Blog
Words fail to convey how I feel about the birth of our new grand daughter. But here she is, only three hours old. She's so new to this world that her parents (Brian and Katie) have yet to name her. But we like her nick name:"June Bug."
I suspect I will be posting a few more of this little girl from time to time. . .
For a person who thrives on warm weather and sunshine, June is an important month. The grass is pretty green by now, the days are incredibly long and there is the promise of summer.
The iris pictured here is, of course, a symbol of all of that. . .
The last time I had pondered my favorite little stone bird, he/she was standing in fallen leaves. On this ocassion it is standing stoicly in fallen flower petals from the same tree.
We have had a cooler than normal spring here in South Dakota and I'm wondering if that is why our flowering crabapple trees were so loaded with blooms. When the flower petals fell, they literally piled up in drifts.
So have you ever pondered the backside of a pink tulip? You have now. The title, as my friends from the '70s may recognize, is borrowed from Joni Mitchell's song by the same title, though in her case, she's talking about clouds.
And, yes, those are real rain drops on the tulips, which are bent over both by the wind and by age.
When the sky began to grow light this morning, I looked out my den window and noticed something that gave me my first laugh of the day - a mallard standing on top of the building across the ally from our house. I quickly ran to get my camera and took several shots of him silhouetted against the sky. I thought he would fly away any second but it turns out there was no rush - an hour later he was still there. Maybe he sleeps up there? A room with a view. . .
This duck moved into our neighborhood this spring and seems to be quite comfortable here. My wife and I (and perhaps even our clawless cat Mac) have adopted a "live and let live" policy. And so has the rest of the neighborhood
The most strking thing about this bird is how cool and calm he seems as he scans the eastern horizon, balanced on one leg. Thus, my post's title: not the "Urban Duck" but the "Urbane Duck." (And how can you not be reminded of aboriginal men who also balance on one leg?)
Here's one more version of the pink tulips I've been posting for the last couple days. This is the side view of the same two flowers pictured two days ago.
I went out in the cold rain the other day and took about 50 photos, mostly of crabapple tree blooms ready to burst. But in my back yard I was struck by the wet aspen leaves stuck together and backlit by the sky. This is one of the last photos I took but it's the one I ended up liking most.
I offer both a color version and a black and white version. Take your pick between the "reality" of green tree leaves or the texture, lines and light that make up the "bones" of the photo.
Canon 5DIII 1/60s f/7.1 ISO200 168mm
I took several photos of my wife's pink tulips. One was posted yesterday, as you may have noticed. And today I post another version. This one adopts an unusual point of view and but I remove the color. There is something a bit perverse about taking color away from a scene but black and white photographs require/allow us to see things that may be lost in the color versions. Anyway, this one has a bit of a eerie feel to it, if you ask me. But for now, I kind of like it.
I am hung up on flowers, obviously. And I am also once again compelled to comment on the power of the photographer's point of view. The conventional view of flower is from the side and from a short distance. The tulip becomes something quite different when you view it from the top at close range.
This is one of my wife's beautiful flowers, incidentally. I'll admit that I did wander into the neighbor's yard again today. But the pink tulips called me back home. . . .
Well, here they are: my neighbor's purples tulips Water droplets from morning dew or from a spray bottle? I'll never tell.
Canon 5DIII 1/80s f/7.1 ISO400 100mm
I call this post "Finally!" because after what seems like and endless winter and cold spring, it finally feels like summer. And my wife's daffodils are celebrating the occasion by blooming.
This photo, incidentally, started out as a completely different concept. In the failing light of a beautiful day, I noticed the heads of these daffodils bobbing in the gusty wind. And I thought this would be a perfect time to try dragging the shutter, a process that uses camera flash and a fairly slow shutter speed. I took 5 or six using this technique but didn't really like any of them.
So instead, I put the camera as close to the ground as I could and tried to focus on on a single daffodil. After I took the photo, I noticed the camera was seeing a very interesting deep, blue bokeh in the out-of-focus boughs of the a pine tree behind the garden. And so I ended up with this photo. I will probably try the dragging the flash thing another time.
By Scott Shephard
Leave it to one of my photography students to apply a little artistic flair to what is otherwise a pretty monotonous sea of black. Actually, several of the Lake Area Technical Institute Photo/Media students added bling to their hats, though Elsa's ended up being the most well posed cap of all I photographed.
Canon 5DIII 1/250s f/2.8 ISO2500 200mm
Do you want to see the entire 2 hour and 15 minutes ceremony in 60 seconds? Hold on to you hat and watch:
