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Harvesting Wind

We went out near the river to check on things at the marina.  I didn’t want my photo du jour to be of the mostly empty marina, so, we drove the countryside to find something of interest.  We took the turn that goes by the wind turbines near the LaSalle Generating Station.  There are wind turbines for as far as the eye can see.  Today was the first time I’d seen them all spinning.  There was a lot wind being harvested across the corn fields.

Funny story…  Remember last summer when we were without power for three or four days?  Well, we have power, but our home phone, television and internet access are all out of service.  Repair is scheduled for a visit in the morning.  This service outage poses quite a problem when there is a blog to get posted.  I could use the WordPress iPhone app, but I like to be able to preview the post to be sure the text and photos look okay before I hit the publish button.  So, after hastily processing the above photo, we beat a path to our local McDonald’s for an ice cream cone (for my husband), a Diet Coke (for me) and an internet connection.  What did we do before all of this connectedness?

A Walk After creativeLIVE

We watched the first day of the speedlight class on creativeLIVE.com.  I’m trying to get up enough courage to start using the flashes that we have.  The class today was helpful in explaining some things that I didn’t understand.  Now, it’s a matter of being brave, grabbing a speedlight and giving it a try.

After the class, we headed out to Pratt’s Wayne Woods for a walk and to take a photo.  While we walked, we saw families out fishing together.  Dads and sons, daughters and dads, and moms and dads with their kids were all spending a lovely evening together, fishing.

The water on one of the smaller ponds was so still.  It made a beautiful reflection.  One that I couldn’t resist shooting.  These are both HDR images.  I cropped the first image to make it look like a pano.

I Really Do Miss It

Believe it or not, I miss our treadmill when we’re gone.  Even though we walk almost every day, there’s something about being able to get in a brisk, uphill walk on the treadmill any time of day.  I took this with the 645 Pro app on my iPhone 4S.

No Ice Cream :(

Kilwin’s is my most favorite ice cream place.  We can’t visit any of our favorite ports of call along the east coast of Lake Michigan without a stop for ice cream at Kilwin’s.  If we are in St. Joe, I get St. Joe Mud.  If we’re in South Haven, I get South Haven Mud.  In Saugatuck, I order Saugatuck Mud.  I think you get the idea.  We were very excited when we discovered a Kilwin’s on north Wells St. in Chicago!!  I was curious what kind of Mud there would be at the Chicago location.  You would expect Chicago Mud, maybe.  But, those clever ice cream creators called it Old Town Mud, which makes so much sense, since the store is located in Old Town.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Kilwin’s without getting ice cream.  That is until today.  We were visiting some friends on our way back home and I wanted to bring them a bit of a treat.  So, we ran into St. Joe to pick up some Kilwin’s handmade chocolates on our way out-of-town.  I left with the candy, but NO ice cream.  It would have spoiled my dinner with friends.  That just means next time I’ll have to get a double scoop of (insert the name of a favorite port of call here) Mud in a waffle cone.  Yum!!

 

In a Heartbeat

I love my little car. She’s bright red. True Red is actually her color. It’s a treat to get behind the wheel and drive her. Her name is Molly. She’s Molly the Fourth. I got the first Molly in 1996. At the time, I had just started working with a bunch of technicians who eventually became like brothers. I would talk about places that Molly and I went. After talking about Molly for months, one of them asked me something about my daughter, Molly. I busted out laughing and told him that Molly was my car. I’ve loved all of my little Molly cars.

So now you know how I feel about my car. But, if someone had asked me this afternoon if I’d take a 1935 Duesenberg Rollston Convertible Coupe, I would have said in a heartbeat. This is the sweetheart car that I’m talking about. It’s at the Gilmore Car Museum. I took a photo of it last year. It’s just gorgeous.

On second thought, there’s no way anyone can pry Molly’s key fob out of my hand. No car is better than my beautiful, True Red Molly!!

An App, An App, An App

We needed to stick around the house today to get some stuff done in the yard.  Quite frankly, we use photography as an excuse to procrastinate on doing stuff that we would rather not do.  That’s the thing with retirement, whatever it is can generally wait until another day.  But, there comes a point in time when you gotta get whatever it is done.  Funny thing, the putting off of the whatever takes more energy and time than just getting it done to start with.  I’m sure this is a lesson that will need to be relearned over and over again.

As a result of the plan for the day, I needed to shoot something around the house.  I was checking Google+ while contemplating what to shoot, when I saw something about the Big Lens app.  I thought it looked interesting, so I downloaded it.  Big Lens is a focus and blur app that does other stuff, too.  It’s the focus and blur that caught my attention.  I grabbed one of the die-cast models we have around the house and took it out to the yard with a table to set up to take a shot.  I used Big Lens to snap the photo.  Then, I masked the car to keep it in focus and blur the background.  I tried all of the filters, choosing Lomo 4.  There weren’t any highlights in the background to be able to use the bokeh effects.  I’ll use this app again.

On a Better Day

About three weeks ago, we discovered Milham Park in Kalamazoo.  It was raining that day.  It was pretty , even in the rain and we said we would come back on a better day.  Today was that better day.  The park was busy with families celebrating Mother’s Day and a birthday.  There were a lot of kids playing on the playground and feeding the ducks and geese.  We saw goslings under the watchful eye of the mama and papa geese.  An ice cream truck was blasting “Pop Goes the Weasel”, letting everyone in the park know that it was there to provide sweet treats for all.  While we walked, I saw this view of the stream, the reflection and the bridge in the distance.  I shot it as an HDR image.  I used six of the seven bracketed images.

I am so blessed to have an amazing mother!  I love you!!  Happy Mother’s Day!!

He’s Quite a Character

We had a new adventure today.  It was a visit to the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.  There were several things that caught our collective eye.  Probably the coolest thing was the video art of Lee-nam Lee.  I could have stood and watched each of his video images for quite a while.  This exhibit is on display until August 18th.

I read a lot of photography blogs and watch or listen to even more photography podcasts.  The ones about portrait and wedding photography always talk about posing a group in a casual way.  When I saw this sculpture outside the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, it struck me how this artist figured out this posing technique.

Of all the figures posed in this sculpture, this guy is my favorite.  I think he’s quite a character, wearing the paper bag on his head and all.

 

View from the Other End

We started out on the Kal-Haven Trail from the Kalamazoo trailhead.  Slowly, we will walk the whole trail in two or three mile stretches.  The photo challenge was to take a picture of the hill off to the side of the trail and get it to look like a hill.  We have tried this when the hill goes down, but never going up.  I think we got the perspective right.  The key was to get the path in the photo for a reference.  I don’t think I did that when I shot the hill going down before.

Another Camera App

In addition to the resident camera app on my iPhone 4S, I have 39 other camera apps.  Most of them come with filters or other effects that can be added to the photos taken in the app or imported from the Camera Roll.  These camera apps don’t include the apps that I have for post-processing.  I admit it, I’m an “app-oholic” when it comes to photography stuff on my phone.  My newest app is 645 Pro.  The reason why it’s different is that it has no filters and does no post-processing.  It also generates a high-resolution TIFF file, in addition to a JPEG.  I processed the TIFF file in Lightroom 4.  It came out much better than any of the other phone photos I’ve processed outside of the apps where they were taken.  The app allows control over quite a few settings.  I’ll have to reread the 32 page instruction book to figure those out.  I knew enough today to take a picture of an iris in the backyard.