Virginia Breeze

Beth reminded me that the Neptune Festival is happening next weekend at Virginia Beach.   And there will definitely be photo taking opportunities there.  It’s difficult to believe that a year has gone by since the last festival.  There are photos here from that competition.  Hopefully this year I will be able to gain a little different perspective while clicking away.

I had to laugh when I was going over some photos taken last July.  What is that thing out in the water?  Is it Jaws?

I never noticed it before but there is a dolphin out there.  Maybe he is watching the people having fun on the beach.   Maybe he is curious.

Not available in stores any more . . . .

02-blu-girl

I have been playing with Photoshop CS3 this afternoon.  I downloaded a free copy (for thirty days).  Do you know how much this thing costs if you buy it?  Over six hundred dollars!!   Can you imagine?  Do you know what I can get for that much money?

Why I can get a Woodrat for six hundred dollars!   And a Woodrat will make all kinds of wood joints for your latest wood project without much effort at all.

Here!  Just take a look!

Or I can get more than half of the new lens I want in order to take photos far, far away from the bird or person who is walking around UNAWARE that someone is drawing a bead on them!   I can do this from our balcony at Virginia Beach.  Or I can go down to the river and finally take a photo of that heron who sits out there and cusses out the ducks.

But six hundred dollars for a CD and some software?  It hardly seems right.  What is wrong with these  people?  You can almost get a whole computer for this much money!

So I downloaded it for free (for thirty days) and I have been trying to understand why it could possibly be worth this much money.  And since I am particularly dim witted in this area things have not been going well.  I can see where it is possibly worth fifty or sixty bucks.

So we have a long ways to go.  But the rain appears to have let up.  It’s still dark outside but things are no longer filling up with water.  And I have been looking at the faces in my Blog Catalog widget. Most of them I do not know.  And I wish that I did know them.  But every face on that widget represents a challenge about as big as Photoshop CS3 to me.  It is not easy figuring out most people.  At least it is not easy for me.  If you have a knack for it you are truly a gifted person and you have a valuable talent.

But, chances are that if you are at least as complicated as Photoshop CS3 I will never understand you. If I was twenty five and found you extremely sexy there is a chance (if you are/were a girl).   Or if you became my in-law through some cruel act of fate I might figure you out.  Or if you decided to embed yourself in my comment page and never leave until you made your point I might grow to understand and (dare I say it) be fond of and admire you.

And I would appreciate you too.  Because it would not cost six hundred dollars to reach this happy moment.  But, on the other hand, you would not be able to fix my photos. You could enjoy them after they have become presentable.  But you could not lighten certain parts of them (which is called “dodging” I have just learned) or darken other parts (which is called “burning” I have just . . . fallen asleep.)

You would be full of pluses and minuses and you would possibly continue to confuse me long after this storm has finally wiped out the US Open and headed out to sea.  But that’s alright.  Life is full of challenges.

Do you have a help page?  Please send it along next time your smiling face appears in my Blog Catalog widget.  I need all the help I can get at this point.  I’m like one of those solar panels that gradually becomes useless in cloudy weather.  The ones you can get for a lot less than six hundred dollars!

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are;
but you must approach each man by the right door.  ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

I told you I was going up to Lynchburg over the weekend to see my son and his family.  What I didn’t know at the time was that they were planning to go to the Virginia Safari Park which is up the road and near the Natural Bridge.  This is a pretty nice area of Virginia with all the mountains and these two tourist attractions.

So it slowly dawned on me as we entered the park and I looked up the road that we would be mingling with all kinds of wild animals. I was sitting in the way back seat of the minivan.  Mom and dad were up front.  And the two little ones were in the middle.

The emu’s, camels, bison, bongos, zebras and wildebeests were all around the car looking at me (the sliding doors were open) and hoping I would give them something to eat.  I managed to move forward in between the two children in their little car seats with my camera and take some photos while I was slamming the doors if they got too close.

I wasn’t about to let them have one of the children for a snack.  I wasn’t worried too much about the blackbuck or the oryxes.  And the watusis horns were too wide to get through the door.  But the zebra were another story and the buffalo definitely were not coming near any of us.  I could see one of them a few cars forward sticking his head in the back of another minivan.

We started out into the park and a camel came right up and put his head inside the front window where my son Jeremy was holding a bucket of feed.  You can see him getting ready to make his move in one of these photos.  Then they would do a tag team drill where one of them would stand in front of the car so you couldn’t move and the other one would sneak around the side and put his head in the window while you were supposedly distracted by the first one.

I have to hand it to these guys.  They knew what they were doing.  And there were several park attendants around with these nasty sounding whips.  The crew would move off immediately when they heard that sound.  I didn’t see any of them actually being whipped.

But then I started thinking about how human beings are actually whipped in various places and how awful this sort of thing is for people or animals to endure.

So we spent an hour or so travelling through the park and meeting the animals.  Once things cleared out a bit things were more relaxed and we enjoyed communing with nature and the animal population.   Here are some photos of our visit.

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I tried to name all of them but wouldn’t be surprised if I got some of them wrong.  Please let me know if you you see a missed ID especially where the deer are concerned.