The (Incredibly Late) Official Announcement of my new ebook series Prairie Light

Greetings and New Years Wishes to you all in 2021! There were certain things I never really noticed until we moved to our present location, an old farmhouse at the corner of an intersection in Tippecanoe County in 2005. While our other home, a 1950's ranch-style home just down the road, offered me a a convenient and enjoyable view of the sunset from my kitchen sink window, it wasn't until we moved here that I started tracking both the beautiful sunrises and sunsets on our Indiana prairie and the movement of the sun on the horizon from summer to winter. At this location our neighbor's pole barn across the field became a silhouette against the horizon that only enhanced those views which I came to refer to as "Prairie Light."

After I finished writing my first ebook A Furniture Refinisher's Newsletter in 2017, I decided to follow it with a series called "Prairie Light." This series would essentially be a photo anthology, also in ebook format, long on pictures and sparse on comment, and consist of four volumes : Seasons of Light, Prairie Views, Prairie Life, and Prairie Gardens. All would feature Mother Nature in all her various moods as a back drop.

Today I would like to announce to you that the first two volumes Prairie Light: Seasons of Light and Prairie Light: Prairie Views are available at the Amazon Kindle Store for only $1.99 each. 

Following is more information about each volume:

Prairie Light: Seasons of Light - This first book of a photo anthology series "Prairie Light" features a specific area of the Midwestern tall grass prairie in central Indiana. To quote directly from the book, "Out here we do not have the quaint hills and hollows, the rolling woodlands, or the great oceans and mountain ranges of the United States, but we do have the vast sky, the prairie grasses, and Mother Nature's ever-varying moods," which the author has come to think of as "prairie light." This book is primarily about observing the beauty around you, where ever you are.

Video Sample of Photographs in Seasons of Light

Prairie Light: Prairie Views - This second book of the Prairie Light series features landscapes, skyscapes, and various rural scenes from the Indiana tall grass prairie where the land starts to flatten as it extends toward the Great Plains west of the Mississippi river. Many of the photos are taken close to where the author lives and encourage the reader to observe the beauty around them wherever they are.

Video Sample of Photographs in Prairie views

Cheers to all you photography aficionados, nature lovers, and other folks! If you are on Facebook I encourage you to check out the Indiana Nature and Wildlife Photographers page.

JuneBug

2020 in a Kinder, Gentler Light - or what to do on a home-alone holiday during a pandemic

Prairie Light: 2020 in a Kinder, Gentler Light on YouTube

New Years Greetings, all. Goodness, it's been a while since I posted an article here! This new post marks a return to Geekdom and Nerdiness, in the area of developing significant personal photo and media slideshows on your phone and tablet, with an occasional assist from your desktop or laptop. You can take the geek away from geekdom, but you can never take geekdom away from the geek, I guess.

This is the time of year for things like retrospection and introspection and resolutions and Christmas cards and letters. Among other things. So this year when I was considering what to put in my Christmas letter about the infamous 2020, I turned off onto a side path after Thanksgiving and wound up on a long journey of exploration and discovery of the past 12 years and earlier as well as new ways to tell their stories.

With the purchase of my iPhone X and iPad in 2018 and eventual capitulation to Apple’s demands that I have an iCloud subscription, I have slowly come to realize that I no longer needed to delete photos off my devices to save space. Apple seemed to be managing my space for me by swapping apps and media back and forth from iCloud for both devices. I realized that nowadays when young people buy a new phone they don’t have to lose all their photos and that they can accumulate quite a pocket pictorial history on their devices. Perhaps the first generation to experience such continuity! Lately Apple has gone to all the trouble to curate and organize our photo libraries on our devices by years, months, and days so that we can easily go back to a period of time and look through a beautiful display. Heck Apple will even do a slide show for us at the press of a button, especially nice when used with Apple’s Album feature. Gone are the days of looking for a printed date-stamp on the back of an old film photo, or, if like me, you have eventually abandoned all other cameras in favor of the one on your phone, the days of keeping an accurate date setting on your standalone digital camera. Our phone cameras automatically keep track of time right down to the day and hour the photo was taken! How convenient! 

 Anyway, as I was mulling all of this, it occurred to me, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go back to the time that I started regularly using my phone camera (around 2012 when I had to spend several months on the east coast helping family) and get all of those photos on or back on my iCloud photo library? Then I could take advantage of Apple’s great tools to curate my own slide show productions of each year. (Only I would probably have to move to a higher storage plan on iCloud, especially if I threw in an occasional favorite from a standalone digital camera as well.)

 In 2019 a bolt of lightning struck a tree close to our house and did considerable damage, including killing our tv. We replaced it with a tv of similar price, only now tv’s were “Smart.” I knew the new tv had two USB ports (and could browse the internet), and I wondered what would happen if I loaded my slide shows onto a thumb drive and simply plugged it in to the tv. Would it work like a dvd player only hopefully with the original resolution?

 The iPhone and iPad have some pretty quick and easy slide-show and movie apps, except that through the years they have moved to subscription-based fees for use. Having intermittently toyed for years with video and slide-show editors, from PowerPoint on, I had in mind the tools I wanted an app to have for such a large project (year-in-review slide shows from 2012 to 2020). I didn’t want limits on the number of slides per show and I did want to be able to include video. Furthermore, while the ability to “touch” every slide would be nice (the ability to specify captions, styles and effects, duration, and transitions at the individual slide level), I mostly wanted the ability to specify these types of things globally (for all the slides) and be able to run with it. Background music would be nice, including the ability to import free music from other sources like YouTube’s free music library. Adequate resolution was important and ended up being one of the “hitches” I had to troubleshoot along the way. I ended up using an app called Slideshow Maker Video & Photo by Alan Cushway with a very doable annual subscription fee of 7.99 per year. iMovie complemented Alan’s App, by letting me add a running title so we could see which year we were watching as the slide show played. So I ended up rendering the movie twice – once in Alan’s app to build the slide show, and again in iMovie, as a single movie slide, so I could add the running title. I worried about how the resolution would be affected by rendering the slideshow twice, but in the end the quality was quite acceptable, at least from the distance we watch our TV.

 In theory my plan to use iPhone and iPad devices to do this project (years-in-review slide shows from 2012 to 2020) seemed like it should work pretty seamlessly. But in actuality, I regularly hit roadblocks in the execution. Two major challenges were internet bandwidth and my laptop’s cpu power/hard drive space. The bandwidth problem is related to where I live which is out in the country where high speed internet is nonexistent. Actually our rural electric cooperative has been working to bring high speed internet to our area for a couple of years now and if things go according to plan, our area should have high-speed internet by 2024. Yay, but I needed it now. 

 So, here’s where bandwidth became an issue in my project. I had been diligently keeping backups of my digital photos over the years. However many of those years I did not have an iCloud account (if such a thing even existed in 2012) and so I had to find a way to get those older photos from my pc over to iCloud. Not hard in theory. You can mount iCloud on your desktop or laptop computer essentially as another hard drive and then use File Explorer (or Finder) to copy files over. However, through the years as cell phone camera usage increased, I had accumulated literally thousands of pictures. =:o I didn’t want to have to go through them on my pc. I wanted to dump them over to iCloud, and use Apple’s more intuitive sorting and viewing tools to cull and curate them. However I soon found that trying to copy over thousands of photos at a time from my pc to my iCloud drive was a slow, treacherous, and torturous process which often sent my internet bandwidth and my pc’s cpu power to Never-Never Land. And I feared that my pc hard drive storage would be used up as well because I was essentially duplicating files already on my hard drive by placing them in the iCloud folder. I wondered if iCloud would manage its space on my pc hard drive as it did on my phone and iPad. The other thing about iCloud is that (unlike me) Apple stores all those photos through the years in ONE folder. We are talking about a folder with 30,000 to 60,000 photo and video files in it mounted as a hard drive on my pc. Enough to bring any consumer operating system to its knees, I guess! I wondered if those photos I tried to copy over would eventually show up in my iPhone and iPad photo libraries. Some did. I discovered them in my Recents folder first mixed in among my current photos. Eventually Apple would curate some by month and year. I usually had to wait a day or two with large transfers. Some photos went to Never-Never Land. Eventually I resigned to curating on the PC and copying over the photos I wanted to include in the slide shows in small batches. Probably the wisest approach. Oh, but wait. There was yet another complication, perhaps the biggest headache of all. Apple’s camera roll tends to restart its file naming from zero after a while and especially when one gets a new phone. So I had to make sure in this huge iCloud file folder that I wasn’t overwriting different photos that happened to have the same name. Microsoft File Explorer handles this by allowing you to specify which file you want to keep – the one already in the destination folder or the one you want to copy over to it. If you decide to keep both (because you have two different photos with the same name), then File Explorer simply adds a number to one of them. With the slowness of the huge iCloud folder to update and display (as in NEVER), managing the process of not overwriting files was perhaps the worst task of all. Often it was like flying blind. In the process of trying and re-trying, I fear I have ended up with many duplicate photos with a unique number after their name which I will have to eventually figure out how to remove from iCloud. =:o

When all the photos I wanted for a given year were finally in my iPhone and iPad libraries, I was ready to start production of the slide shows. I will say that choosing the music to go with any given slide show was a challenging process for me both artistically and technically, particularly if I wanted to use a piece that was not included in my slide-show app’s soundtracks. Soundtracks were the best choice because they would automatically replicate and run to the end of the video and end at a good ending point. But they were limited in choice. So sometimes I went to the YouTube free audio library for pieces of background music which I then had to fade out "by hand."

Often times the documentation for the app isn’t detailed enough if you need to trouble-shoot. I think I ended up downloading many YouTube library pieces to my OneDrive App and from there to Apple’s File App. Apple conceptualized its operating system differently from Microsoft. Any given photo file has to “belong” to an App on the iPhone, iPad, or Mac before the App is able to see it and work with it. I’m not sure why I couldn’t download directly from YouTube free music library to the iPad's File App or to the Slideshow App itself but in many cases, it seemed to work better if I used OneDrive and the File App as intermediaries. On the artistic side, I wanted music to be a subtle background enhancement (usually). I tried to pick music that reflected the mood of the picture or of our experiences at the time. But I also felt like the music should make room for a little of the poignancy that sometimes comes when a person looks back on and remembers life gone by. I was mostly drawn to acoustic music for its intimacy and with my husband Ben’s musical preferences in mind.

I did run into some limitations with the iPad and the movie/slideshow apps that required trouble shooting. Sometimes I got fuzzy quality when I rendered the slideshow in Alan Cushway's App.  Revisiting all the photos I was using in the library and making sure they finished downloading from iCloud seemed to help that. iMovie seemed to know when a photo or video needed to finish downloading. Sadly I wasn’t able to save all my projects so I wouldn’t have to recreate all the steps. Alan Cushway App's does not save project steps, so there nothing that could be done about that. iMovie and the iPad kept running out of space to render. I recalled the days when I provided support for office Macintoshes. Back then Macintosh applications had a memory setting that could be increased if the application ran out of memory (the pc’s memory allocations were all somehow negotiated by the Microsoft operating system). Anyway on the iPad and the iPhone Apps there appeared to be no such setting as was had by their old Macintosh counterparts. So it was out with the old iMovie project to make way for the new. At least I had the final products if not all the steps that created them.

 For the final year, 2020, I did the whole show with iMovie. After all I was down to the last production and I didn’t mind so much having to touch each slide. It was iMovie that showed me the power of the Ken Burns' feature in story-telling with still photos. In Cushway’s app, I could size the whole photo down to fit the screen, so that’s what I mostly did with years 2012 through 2019. iMovie didn’t seem to want to let me do that. So I started working with the Ken Burns' feature and discovered that you could make a still photo more like a movie by revealing it gradually and intentionally. Also you could zoom in and out to direct attention to what you wanted the viewer to notice (or not to miss).

 In the end, I plugged the thumb drive into the Smart TV with each new video and it was the first thing Ben noticed when he got up on cold December mornings. He seemed to really enjoy them. On Christmas Day we binge-watched 2012 through 2019 and on New Year’s we watched 2020, as I had held out to the last day of 2020 to finish that one.

It was interesting in this whole process to trace my increasing use of the cell phone camera and abandonment of the standalone digital camera and also to see the increasing quality of the photos I took, as both the phone cameras and the photographer got better. When I think back to the tools I had in my childhood – little box cameras with disposable flash cubes and rolls of film and developing houses – and compare them to the tools people of all ages have today, I am simply amazed. The film cameras of yesteryear required a lot of artistic and scientific skill from the photographer. They produced spectacular images, especially the 35 mm cameras, which are still the envy and the standard today. But today’s digital cameras, including cell phone cameras, put some of those skills and knowledge within the reach of the rest of us and today’s young people are among the first to have such continuity in vividly revisiting their lives and their memories.

Prairie Light: 2020 in a Kinder, Gentler Light on YouTube

Junebug

Stories from the Farm - The Jacksons' Barn

View from the parlor window when we first moved in (2005)

I've entered 2016 with a series of three posts relating to the joys and pains of prairie winters and living in old farmhouses. To go along with the photography theme of this blog, I included several photos, mostly winter scenes of seasonal birds and lovely sunrises and sunsets. Now before I "lay down my pen," I want to tie off a common thread that runs through these previous posts. In a couple of them I keep mentioning the view of our neighbors' pole barn across the field and against the horizon. Truth is, I have particularly enjoyed this scene ever since we moved here ten years ago. It is nicely framed by our parlor window and by the window over my kitchen sink. It changes with the seasons and looks spectacular at sunrise. I also enjoy it whenever I'm out in the yard.

So to wrap up this January 2016 series, following are glimpses of the Jacksons' barn in different seasons:

Over the rainbow (March 2011)

Spring daffodils (March 2012)

Beyond the lilacs (April 2012)

Cloud drama at sunset (May 2012)

Nimbus clouds (June 2010)

Part of the pleasure of seeing the Jackson's barn is that it brings to mind our neighbors of many years, Ray and Sharon Jackson. Here's a closer view of the barn at Ray and Sharon's 85th and 80th backyard birthday celebration (2013).

In an interesting side note, our neighbor Ray Jackson (and his brother Dale who lives further down the road on 700 S) grew up in the farmhouse where Ben and I now live - back in the 1930's and '40s when it was a working farm, complete with acreage! Oh, the stories they can tell - like waking up in the morning in the upstairs bedroom with snow on their blankets and how the old farmhouse used to look and where the old barn stood. Ray's wife Sharon can chime right in with tales of the days she and Ray were courting and she would visit this house. Ray and Sharon are engaging story-tellers! (And of course a complete history of our old farmhouse would also need to include our good neighbors the Ricks's who also grew up on and farmed this property after the Jacksons.)

In closing I thought it would be fun to collage some of the photos I've included in this January series of posts so that my readers can compare and contrast the view of the Jackson's barn through the different seasons. :)

Through the seasons and through the years (2006 - 2012)  - collage done with the Atlantas App for Windows 8 and Windows 10

And now that I'm hopefully done with this series, it's time to look toward spring. It may still be January, but the days are definitely getting longer!

JuneBug

Prairie Light

Here comes the sun  (encroaching sunrise, November 2015).

Dear Readers,

Isn't it surprising how the plainest of statements and the briefest of moments can make a lasting impression on our lives? The longer we live, the more meaning some memories take on, becoming the permanent mile-markers or snap-shots in time that continue to shed light on our journey. Truth is, any seemingly inconsequential encounter can inadvertently plant a seed, open our minds to new possibilities, introduce us to something new (usually something that's right under our noses), enhance our powers of observation, or make us more aware of what's around us ... what's in us ... and what's been given to us. For instance, sometime last year I read advice from a photographer who wrote that instead of focusing on objects, we should instead focus on taking pictures of the light, e.g. choosing the camera settings that will best capture the light in the frame rather than the objects.

The lighting effect in this photo looking out from the front stoop of our old farmhouse is due to the time of day (sunrise) and atmospheric conditions of frozen fog or hoar-frost (note how it  covers the tree branches, February 2010).

That comment stuck with me (and if I ever find that link again, I'll share it). I guess one way I come close to doing that is when I take pictures of subjects that are more ethereal to begin with such as clouds, sky, and mist. Such subjects are (usually) far away and less defined; since they are not "solid," they can be challenging for automatic cameras (and everyday photographers, like me) to meter and focus on correctly to bring out their magic. This is especially true in low-light conditions which are when these subjects tend to be at their most dramatic, e.g. dawn and dusk (or as photographers tend to say, the golden hour and the blue hour).

November sunset behind our garage (2015)

In our little corner of the prairie, we get some absolutely glorious sunrises and sunsets. These are especially evident during the late fall and winter months, from November through March. It's taken me a while to realize why that is. During the long days the sun's daily trajectory moves way north on our horizon, starting behind our neighbors' grove of trees in the east and ending behind our outbuildings in the west. While billowing summer skies make spectacular subjects, sunrises and sunsets tend to be problematic because there is no unobstructed view of those points on the horizon. Any pictures of summer sunrises or sunsets tend to be "flanked" by buildings, hidden by trees, and obstructed by telephone poles and cell towers. That's not to say you can't sometimes get a good shot especially if the trees act as a light filter or the silhouette of their branches and leaves gracefully frame the composition.

One of my all-time favorites - the sun rising behind the Jacksons' barn (December 2007)

During the short days the sun's trajectory moves far south on our horizon, starting on the open prairie behind the neighbors' barn and ending behind our horse pasture. Simply put, the sunrise and sunset are much more visible during late fall and winter in our neck of the woods. Amazing that it's taken me ten years of living here to finally reach that conclusion, lol! Anyway, during winter when nature's sounds and colors fade away, don't forget to look upward! :)

Following are some scenes of the the winter prairie that I hope you will enjoy.

Stories from the Farm - Over My Kitchen Sink

Last spring I posted an article On Armchair Photography and Other Vantage Points. At that time the magnolia tree in the back yard was still blooming and I could admire it from a rocking chair that sits by a window in the old summer kitchen (which has long served as anything but that, including a work-room, sun-room, guest room, office, and on occasion a one-room apartment).

A cleome seems to peek in at my kitchen sink clutter (2013)

A hummingbird enjoys a drink from the feeder right outside the window (2006)

View of Jacksons' barn after harvest 2005 (one of my first photos of this vista)

Today I want to talk about a different vantage point, the view from over my kitchen sink (same room designation, different room). Whereas the summer kitchen looks out from the back of the house in three directions (southeast, west, and north), my kitchen sink window looks out toward the front of the house (due east). This unassuming little window has surprised me with  many beautiful views through the seasons. A flower bed with two magnolia bushes wraps around this corner of the kitchen. Beyond it the front yard stretches out to the drive way which curves gracefully in from the road welcoming any visitors. Across the road which is bordered by a field the Jackson's red barn stands out against a wide prairie sky in the distance. So in early spring I enjoy the delicate, glowing magnolia blooms and the colorful spring bulbs in the flower bed; in the summer it's the cleomes and the susans that reach clear up to the window sill, the Queen Anne's lace growing across the road, and the hummingbirds that frequent the feeders; and in the fall it's the view of the Jackson's barn after the corn has been harvested.

A pair of Christmas Cardinals adorn my snow-covered magnolia bush (2007).

But in the winter, it's the beautiful sunrises and the winter birds.

The people who owned this old farmhouse for many years must have loved birds. For many years when Ben and I rode our bikes past this place, there was a purple martin house on a tall pole in the front yard. When we purchased the property in 2005 the purple martin house was gone but we inherited several little bird houses hanging in trees. The flower beds and bushes around the old house with its modern picture windows seemed designed to draw in the birds for all to see. For instance the winter birds shelter themselves from the wind and sun themselves on the bare magnolia-bush branches just outside the kitchen sink window. For that reason I have gotten into the habit of taking out the screen during the cold weather months for a better view - and for the occasional photo opportunity.

So let me introduce you to some more of our fine feathered friends:

Stories from the Farm - the Different Faces of Winter

New year's greetings to one and all, and I hope everyone is getting used to writing 2016 instead of 2015 on all their documents! Speaking of transitions, when you live in a four-season climate like Ben and I do, there seems to be such a marked contrast between life in December and life in January. It's not just about the end of the holidays or about a new start although those transitions play in to the equation; it's about how we shift so abruptly from the warmth and gentleness of December's festive preparations and celebrations into basic survival mode of winter in January. I've experienced this transition all my adult life (and even written a poem or two about it). I've lived in this little section of southern Tippecanoe County for thirty-five years, twenty-five of them in a modest ranch-style home on one corner, and the past ten in a old yellow farm house on the next corner. I like to tell people we moved a mile down the road and a hundred years back in time. :) In all these years of country living, the shift in focus as we move past the holidays has always seemed abrupt - like jumping into a tub of ice-water!

Put Christmas away slowly
December dark and deep with verdant hues of gold and ruby, Laughter mingles with the scents of baked ham or turkey in warm houses where candles burn in windows, and carols drift over snow-covered, glowing branches.
The new year stretches out before us in stark, dark, frozen silence.
It hints at promise, like the half spent candle floats and flickers faintly in a clear glass bowl of water.
Once again we deal with the basic survival set, do battle with the elements.
Yes, put Christmas away slowly.
As the days grow longer, gently fold the last Christmas card away with its newsletter into a torn envelope, and lay it on the heap of Christmases past.

Winter winds bring us winter bouquets

More  of Junebug's writing at www.secondlooks.biz/writingsite/

This year is no different. December was extremely damp and wet. Sunless, in fact. No snow, however. But 9 days into January (and right on schedule) the winter winds picked up and the January temps dipped down to zero. This is when I brace for the usual onslaught of "winter woes." This year with all the rain in December, our outdoor faucet-handles locked up, our door-locks wouldn't turn, and the garage doors refused to stay shut. As a rule, the heating bill triples in January and the plumbing in this old house gets kinda slow and funky because the ground is either too frozen or too wet. In fact last winter some of the old galvanized plumbing between our outdoor pump and our indoor pressure tank which supplies the house with water rusted out. The cellar started to flood and we had to shut off the cold water to the side of the house which contains our laundry room and spare bathroom. So for about a month I was filling the washing machine with cold water from the kitchen sink until the ground could dry up enough for the excavators to dig up and replace the pipes. =:o Ah, the joys of living in an old farmhouse.

2016 found us emerging from a lovely, albeit somewhat hectic, holiday season and facing a hernia repair surgery for Ben the first week of January. All farm boys prefer to have their surgeries in the winter months with plenty of time to recoup for spring planting. It is now January 14th and Ben's recovery is going as well as can be expected for having a hole in his abdomen patched (ouch). But then one of our tires sprang a slow leak that won't seem to fix; and it snowed and of course Ben is not allowed on the tractor.

Stories from the Farm - A New Year's Eve Buggy Ride

composite photo done with techniques taught by Fine Arts photographer  Stephanie Laird

So here's the story. Once upon a time there was this couple named Matt and Mary. Their 34th wedding anniversary was coming up. 

Matt asked Mary which restaurant they were going to go to celebrate and Mary replied, "If you really cared, you would take me for a ride on a horse and carriage for our anniversary." 

Apparently she had been saying the same thing for every anniversary for the past ten years. "I don't even know anyone who has a carriage," Matt helplessly told his buddy Dale at work. "How am I supposed to arrange this?" 

Well, Dale happened to be Ben's and my neighbor. "I think I know someone who might be able to help," said Dale.

So early in December, Dale brought Matt over and introduced him to Ben. Matt told Ben come rain or shine, he wanted to take his wife on a buggy ride the day of their anniversary, December 31st, 2015. It was to be a surprise.

Throughout the holidays which were rainy and cold, we kept wondering if our passengers would really show up.

"I sure hope she's not expecting fancy horses and a fancy carriage," said I. 

"I sure hope the weather's decent," said Ben.

But Matt kept calling to make sure we were still on and sure enough at four o'clock New Year's Eve he brought his wide-eyed bride to our place where Ben and Rodney (another neighbor) had the mules brushed, harnessed, and hitched up to the Ben's home-made surrey. Matt's buddy Dale appeared with a thermos of hot chocolate and attached a camera to the back of the surrey to record the event. I brought out a basketful of old blankets still warm from the dryer for all to use and off they all went for a ride around the block - which is about 4 miles in the country or an hour's ride for Kate and Annie (who are no speed demons). The day was dreary and damp and cold as could be, but when Kate and Annie pulled the wagon back into the driveway, the happy couple still had stars in their eyes. 

Happy Anniversary, Mary and Matt, and Happy New Year to All!

JuneBug

Stories from the Farm - Morning Mist, Dew Drops, and Some Very Artistic Spiders

Every once in a while Mother Nature sends us a beautiful misty morning when the clouds appear to rise up from the ground and end just above the tree-tops. Gaggles of geese fly low, cloaked in mist, and the shrouded sun rises on a hazy horizon. On these mornings, literally everything is drenched in dew, beads lining each blade of grass; each flower petal, stamen and pistil; and each little insect leg and antenna.

These mornings don't seem to come often.* This year there were two of them.

One such morning came for me in the early spring. The winter had been hard and very cold, but on the morning of April 17th, the world was newly green and blooming in the sun-kissed mist. I grabbed my camera to look for beaded spider webs and other wonders and was rewarded with the following pictures:

Magnolias in the mist

Morning dew and mist

Pasture through the mist

Reflecting dew drops on lily leaves and spider web

Another such morning came just this past September 12th. As the winter of 2015 had been unusually cold, so had the summer of 2015 been unusually wet. When the calendar reached August, I began to notice a predominance of spiderwebs in the yard. Actually I couldn't help but notice because I was always walking into them and brushing them out of my face and hair. =:o They would stretch from the tree branches all the way down to the ground and from the clothesline clear over to the flower beds that hug the summer kitchen. They adorned all the shrubs and bushes. On a sunny day I couldn't walk outside without unintentionally walking through a spider web! So when I awoke on this misty September morning, I grabbed my camera and went outside hoping to find spiderwebs bejeweled in dew. I was not disappointed. Our yard was literally decked out in spiderwebs that morning, especially along the shrubbery and the chicken run. I decided we'd been blessed with some very artistic spiders! I will end this post with a few samples from this once-in-a-lifetime misty-morning exhibit:

Ornate web

Stories from the Farm - Little Visitors

It's a cool morning three days past mid-August. There is no need to run fans, night or day, and the windows remain wide open even though an intermittently cloudy sky has been spitting rain. Through the windows floats a cool breeze and the almost constant crescendo and diminuendo of the cicadas' chorus, drowning out other songs of summer. The school buses have started running their routes again. In stores and nurseries all over town, the traditional stock of summer plants has disappeared almost overnight, replaced by Mums and pumpkins. Even though the bean and gold-tipped corn fields are still green and yards are awash in blooms, there's a feeling of fall in the air, signaled perhaps by the scent of summer growth maturing and seeding out, the aging light of a sun sitting lower in the sky, and by a slight change of pace as the traffic-flow starts to increase. The days are getting noticeably shorter.

Hello, World. Perchance send a gnat or a mosquito my way?

Welcome to  my world!

Signs of encroaching fall aside, however, it is still mid-August. The tomatoes are red-ripe on the vine and the vegetables are fresh from the garden. There is still plenty of summer left to enjoy!  

One morning last week, a slight movement on a leaf of one of my cleomes drew my eye to this little baby tree frog outside my kitchen window. By the time I got outside with my camera and found him again, he was clinging to the cleome's seed pods - he's only about an inch long with his little spindly legs and suction-cup toes tucked around him - so tiny! Made me think of all the little tadpoles that occupied our flooded ditch this wet, wet summer and wonder if he had been one of them.

Tussock Moth Caterpillar

And WOO HOO! I finally have Monarch caterpillars on my Milkweed plants! The Milkweed plants I came by a few years ago at the Master Gardeners' Garden Expo. I always look forward to this annual spring event at the fairgrounds because the Master Gardeners dig and sell plants from their own yards and gardens. It's a great way to get inexpensive starts of plants that are resilient in this area of the country. Various vendors also participate and the Master Gardeners offer educational lectures as well. This particular year, I stopped at the booth of a lady who was advocating to save the Monarch butterfly.  I made a donation and she sold me a Milkweed plant. Milkweed plants have been happily thriving in my garden ever since. I had never really noticed any Monarch larvae on them, however. (Probably because I didn't know what Monarch larvae looked like, lol.) Then this summer I spotted five or six of the creatures shown above right crawling around on my Milkweed Plants. I was so excited! I assumed they were Monarch larvae. False alarm. They are actually Tussock moth larvae.

Monarch Caterpillar chewing away on a Milkweed leaf

So I was somewhat disappointed - and humbled because I had uploaded a photo on Facebook and told all my friends it was of a Monarch caterpillar. But a few days later, along comes the real deal (as show to the left)! I have spotted three of these on my Milkweed plants so far.

So, enjoy the rest of your summer, and keep your fingers crossed along with me or send up a prayer that my little visitors survive to have long, happy, and productive lives!

JuneBug

Mysterious pupa on my Milkweed

Another Monarch caterpillar grazes behind a pupa

Introducing a New Photo Exhibit: the Tippecanoe-County-Fair Antique-Tractor Parades and Exhibit 2015!

Greetings, everyone who happens upon these pages! A few months ago I wrote a blog post introducing readers to my "Scrappy" photo gallery site. Today, I am announcing the website has just gotten its new "summer look" with new feature photos and one new exhibit:

Tippecanoe County Fair Antique Tractor Parades and Exhibit 2015

Ben pulling a wagon with the Allis Chalmers D  in Sunday's parade at the fair

Ben always exhibits his old Allis Chalmers D and Ford Series 2000 tractors at the County Fair Antique Tractor Exhibit and he and his son Steven drive them in the three tractor parades that take place during fair week. This year I tried to get a picture of all the entries at each parade. I didn't succeed 100% but I got most!

If you like county fairs and enjoy old tractors, drop by my photography site and have a look! While you're there, check out my other feature exhibits:

• Workers' Rally at the Statehouse March 2011
• Lafayette Columbian Park 2014
• Tippecanoe County Extension Community Gardens (*new additions for 2015*)
• Prophetstown State Park 2007
• Indianapolis Fairgrounds Flower and Patio Show 2015
• This Old Farmhouse Tour 2009

To find out more about these exhibits, read below or better yet drop by for a visit!

Stories from the Farm - Riding Katie

Three little friends on their first mule ride

In the country the pace of summer usually picks up in July, right after Independence Day celebrations. The county fair is two weeks away and there are projects and entries to ready for the Home Show and 4H exhibits. There's pre-registration. Then there's getting these items to the Fair. And then there's the week of the fair, By then the weather usually turns blistering hot and the vegetable garden starts producing. There are summer family reunions to attend, the usual home chores to complete, the yard to mow, and the garden and flowers to water (but not this year). People start to meet themselves coming and going. 

Ben and I really enjoyed the week of the fair this summer. Ben participated in three tractor parades and one night I brought my ninety-year-old mother, so we were there almost everyday for one reason or another. We usually ate dinner at the pork and cattlemen's tent and visited with friends and neighbors we hadn't seen in a while. Ben also loves the stand that sells roast'n ears (corn on the cob). The Extension Homemakers run a Country Kitchen that is air-conditioned. They serve breakfast and family style meals in the evenings - we usually eat there at least once with our friend Lowell Oesterling. And then there's the carnival. We get ice cream cones and lemon and orange shake-ups from the carnival vendors - and ever since I discovered funnel cakes at the State Fair a few years ago,  I am always sorely tempted to buy one. YUM!

Ben pulling the surrey in Monday's Antique Tractor Parade

Ben defied the unusally rainy weather and drove his Ford and Allis-Chalmers tractors in for the Antique Tractor Exhibit the Friday before the fair, the Allis in the morning and the Ford after lunch. He pulled a little surrey with a fringe on top behind the Ford for the grand-kids to ride behind the tractor in the parades. I drove behind him on that second trip to town. Our half of the sky was sunny most of the way but all the while a vast black sky loomed before us. I could tell by the water tower that it had swallowed the fairgrounds. The rain cut loose a few blocks before we reached Teal Road. Ben pulled over and made a dash for the car but still got absolutely soaked. Good thing I thought to bring along a change of clothes, just in case! 

Dairy Tent

The grand-kids worked in the dairy booth and showed dairy calves this year as well as participating in the rabbit and chicken exhibit. The rabbits and poultry are usually housed in the same building at the fairgrounds - one of my favorite exhibits, but this year sadly 4H participants couldn't bring their chickens, ducks, and geese in because of the avian flu. Instead the cages had photos in them - and I think the actual  judging took place at people's homes and farms. We missed seeing all the beautiful and sometimes exotic poultry.

Double-page Scrapbooking Layout for the Fair

For my part, I usually bring entries for the Home Show's photography and scrapbooking exhibits. Every year I say it's going to be my last time, but every year I seem to end up with a few photos earmarked for the fair.

But today's farm story, while it occurred during fair week, actually took place at our farm - as a sort of respite from all the commotion and activities of a rather muddy fair. (Coming home to our old farmhouse in the country always seems so peaceful after being at the fair.) Tuesday of fair week, some former neighbors called and asked if they could bring their new neighbors out to see Kate and Annie, Ben's draft mules.

Stories from the Farm - Saga of the Sunflower Seeds

This little farm story starts with a Christmas gift a few years ago:

One Christmas I got a cute sunflower-seed bird-feeder in the shape of a snowman from my daughter. I hung it on a tree by the driveway to feed the winter birds.

That next summer, up pops a magnificent volunteer sunflower in my horse-hitch flower bed, close to where the bird feeder hung

One day after the sunflower matured and went to seed (sometime in July),  I noticed a little goldfinch absorbed in eating the sunflower's seeds. I was able to get close enough to take this photo. 

A few weeks later, the seeds were all gone!

So fast forward to this summer of 2015:

Photoshop Actions, Overlays, and Textures for under Twenty-five Dollars

I keep seeing all these wonderful online ads about textures and lately, Photoshop Actions and Overlays that you can purchase and apply to your photographs to turn them into works of art. Due to cookies and other forms of internet magic, these ads keep following me around, teasing me and tempting me! The results shown in these ads look absolutely beautiful and the products seem like they'd be fun to learn. Until I see the price tag, that is. These products may or may not make my photos beautiful, but one thing for sure, they can be prohibitively expensive. So I want some certainty before I buy.

How to Photograph Falling Magnolia Blossoms

I've always loved drifting petals and petal drifts. A couple of years ago I happened to be in Virginia during cherry blossom time. Not only were the cherry trees gorgeous, but their drifting petals filled the air like falling snow. Seriously. I even tried to capture it on video.

So back home in Indiana this spring when the petals on my beautiful magnolia tree started blanketing the ground, I thought I would try to capture their descent. I guess there are many ways you could approach this ... a close up of a single petal in mid-air, a long exposure that would leave a trail of movement or even a multiple exposure showing the descent of a petal. All challenging shots in their own right (at least for me).

"Steal Like an Artist" by Austin Kleon on a Coffee Table 
  at a 2015 Indianapolis Flower and Patio Show exhibit.

As it turns out, a simple, straight-forward approach was enough of a challenge! It's not easy to capture a petal in flight. But let me digress. Back in March I went with a friend to the Indianapolis Flower and Patio show at the state fairgrounds. While I was admiring a particular landscape display, a little book entitled "Steal Like an Artist" lying a coffee table caught my eye. The landscaper told me that his daughter was an artist and that this was her favorite book. Intrigued, I snapped a photo. When I got home, I ordered this book and another entitled "Show Your Work," both in ebook format and both by the same author Austin Kleon. I enjoyed them both, especially the latter. Some concepts I garnered from Austin are that you need to find a group of like-minded people - or let them find you; that online is the best venue for meeting like-minded people these days; and that to be found online you need to establish a long-lived online presence. Last but not least you need to show your work - only work to Austin is not just the final product - but also the process. He says we should be active everyday and share bits and pieces of things we are working on ... So I'm going to share a few lessons learned from some 200 attempts to capture petals in flight. I know, kinda lame, but it is one of the things I've been trying to learn how to do in my photography.

If you're going for stop-action on moving objects, then you need high shutter-speed (burst shooting capability is also nice). So any setting that gives you the highest viable shutter speed (whether you choose a wide-aperture or work in shutter-speed priority) is good. Also, for high shutter-speed you'll need good light - so early to mid-afternoon with its usually problematic high contrast is not necessarily a bad time of day in this case.

Multiple vantage points work, but I found in looking at some of my 200 photos, that petals show up best either silhouetted against the sky or against something light - or if the petals themselves are gleaming in the sunlight, against something darker. In the wide-open Indiana prairies, petals do not fill the air like drifting snow (unlike Virginia). So wait for a breeze gust or better yet a steady wind.  Aim and focus toward the direction the wind is blowing the petals to have a better chance of catching them. Focusing or metering on the trunk of the tree provided me a fairly nice medium gray tone and adequate depth of field. (I should also mention that the sun was at my back, in the west - and I forget whether I set the camera to spot-meter or to center-weight meter.) Also if you can, position yourself where you can see the top of the tree. Wait to see several blossoms start to descend - and press and hold that button! If you're lucky you'll catch 'em in mid-air. My frustration was that my camera only did three bursts and then lagged in recording them, thereby limiting my ability to keep shooting. Probably using a tripod and remote control would be good - but I need to brush up on those skills. I set the camera to ISO 100 which gives sharp, beautiful detail (but higher ISO's will allow you to work at higher shutter speeds). I think in my best shot I forgot I had set the focus to macro or macro zoom - and that actually lent a nice little exaggeration to the photo. (Or maybe that's just my imagination.) In post-processing, perhaps adding a motion filter to the photo would also help emphasize falling or drifting petals.

Falling and drifting magnolia blossoms - best viewed full screen

Falling and drifting magnolia blossoms - zoomed in

My final thought on this topic, is that this shot was a lot of work for relatively little return (capturing about seven little petals in flight), and is probably more easily and successfully attempted in Virginia during cherry blossom time. ;)

In the meantime, happy shutter-bugging!

JuneBug

May and June

In May and June when the flowers bloom,
and the air is filled with a sweet perfume,
and the petals blow like the drifting snow,
then the neighbors forget their winter woe
and greet one another on a sunset stroll.

from poems.html