Another Painful Goodbye

We are loosing another priest at church.  This is Father Greg, and he is our good friend.  St Brigid's was his first assignment in a parish, and everyone here loves him.  He should have been here for a total of six years, but he is leaving with three years to go, because they need him at the Seminary to work on the curriculum there.  It is a painful loss for us.  We will still be in touch with him, but he won't be around on Sundays any more and that seems like a great loss.  They had a party for him after Mass today, and so many people turned out to say goodbye and have their pictures taken with him.

Sunflowers. Again

I mentioned when I ran the photograph of Sunflowers in a vase, that I had done a number of different versions of the photo, and I threatened to show you others. This is one of them.  It gives a completely different sense of the flower, I think.  I love seeing each of the yellow petals, and I like the brown/green parts behind the petals, which I hadn't really paid attention to when shooting the picture.  Sometimes it is so difficult to decide whether to include everything in an image, or whether to just concentrate on one small detail.  One of the joys of photography is figuring out these kinds of questions.

The Last of the Sunflowers

You saw my photograph of the vase of fading Sunflowers the other day.  Today they were just about completely gone, and I realized that this was a really different photograph, so I shot the flowers again.  Their shape was so interesting that I shot them as a silhouette in the window.  It is all about the strange shape.  I still have some other photographs of individualo blossoms, and you may get to see one of those pretty soon.

Mrs. Spider is IN

We went to Connecticut today for the annual July Birthdays party.   The number of us born in July in this family is amazing.  In addition to our mom and dad, now gone, my sister Betsey, and our daughter Amy, my niece Kelsey, and I are all born in July.  So we have one party to celebrate all the birthdays.

While sitting on the back deck at Joan's house, I saw the sun glinting off something over by the hedges.  I went to investigate, and saw this beautiful spider web. As I got closer, I could see that Mrs. Spider was in fact home.  At one point when I was photographing, she sped to the bottom edge of the web for some reason, and then raced back to the center.  I could not believe how fast she moved.

Not a Simple Assignment

These are Kathy's birthday sunflowers from Sarah, from several weeks ago.  They were beautiful and we really enjoyed them.  But I do enjoy photographing flowers that are fading.  So I always insist we keep  flowers around, even when they have passed. So today I set about looking for a photograph.  That's simple, right?  Not exactly.  I tried a number of different things, including individual blooms and close-ups.  I must have spent nearly an hour experimenting.  I had such a difficult time picking my favorite.  I will start with this overall view, and then on some subsequent days, show you some of the other versions.

Faded Glory

This is not the real front door of this building, the read door is around the corner of the building.  It is the office of the masonry yard I photographed before.  I was really taken by this, because everything is faded - the flag, the paint, the building.  But they all seem to go together.  It was late in the day and I like the raking light illuminating the scene. I also left this just a bit dark, because it seems appropriate for the feeling in the photograph.

A Rainy Day

I seem to be hiding from the rain a lot these days.  Overcast and showers for eight days straight - I know that because I wrote the weatherman to ask why. I said it was for two weeks, but he said it was only 8 days.  Anyhow, because it was raining I decided to stay under the cover of the maple tree.  I photographed this grouping of ferns.  I had photographed them before, but I wasn't happy with the composition.  I think this time I nailed it.  It is more interesting because of the contrast between the white and black areas and how they are distributed throughout the frame.  I like this a lot!  Yes, I know it's in infrared again, but I would say it is infrared well used.