Tag: Summer

Photo 365 #97: The natural world

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Living in a rural area is nothing if not fantastic for capturing wonderful moments in the life cycle of nature.  As evidenced by my deep and abiding love for skyscapes, I’ve got no shortage of inspiration for nature-based images.  And since it’s hard for me to choose just one, here are several!

Beautiful…and treacherous.
Our yard is littered with pine cones.
“Come into my chamber,” said the spider to the fly.
Just another beautiful summer day.
Tasty harvest. 🙂
This is completely unacceptable at this point in the year.

These are only a handful of the nearly two thousand pictures I’ve taken of the world around me this year alone.  I feel blessed to live in such a beautiful place.

(c) 2014.  All rights reserved.

Photo 365 #90: Water

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Water.  It’s everywhere, both around us and within us, in one form or another.  For today’s Photography 101 challenge, I’m once again relying on older pictures, but they’re two of my favorites, and they’ve been in my mind quite a bit lately.

Both photos are from one of our many camping trips last summer.  We haven’t been able to go camping this year at all, aside from the kids camping out in the yard a time or two when it was still warm.  We did, however, find some adorable camping-themed picture frames this summer on our trip up north, so Seymour asked me to get a couple of our camping pictures printed off to put in them.  Perfectly enough for this challenge, one frame was horizontal and one frame was vertical.

Lovely horizontal picture. :)

Lovely horizontal picture, featuring a pretty smile from Miss Tadpole. 🙂

Last summer we camped at Pine Lake several times and on our first trip…

Photo 365 #89: Street

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A few months ago, I hosted a Pampered Chef party (I wanted an apple peeler/corer/slicer and figured this was a smart way to get one for a reasonable price). When the orders arrived, I was able to deliver most of them in one stop, but one of the orders required a drive to Holland (a nearby town, not the country). Because it was the middle of road construction season and the road into town was closed for bridge repair, I had to go north of town, then west, and come in from the northwest corner.
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The sun was setting as I made my delivery and it was so beautiful that I pulled over to catch it before it was gone. When I shoot the sunset, I love to get it alone, with just the horizon or maybe a tree or two for company. I love the wild places where humanity’s fingerprint on the land is a light one. But I got the road with it in this shot, and the power lines running into town, and the more I look at this picture, the more I like it.

What do you like in a landscape shot?

(c) 2014. All rights reserved.

Photo 365 #25

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This is a portion of the Great Bear Mound at Effigy Mounds National Monument. Though the mounds have settled over the centuries, this one was still too big to fit in the frame.

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I love the way the shadows play out in this picture. I didn’t really notice them when I took it – I was more concerned with getting a picture of the mound at the time – but the more I look at it (and the one I took after this), the more I like it. It’s like looking at the clouds on a summer afternoon and trying to put a name to the shapes they form.

I see a stag in these shadows. What do you see?

(c) 2014. All rights reserved.

Photo 365 #20

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Today’s photo post is accompanied by a little piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the humid heat of an Iowa summer combined with the indescribable heat of a hot flash.  It’s more an experiment in painting with words than anything else, and I hope I’ve achieved what I set out to do (which is to attempt to convey the misery of having a hot flash in high summer).  Comment away and let me know how I’ve done!

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Impressive, no?

I stepped out of my perfectly climate-controlled office…

Photo 365 #1

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Inspired by my good friend Mara, I’ve decided to undertake a new project. I’m going to post a photo a day for a year. I hope my skills continue to develop. Also, it’ll be fun.

Right?

Right. 🙂

hazy

So, without further ado, here’s a picture I took as I was leaving work tonight. It’s a perfect depiction of how I felt all day, of struggling to shine on despite the haze, and I love the way it turned out.

I hope you like it, and I hope you stick around and see where my camera and I end up. Happy Friday!

(c) 2014. All rights reserved.

Freeze!

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*yawn*

*blink blink*

*chugs two gallons of strong coffee*

Wow!  Well, that’s a little better.  After yesterday, I’m exhausted.  It seems like every time I have a day or two off of work, I need a day or two to recover.  Vacation can be exhausting, but this summer, I haven’t been able to go on vacation, and it’s been equally exhausting.

IMG_20140805_150429Yesterday I froze corn, something I’ve only attempted as an adult once up to now.  It was bad.  I found my grandma’s recipe, then promptly misread it, and the results were terrible.  But we received a boatload of fresh sweet corn over the weekend and had to do something with it, so yesterday I tracked down my grandma’s recipe again, determined to have better results this time.

I’m happy to say I got what I wanted.  I’m even happier to say that I’m done freezing corn (for a while, anyway).

I posted a few shots of my progress on Instagram throughout the day yesterday, but it was after 11:00 p.m. last night before we were finally finished – it would have been much later without the help of my wonderful family.   When I was a kid, my mom’s family always used to freeze corn together – we shucked and cut the corn outside (this keeps the mess down, and I really wish I’d done the same thing yesterday), then cooked it inside.  It was always a big day – Grandpa always had a truckload of corn to freeze.  One of my favorite corn-freezing stories involved my great-grandma.  I have no idea if I was present at the time this particular incident occurred (she died when I was four), but I get a kick out of the story regardless.   Anyway, it was corn-freezing day…

Photo Friday: Outside Interests

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Today’s Photo Friday theme is all about the great outdoors.  If you keep tabs on my Instagram widget in the sidebar on the right, you’ll see that I take lots and lots of pictures of flowers.  Like, seriously, a ton.  I may not be able to grow flowers worth a hoot, but I sure can take nice pictures of them.

More pretties are hidden behind the cut!