Shades of Grey #2

I love to play with photos almost as much as I love taking them.  The 'grey' prompt is, for me, an invitation to get out the photo editor and have fun.

I do have another grey squirrel shot, though.  I was really torn between the two of them (see post below this one) but went with the other one as the model was in coffee pot mode.  This shot is at extreme telephoto, hand held.  I love my camera.

I hauled out several shots from earlier exercises and played with them.  Moved them to grey scale, inverted, played with the intensity and generally had fun.

102/365 inversion.  Should have cleaned the background here.

103/365 geranium.

104/365  pond scene

I also wanted to show you where the squirrel shots were taken.  Little Stuff and her dad have turned their back yard into a bird restaurant.  The squirrels, while not invited, are also ubiquious.

Running Hard

I have just deleted a whole paragraph of whines about old age and too much to do.  I got tired of listening to myself complain to myself, if that makes any kind of sense.  Tomorrow I head off to the city to grandkid sit for part of the weekend, although not much sitting will be involved, I am pretty sure. Little Stuff and I are going to be making pies because the big fund-raising event at the local Community Hall takes place on Sunday.  It's called the 'Hunters' Dinner' because we hold it during deer hunting season - there are a lot of hunters and hunt camps around the area.  We feed over 300 people usually in a couple of hours, and we have a reputation for good quality pies and lots of them. 

There are lots of orange figures staked out through the bush this week and the four-wheelers are humming in and out of the hunt camp on the next lot over from ours.  I don't think they have any deer yet because no one has arrived on our doorstep with a dripping bag of liver  - JG told them we like liver and we have had a gift of one every November ever since those unwise words.  And I am having the annual attack of driving nerves I have every hunt season since I hit a spooked deer and crunched up the front of my poor Jeep.  (Okay, poor deer also.)

There are fewer deer visible this fall than during the last several years, but we still see them most days because we put feed and corn out on a rock at the bottom of our back field.  Here are three of them, looking hopeful.

096/365  I think this is a mom and two almost grown children.  We haven't seen a single buck this year.

Alas, it is November.  Frost and wet rain and wet snow and falling temperatures and dark, short days.  I find it hard to keep my spirits up until the Christmas rush overwhelms me and there is no time at all to brood.  I've been admiring other people's frost and first snow photos; here are my attempts.  Please don't notice that the planters are still on the porch and not cleared away until next year.

097/365 Please note the stylish snow tam Mr Pumpkin is wearing.

098/365  Flash frozen geranium close-up.  

099/365  Hoar frost.

I'm still also playing around with self-photos in my trifold mirror.  This one is a little better than the last try. 

100/365  Looking over my own shoulder.

Yahoo.  100.  I am now going to find out what the prompt is for the coming week.  And admire some of the other 365ers' work.  There's a link to the list in the upper right corner of the right column -- go and take a look.  Some of the work is truly excellent and all of it is fun.

Spooky

We went to Montreal over the weekend and I hopefully lugged my camera along, wanting a fine vista from Mont Royale and some last-of-the-autumn shots.  Rained out.  Sigh.

However, we dropped in on Little Stuff and her parents to help her prepare for her Halloween outing and eat pizza and I now, finally, have some photos of the jellyfish costume and her mother's classy spooky decorations for the great night.

As of this morning, I am told that the costume was a great success - she got a lot of compliments and interest - and candy, of course.  Which were deserved; she worked very hard to make it.


091/365 - the Jellyfish girl is admired by all.

092/365 A tour de force jack-o-lantern face.

093/365 Decorated for Hallowe'en

094/365 The full jellyfish rig.

095/365 bat light

She also had glow-in-the-dark face paint.  I have no idea how her mother got her cleaned up.

On Where I Live

 087/365  This one is titled, 'Where IS everybody".

Have you ever noticed how the very tipmost leaves hang on when all of the others are long vanished?  I explect that there is some scientific reason that my brainy ED could explain to me, but I prefer to think of this one as the baby of the bunch who does not want to leave home.

 088/365.

Every year I take photos of glowing trees and forests pulsating with colour.  But these last few burnished leaves, accented by the absence of light and their fellows, are so beautiful.

089/365.

090/365

This is the cemetary of the hamlet near where I live.  The old part of this graveyard is grey and sere on a misty day, the legends slowly eroding from the stones, but in the new part, the families have decorated and elaborated and the monuments are new and shiny.  If you magnify this last shot a bit, you will see that the centre gravestone, the one with the tub of gold chrysanthemums in frontof it, also has a hummingbird feeder on a hook at the left hand side.  I am not sure whose grave this is, but whoever it is, I would wager, loved hummingbirds.

Can I have the last two count for both idiomatic and spooky? No?  Oh, well.  I agree that these graves, in their festive decorations, are not the least spooky.

Idiomatic

After some brooding about the latest 365 prompt, I realized that I have at least one photo in the ready pile that answers it.

We have a lot of buildings around here with the characteristic 'doghouse' on the top - old and decrepit ones, new and spiffy ones, big ones, tiny ones.  In Eastern Ontario a building with a doghouse on the roof is a sugar shack or sugar camp, a building used to boil down maple sap until it becomes syrup.  The 'doghouse' has removable sides and when the sap is boiling, the excess steam escapes through it, making the main part of the building less steamy and improving visibility.

 087/365 - idiomatic - an old sugar camp on Concession 2.

More Catching Up

We had a lovely, lovely sunny fall weekend - a bit cool, but not imposibly so.  The YD went canoeing on the Petawawa River and had, according to her, a lovely time.  Brrr.  It is 8 C out there this morning.  She did not take the large white dog, figuring it would be too cold for her.  Her father rolled his eyes at this, but I didn't - the LWD will wade into water at the slightest provocation and getting her coat soaked at these temperatures would not be good for her if you couldn't dry her off.  Ah, the joys of pet ownership.


At any rate, we had this glorious sun and I decided to play with shooting directly into it.  Probably not good for my camera sensors, but I wanted to try.  I also wanted to capture the oak on the front lawn as it was looking very nice decked out in deep red and rust.

071/365  -- notice how cleverly I have hidden the satellite dish behind the trunk.

 072/365.  Dramatic, in a strange way.

I was also up early one day this weekend and as we are still on Daylight Saving time, I got to see the sunrise.  It was very cool and still and damp - there was not a bird chirp or rustle of leaves.

073/365.  What I saw first - and took without the flash on the camera, being somewhat dopey and not outside of my first coffee.

 074/365 A few minutes later, with flash. I can't decide whether the colour did intensify or using the flash changed the sensor reception.

I'm still playing around with the oxymoron prompt.  Can't leave this kind of thing alone.  I looked at my office desk the other day and one of my mother's expressions surfaced in my mind -- "A fine mess you've made of it!' she used to say.

075/365

I have tidied all the mess into one pile this morning, as my cleaner is here and I don't like to watch strong women weep.  But I will have to disentangle it later and Do Somthing with most of it.  Maybe a bonfire would be a good option.  Maybe not, though.  There is, I think, a cheque lurking in there somewhere.  No better incentive to file than finding money while you do it.

076/365.  If only this fellow were a bit bigger and more, um, animated.

Oxymorons

Yep.  That's the mind bending prompt that the 365 project photographers are struggling with this week.  Good grief!

Here are a few that I've squeezed out of the reluctant brain - I confess to having grabbed a couple I took earlier in this project and coudn't think what to do with.  There's also one I took a while back and have used once before, but it meets the prompt so well that I'm recycling it.
065/365

 066/365

 067/365

 068/365

 069/365

and finally 070/365  Bedrock.

Goodbye Sun

A long line of gray clouds is pushing in across the sky, ending five days of the most perfect fall weather I remember for a long time.  All of Thanksgiving weekend was spectacular; days full of sun and skies so bright a blue as to dazzle the eye.  My family came out from the cities where they live and played and took marvellous photographs, while I stuffed stuffed bird in and out of the oven and prepared The Feast.  The event also included JG's birthday and so two cakes were added to the traditional pumpkin and apple pies.  And cookies, some of which were part of JG's birthday gift.

056/365  A work of art!  Little Stuff and her mother made this woodland scene for Grampa.  And it is delicious!

Meanwhile, I have been lugging my camera around in the car (and driving somewhat erratically) as I looked at the scenery more than the road.  Have you ever noticed how many power lines polute the pristine vistas of Ontario?  So, craft having been the object, I took long shots and have just finished editing out the junk.

057/365  Long view.

I've been somewhat obsessed by these long views - here are a few of the results.  Where I've had to do a major edit, I'm putting in both before and after.  In the one above, for instance, I erased the power lines by using a cut and paste.  The little cloud, for example, is bigger in the cleaned version as I used it to cover some of the power line.  I use Corel PhotoPaint for this kind of thing.

058/365 This one worked

And this one, not.

 059/365 - down our road.

060/365

Here's another power line edit, this one of a local church where the old, crumbling headstones were reset and preserved.

061/365

I should have t aken out the wire on the far left as well.  Or cropped more.

062/365

 This is the original - of a barn a few hundre metres down the road from where we live.  It's taken in the last of the light.  Then I played with it.
063/365

This is what happens when you play with the intensity and light values to equalize the two halves.  Kind of neat.

And, because they are so beautiful, my Thansgiving flowers.  Thanks, YD.
064/365.

Gee, I'm on the last day of September in posting photos.  Sigh.

Catching Up

For the last two weeks I have been working flat out on an election blog for our municipality.  I got involved with the local Business and Tourism Association which has an election committee and found myself very much involved in the all-candidates' meeting that the Association runs.  There's quite a split in public opinion and the position of candidates here, one side being somewhat similar to the Tea Party in the States (only I guess it should be a Timmy Party here, hmm?) and the other much more "small L"  liberal.

Anyway, there is a lot of controversy and the group was afraid that the all-candidates meeting might get out of hand.  They decided that to keep it on a more even keel, all questions for candidates would have to be submitted in writing before the meeting got underway.  And it became my job to number the questions coming in, type them onto a laptop and project each one up on a screen at the front of the hall as it was selected.

I borrowed my husband's lap-top, with its small screen and equally cramped keyboard and spent an unhappy hour hunched over it on an inadequate table, sorting and typing frantically.  I would not have been finished save that the Ratepayers Association had seven pre-determined questions and dropped them into the question boxes in multiples.  They would have flooded the questions if we had simply been pulling questions from the box, a somewhat sneaky ploy that is typical of how this campaign is going.

What with all of the meetings around that and the extra meetings generated by a review of the strategic plan at the Health and Community Services board of which I am past chair, I have been driving in and out of the village a lot.  And looking sadly at the fall folliage and glorious fall flowers as I whip past with no time to spare.  Yesterday I finally carved out some spare time on my way to physiotherapy and got some photos done for the 'fluff' prompt.  And I've had a few other quick stops. Given the unusually rainy and windy September we have had and the fact that there is so much moisture that the fall colours are unusually muted, my fall haul is not as good as usual.

But, for what it's worth, here is a bit of catch-up.

048/365  The stream is running high.

049/365  The colours are muted this fall.

050/365  Even my faithful red maple is mostly gold.

051/365  The milkweed pods are popping open.

052/365 Fluff!

053/365  A wild aster (also called 'Farewell Summer') and the fluff flying.

054/365.  Sunset last night - and today it is raining.  Again.

055/365.  Isn't he a sweetie?  Collected by Little Stuff last weekend, he sat for his portrait so that we could identify him.  Guess which end is the head.