Virginia Is For Families

My recent trip to Washington DC turned south when a museum guard was shot by a crazy old man and I never did really look at some of the photos from the area in and around the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. So here they are along with some music that brings to mind a group of human forms standing silently under the night sky and in the rain.

It rained fiercely when I was driving up the road to DC on the morning I went to the museums. There was a brilliant flash of lightening up the road and I had to pull over because I could not see anything outside the car. All of this brings to my mind the tremendously dark emotions that sometimes settle on humanity and set off senselessly destructive acts. Some of the works in the garden struggle perpetually with the darkness. Others cover more benign territory. I was happy to be with them and hope to revisit them someday.

They are good company even as they leave us alone with our thoughts, hopes and prayers.

Click on the music and then the thumbnail photo for a slide show with sound. You might want to fiddle with the change rate for the photos too.

Melody Gardot

Play – The Rain

Art Outside

Last Friday I wrote a silly post and started feeling so good about life I decided to go out and take some photos. I took along my largest telephoto lens and headed for the butterfly exhibit at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. This we have photographed before but not with this lens. I was hoping to get some shots of the smaller but equally beautiful creatures as they flew above the bushes far over our heads. You can judge how this experiment turned out for yourself.

I hope you will let me know because it’s difficult to be objective when you’re the one making the effort to photograph these flighty little beauties. They hardly ever stand still. Their lives are so short! Maybe that’s why they seem to be in a hurry.

Dedicated to Robin Easton who made it home in one piece (hopefully) from her week long adventure in the wild.

Click on the music and then the photo for a slide show with sound.

Botanical Garden July 09

Play – Reach Out, I’ll Be There

I guess that I have been having a little vacation here. How the weeks fly by! But I did add some photos to one of my other blogs My Foto Buzz and they look pretty nice with the new dark theme. It’s all about photos gang. Blogging would be a waste of time for yours truly if it wasn’t for the photos.

They are magic! Or at least they are a magical power that pulls me back into the world. Because I can become lost somewhere else.

Did you know that you can become addicted to a computer game? I have become addicted to Lord of the Rings Online. So now there will be a struggle to become unaddicted. Is “unaddicted” not a word? I hate Wordpress spell check.

But now that I have added the photos of flowers and butterflies to My Foto Buzz I feel better. And Yes I know foto is not a word but the spell check should just relax and let me finish this post. There are no spell checks in Middle Earth!

Wait. That was a wrong thought. I don’t need to go back to Hobbit Land because there is no spell check there. And I can continue to blog even if spell check harrasses me and my domains don’t do the things they are supposed to do. A man’s blog is his domain after all and he better take care of it!

I was thinking yesterday about dissolving all my blogs and just having a Blogger blog that requires no effort and is maintained by the wonderful people who run Google and the world. I could write posts and publish them in about four minutes and then get back to Gandalf and the gang.

But My Foto Buzz looks much nicer than any Blogger blog I can find. And it costs more too! So there’s another advantage.

Oh wait. Spending money is not a good thing. Unless, of course, you want to help the economy so that it does not tank forever! Wouldn’t it be cool if everyone decided to go out and buy something this weekend to help the economy? Even if they only have two nickels to rub together! You can still buy stuff for ten cents right?

Like what? I’m not sure. Surely not anything that I see in the grocery store check out line (Spell check I haven’t seen you for awhile. . . “where’d” you go? Oh there you are!!) Candy bars cost two bucks! That’s crazy. A candy bar costs almost as much as a gallon of gas! And if the economy tanks again they will probably cost as much as a tank of gas! I used tank as both a verb and a noun in that sentence you may notice in an attempt to frustrate spell check and cause him to go take a nap somewhere.

Well we all need naps. You need them and I hope you find them on a regular basis. I’m thinking that a good nap is hard to find however. I doubt too many folks actually take them on a regular basis. And then there’s the problem that if you take a nap you may not be able to go to sleep at the appointed hour. Insomnia creeps in. So are naps really a good thing?

I don’t know. I’m just asking. I’m a little concerned that maybe there’s nothing out here that’s really good for you all the time. Can anyone think of something that is one hundred percent good for you all the time? Please let me know.

I can be reached in my little bungalow above the Hobbit village near the waterfall that supplies crystal waters to the residents who enjoy their little Hobbit meals most anytime of the day. But watch out for roving orcs! (Welcome back spell check! You never heard of an orc? Shame on you!)

And a Hobbit economy that allows all to live comfortably on their limited incomes because. . . . wait. . . . what is this?

A silver dagger is 465 pieces of silver in the auction house! That’s highway robbery. That’s not fair. That’s. . . well . . . that’s the way it is.

It’s always fun to go over some of the thousands of digital photos accumulated without much effort in just a couple of years and look for something new. And that’s what I have been doing this morning. Google has been helping out a lot actually and one of these days it is going to want some coin for the privilege. We are coming close to using up the free portion but I’m not complaining. The products it provides are very helpful and easy to use. And in the end Google not only helps me produce photos and store them. It helps bring them to viewers outside the family circle.

So I have a few new ones to share this morning. Some may seem familiar but they were worked from untouched photos. And Lightroom 2 is on the way from Amazon.com to help with the organizational tasks ahead. Hopefully we can get all these photos in some sort of order and then get out and take some new ones!

Fav’s Not Seen Before

I also purchased an HD flash camcorder and hope to use it to focus on some photos, nature video and poetry together in the coming months.

Will all of this come together in some sort of meaningful way? I don’t know! But I hope you will stick around to find out and also offer some constructive feedback.

All of this leads me to consider the day that is so important in so many minds. Mine too!

Pay Day!

Play – Just Got Paid