The Lakeside Path

If you get to the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia early in the day, you can have a wonderful wooden path all to yourself. But is an hour or two, people are sometimes three wide, which makes the paths a little less wonderful. Crowded paths are complicated by Asian tourists who walk on the left side and westerners like me (except for the British) who walk on the right side.Regardless of all of this, the Plitvice Lakes are amazing, as photos I've posted in the blog might prove.

Alien Life Form?

This flower is no alien but it looks a bit strange, in part due to the angle and in part because the petals were not quite ready for prime time.

Foot Steps

Foot steps left on a sandy beach are commonplace. Go ahead: do a Google search for "footsteps in the sand" and you'll see what I mean. But footsteps in frost? Those photos are hard to come by. So I am offering this picture of my footprints (high arches and all) for the world to enjoy.

Pods

This is another shot from that trail that borders the empty stretch of beach just down from the resort zone south of Playa del Carmen Mexico.

Red Chaos

I've read that some scientists say there is no such thing as chaos - that Nature, in it's apparently random state, is really ordered and predictable. Smarter people than I will have to find order in today's jumble of berries and branches. And quite honestly, I don't mind a little chaos. . .

Variations On A Beach

As long a things like blizzards and Alberta clippers keep whipping through South Dakota, I keep posting tropical scenes. This photo was taken a little after the "Sunrise" photo I posted a few days ago. I'd like to be sitting on this huge driftwood log watching the waves roll in.

Wind Swept

On a recent trip to Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, I sitting in a beach chair near this tree and noticed that the strong breeze was blowing the palm fronds back as if the tree were a tall, thin human with a full head of hair.But this human has green coconuts!!?? Is there any way of knowing when one might fall? A South Dakotan has very little natural experience with things like this.

Turquoise

It was windy, mostly cloudy but warm the day I took this photo on a spot along the Mayan Riviera south of Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

Green Abstraction

I was walking along a trail that ran parallel to an unoccupied stretch of beach south of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, when I saw some kind of tropical shrub that was loaded with green pods. Like many things that strike me in nature, I like the symmetry in these seed pods. I wish I knew what kind of plant this is . . . .

I Teach Photography. . .

I am an amateur photographer but I am a professional educator. I've taught English, history and philosophy for over thirty years. But this year I took on the task of teaching photography/media in a new program at the technical college in our town. And it has been a challenge. Today, I sent an email to my students, many of whom show promise and talent. If you'll forgive the personal nature of this, I'm going to let you in I what I said to them:

I think that most of you know that teaching my afternoon classes has been a challenge. In fact, I concluded yesterday that it is one of the most challenging things I have ever done. Four weeks ago, as I drove home from work on a Thursday, I was thinking that "I used to enjoy photography until I started to teach it."Why would I think this? The answer lies in that fact that for quite a few years, what I know about photography has best been revealed in my photos. My pictures are often my voice; but they can't really teach. So the challenge for me is figuring out how to translate what I have practiced and learned for many years into something that makes sense to enthusiasts like you.Here's what I know:Photography isn't a class. It isn't an assignment. And it isn't a job. For me, when I do photography right, it is transcendent: I lose track of time, and space and self. When I am truly engaged in photography, I am engaged in a silent conversation with my subject. The flowers and the leaves and the landscape talk to me and translating this process into something that makes sense to others is a supreme challenge.I also know this:You have done good work and you have talent, skills and curiosity that are worthy of my very best efforts. And you will continue to get that next semester.Thanks for choosing the Photo/Media option and thanks for choosing LATI. We have a lot to learn and I feel privileged to be in a position to help.

Thank you, APAD readers, for taking the time to view my posts from time to time. If no one visited my blog, it would still be a good for me to do. But that fact that on any given day 100 to 200 people stop by provides a good motivation for finding something to post every day.

Beans

These aren't just any beans. They're Kona coffee beans, ripening on the branch in one of many small coffee farms south of Kona on the Big Island. There are two places on earth that produce highly sought after coffee: Kona and Costa Rica but I can't tell you what makes these coffees so special.The day we visited this coffee farm, they were roasting and the smell of coffee wafted over the property. The young man working at the little concessions kiosk at this farm said that on the days they roasted, the smoke gave him a pretty good caffeine buzz. Kona coffee is expensive but the smoke is free.

Leafy Bokeh - Paris

I wasn't looking for bokeh* when I took this photo. In fact, I didn't know what it was at the time. But here it is in all its glory. Also, here is green in all its glory. This time the green is basswood tree leaves in a park in Paris. There is snow out my window but not a speck of snow in the window we look through today in "A Photo A Day."Here's a bit of trivia: the interstices between leaves that cause bokeh in a camera also act as pinhole lenses and if you can find spots of light on the sidewalk that come through the holes, they will be circular because the sun is circular. But in the event of a partial solar eclipse, the projections will be crescent shaped. Don't believe me? Try being in South Africa, Tasmania and most of New Zealand on November 25, 2011. That's when and where the next decent partial solar eclipse occurs.*"The visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens." (Japanese origin)