Night Light

On April 10,  I photographed a single trailer illuminated by a spotlight late at night, which was located on the property of the old power plant.  When I got back home and pulled into the driveway I saw this scene.  Kathy had just finished with clients and she had left the back spotlight on which cast a shadow of the lilac tree on to the garage. I just thought that these shadows on the garage were so interesting.  Something just a bit different.

 

Fog in the Morning

When I get out of bed in the morning, I always walk into the front bedroom and look out at the street, and then look at the side yard.  It was foggy this morning and I thought I saw some possibilities out both the north window and the east window.  This is the east window, looking toward the rising sun, and I loved how the fog gave depth to the photograph because the fog separates the pine tree from the closer trees.  Not a great shot, but a little bit interesting, and atmospheric I think.

 

Off to London and Zurich

These are contrails over our house and they are "condensation trails" from the water vapor coming out the engines of high flying jet aircraft.  So of course many of us look up with a feeling of wanderlust, and wondering where airplanes like this might be going.  Well, now there is a simple answer.  It is an App (of course) for our cellphones.  It is called "Flight Radar 24" and you can get it for free.  I will leave out the technical stuff, like it receives  ADS-B transmissions from aircraft, showing where they are going, what their altitude is and how fast they are flying.  All on our phones

So there are two contrails over our house in the photograph.  I watched the first airplane fly over and looked it up on Flight Radar 24, and then when I saw the second airplane fly over I looked that up.  So here are the displays for both aircraft.  They are both flying at 33,000 feet and doing about 560 MPH.  If you look closely you can see the type of aircraft, one a 777 and the other 787 and you can even see what time they will arrive at their destinations!  What an amazing thing it is these days to be able to see where airplanes are going!

 

Hosta

I love watching the Hostas come out of the ground in the spring every year.  Little pointy things purple and green in color come out of the ground where the plant was from last year.  It seems to happen so quickly where the pointy things get taller and then they begin to both unwrap themselves, and continue to climb skyward.  There is something beautiful to see all these leaves unwrapping themselves as they continue to grow.  I photographed this early one morning and there are water drops on all the leaves. So this is a photograph of an early stage in the growth of this plant, so far.   Please click on this to see more detail.

 

Four Eyes

I was sitting at my big desktop computer in the basement.  Years ago when I built the desk, I covered it with white formica.  So today I set my bifocals down and picked up my computer glasses.  I have a small LED spotlight on a flexible shaft and I happened to put my glasses in the light.  I love the shadows here and particularly the fact that the close-up part of the bifocals make a brighter image on the desktop.  I was looking at it for a bit an then decided it would make a photograph.  I called it "four eyes" because when I was a kid, that's what some people used as an insult to other kids wearing glasses!  That's terrible.  But here there are four circles, and it just came to me!  This photograph is all about the light, and the shadows.

 

Fair Weather Clouds

These are Cumulus clouds, often called "fair weather clouds" because they usually don't bring any rain.  They are formed when the sun warms the earth and so the warmed air begins to rise - warm air rises - and as it rises it moves up into cooler air.  Because of the nature of the atmosphere, the higher you get from the ground the cooler the temperature.  The air is cooler by 3 degrees Fahrenheit every thousand feet.  So when the warm air rises into the cooler air, then it condenses and "makes" cumulus clouds.  Aren't you glad I am a pilot and know this stuff?  :-)  I just thought this scene was so beautiful in just blue and white.  It lifted my spirits to see these colors.

 

Fixing The Fence

I put up this fence probably 40 or 50 years ago.  Our nighbor Larry had it built for me from cedar lumber.  The fence has been painted over and over again, and some pickets have been replaced when some of them deteriorated.  Well this winter, when the plows came by and pushed the heavy wet snow to the side of the road it broke loose two of the sections which fell down.  So I reattached the two sections and today started scraping and painting the whole fence.  It took several hours to do two sections.  I have two more to do.  You can see that the fence here definitely needs painting. But I am ultimately going to replace the fence.

So I started here on the right side of the photograph and I am just finishing up the second of two sections which I painted today. Do you like my little white seat I built?  I made it to hold binoculars when observing because I couldn't put them down in the grass.  But it is a perfect painting seat!   I have discovered that no one makes wooden fences anymore.  Everything is now plastic fencing which much of looks cheap.  SO...  I will buy the lumber and cut the pickets and attach them to the "stringers" that connect to the posts that hold the fence up.  It will be a long lasting job to do because of all the other work around here, like painting the west side of the house this season. But I will get this done.  Stay tuned!

I set my tools down and the paint and then realized it was an interesting photograph.  There is the scraper I used on all the wood, then the paintbrush to the right which I use to brush off all the scrapings, and then my paintbrush and can of paint, and my well used painting gloves.  A nice composition I thought!

And last but not least, a photograph of the finished painted part of the fence.  This is deceiving because it looks perfect, but many of the pickets are rotting in place and so are some of the stringers as well.  The third picket to the right of center is partially rotting away, if you look closely.  But at least the neighbor's won't dislike me because our property looks rundown.