way, it was gorgeous outside today. Being that today was Friday and was a great day to be outside, I ended up doing one of my more bazaar photos shoot requests I have had lately. More of a stock photo / image request, but the request was for “road” shots. It did end up being a good exercise in depth of field, and it’s always a good day when I can get out and do some photography.
Double yellow line photos and pics with some shots that could be turned into a brush or two in Photoshop. Not a bad idea. I looked at many of the Google images available on double yellow line photos and none were from around here and if you are looking to be middle of the road in the south, there were not many options. Now there are a few more.
It is really hard to get creative with a double yellow line and make it look good but I gave it a go and today I choose a few different middle of the road pics for Friday Feet. I am sure there is some to the “middle of the road” on this but I’ll use it down the road. Which feet shot do you like the best? Yes, they were both taken by me, unassisted.
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One of the things I probably dis-like the most about blogs is having to clean house, but, this weekend I went through the tedious process of implementing a new design, updating all the categories for each post, and changing some previous posts to display the full size images this design will accommodate. I really think that much of the details in photography is lost in viewing small images, so, for those still on dial-up, I apologize now. From this point forward I will be displaying my images on up to 900px wide in some cases, like the image below of Lake City lake in Colorado (although I will try to keep the file size as small as possible).
The image above was taken in August of 2005 in Lake City Colorado. There is an overlook on the forest road where you can stop and hike up the side of the mountain. Image data: Camera, Nikon D2X, ISO-100, Focal length 35mm @ f/16
This is one of those scenes that has probably been photographed a million times but is still so beautiful that you just have to stop and take a shot. This particular shot I did do a bit of hiking off the main road. I climbed up to the top of the ridge overlooking the lake and the most gorgeous colors appeared.
I rarely think the best shot is in the foot pegs of the tripod that just left (or where everyone else tends to take the same shot), and in this case I was greatly rewarded. The drive from Creede to Lake City is one of the most wonderful drives found in the country, so if you ever have a chance, take the road right out of Creede and take a slow drive over several passes until you drop down into Lake City.
Happy Labor Day to everyone.
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Well, we had to leave the boat and come back home. It was such a great weekend we didn’t want to leave but all good thing must come to an end I guess. It was nice to get back to the house though and take a nice shower and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. We left the boat around 9am and took our normal routine (which includes a stop for donuts) back up to North, LA. Along the way, unfortunately, we were stopped by a horrible accident on I-65 that was said to be a fatality. When we finally got up to the wreck, we could see only one car left, a black Chevy Suburban from Alabama, which obviously rolled at least once.
We thought we saw a careflight type helicopter, but we were only about 45 miles south of Montgomery so it would have gone north of us on takeoff. One of those things that makes you wonder why some of these drivers are so careless when this can be the outcome for more than just themselves. At least I had my camera but I wish the best of the family of that car, it was in horrible condition, unrecognizable.
While traffic in California may be bad, we rarely get stopped, but in this case we sat on I-65 for more than an hour with MANY other people. As a photographer, did I mention that I love head shots (and my wife), so, isn’t that a great shot of Deborah.
Update to This Blog
After I got back home I decided that “My Life in LA” needed to be complete. I imported, added, and re-posted all the blog entries from when we moved to LA, which was early 2006, up to this point. My apologies to those rss subscribers would are now spammed with all my previous blog posts. I am sorry, just want this to be an accurate historical record of our life in Alabama, which, at this point, began in January 2006. I did spend much of this weekend working on previous blog entries and updates to my other blogs for organizational purposes, hopefully that work is now done. Tomorrow and this week will be busy.
Nature in View
Once we got back home today we did find a female Red-Breasted Grosbeak at our feeder, along with two males. This was the first time we had seen any females and Deborah and I were both surprised to see them still here at our feeder.
