The Too Cute Kitty!

This cat is way too cute!  Grace loves to be in things, and under things all the time.  She is so curious and is always poking around new boxes that have arrived and are now open.  But this is a new one.  Kathy was stripping the bed to wash the sheets, and this white comforter was flipped over the foot of the bed and ended up on the floor.  I nearly fell over when I walked in the room and there was Grace surrounded by this!  I have no idea how she managed to wrap herself up in the comforter!

The Magnificent Dandelion!

So I am doing my walk, in an on and off drizzle, looking for something to photograph, and I happen to notice a single Dandelion all in white, in the grass next to the sidewalk.  I kept walking.  A Dandelion.  Who cares.  About 30 feet later, I turned around, walked back, and used my telephoto lens to zoom in for a close-up of the top of it.  I could not believe my eyes!  What was I thinking, walking by this magnificent miracle of nature?  Look at the delicate structure.  It is an engineering marvel the way it is constructed, and so delicate and light, that when a wind comes along, all of these little white broom-like structures, because they are so light, will take flight and another Dandelion will take root somewhere.  You MUST click on the image to see it in more detail!

No Dunkin' Donuts, Week 8

I was wracking my brain to come up with something different for my Tuesday Dunkin' Donuts post.  I needed something other than looking out the windshield of our car at the beach.  I was desperate for a different type of photograph.  About two or three days ago I thought of the shot!  The only thing I needed was a day with blue sky and sunshine, and today I had it!  So this is cool, right?  And it makes the point of coffee and a donut at the beach in the most direct way.  What is fun to think about is, if someone saw me on the beach, holding a donut up with one hand and a camera in the other, what would they have thought!  Boggles my mind!

Downside Up

Here's the thing about reading this blog - you never know what you will find when you come here!  So welcome to an upside down duck!  I happened to see two Mallards feeding at the same time, next to each other, so I had more than one chance to get a picture like this.  This was the best photo in the two minutes I had before the ducks moved on.  They are feeding off something that looks like seaweed clinging to rocks underwater - this is how ducks feed, and what they eat, if they are not eating pieces of bread that people toss to them.  Feeding ducks bread is really harmful because it has no food value, so please don't do that.  End of my public service announcement!

Afternoon in a Kayak

Now that the weather is warmer, I am seeing more people out on the water, which is nice.  Saw a sailboat out on the harbor the other day, but it was too far away to get a good photograph.  So I was thrilled to see this kayaker making his way up the harbor toward Long Island Sound.  So I started photographing him with a telephoto lens as he moved closer to me.  It was not that much of a photograph, until he got to a spot where the sun was behind him, and then there was a small white wake trailing him, and that made the shot a bit more interesting.  So here's something that I should NOT have done...

I opened the all-gray photograph that you saw at the top of this post in Photoshop, and then I cranked up the saturation.  I cranked it WAY up.  This is not a good thing.  There is this thing that a lot of inexperienced photographers do, because books and articles tell them to do, which is to crank up the colors to make boring photographs more interesting.  It doesn't work, and it makes the photographs unbelievable.  I like my photographs to look like the real world.  Having said that, this IS kind of interesting, isn't it?

After Abbey Road

                           

Do you remember the Abbey Road Beatles album?  On the cover, the four Beatles are crossing the road, in a crosswalk, marching in perfect step.  I was reminded of that while on my walk when I saw four women on the opposite side of the road in a line.  So I quickly zoomed in on them to get a shot.  Unfortunately, one of the women was hanging back talking on her phone, so this didn't work.  So I continued to walk opposite them hoping they would get in synch once more, but it wasn't looking good.  Then they crossed the street and were walking on the sidewalk side, so I switched to the opposite side of the road and looked for an opportunity to get a good shot of them together.  They were back together as a group, and what I needed was a light background, because they were all wearing black.  I spied this fence which I walk by every day and aimed the camera at the spot where water was the background, and as they walked through this spot quickly shot two frames!  Well, it's not perfect, because they are not in single file, but it is as close as I could get, and they are in step with each other!  Just a fun project on my daily walk!

And in case you are not familiar with the original shot, here is what it looks like.

It's All About the Grays

When I was walking the other day it was overcast, and I happened, while looking at the sky and the water, to notice everything was gray.  Beautiful shades of gray - light grays, dark grays, in many subtle shades.  I tried several different photographs of the sky and water and they were boring.  But I kept trying, and then after a while this single white cloud drifted into the scene and I realized that was my shot!