Beach Seining

On one of our evening walks it was getting pretty dark when these men came along with their net on poles and started dragging the net through the water from a little way off the beach, up on to the beach.  I tried a few photos and they are not tack sharp but I think this photo has a nice mood with the dark figures at work.  The process is called beach seining or drag netting.  The net usually features weights along the bottom edge (the lead line) to keep it resting on the floor and floats along the top edge to keep it upright. Two people stand in shallow water, each holding one of the end poles. They wade through the water together, dragging the net parallel to the shoreline or walking in a sweeping arc.  As they move, the net herds and traps small fish, shrimp, or crabs, which are then brought onto the beach or shore. Because seine nets are dragged through shallow coastal waters, estuaries, or lakes, they are designed to catch schooling fish, bottom-dwellers, and small baitfish.  In watching for just a short time, it didn't appear that they had caught any fish at all.  I do love the mood of this photograph.  I posted a larger image you may enjoy clicking on it to see it larger.

 

Thomas's Ham and Eggery Diner

After going to Home Depot the other day around dinnertime, we were pulling out of the giant parking lot and stopped at the light.  Suddenly, in front of us I saw this beautiful, classic diner all lit up!  We have eaten here once or twice in years past and it made me want to eat here again.  They serve breakfast all day and night and are famous for that.  I think I recall that your eggs arrive when they set a small, hot frying pan in front of you with your eggs in it and tell you to be careful because it is hot!  I was desperate to photograph this scene, but I did not have my toy camera on my belt!  I did have my iPhone but it is a wide angle lens and the diner was across a 6 lane road!  But I was desperate to get something and used my phone. When I got home the file size was large enough for me to crop into it and here is my photo.  I just love the pink and blue colors on the building, and the telephone pole and wires and streetlight!   And the traffic lights in the sky above.  I am thinking it might be worth trying to photograph it again when there was the fading light of day in the sky behind it.  I may just do some calculations and make a project of going back.  If I do, you will know!

 

The Hard Part is Done!

So I have finished the last hard part of my painting.  And that would be the underside this roof overhang which is just over the roof of the new back room.  In the far part of the overhang there is less than 18" clearance between the top of the roof and the underside of the overhang.  So I scraped and painted that part lying on my back.  As I moved closer to where I am now, I would sit on the roof and reach above me with paint scrapers and a paintbrush to do that section.  The only thing you need to be, to be a painter is to be an acrobat, and a pretzel.  Now about 25% of the siding remains to be painted, and it is all within 10 feet of the ground! 

 

Fathers and Sons Learning to Fish

On our walk tonight we saw two young boys who I think were learning to fish.  I think they were with their fathers, but I am not sure.  There were two adults and two children, and the children were casting their lures out into the harbor and their skill was impressive.  Every once in a while one of the adults would come over and offer a suggestion to the kids, but mainly they were on their own.  It was so wonderful seeing the fathers and sons interact as the young boys were learning about fishing.

  The other dad was just outside the frame of this photo and I reluctantly cropped him out because he was at some distance from the others.

I liked the first photograph because it gives a sense of place and a sense of what was going on.  In photography, when working on a "photo story" that first photograph in the layout is usually an "establishing shot" which gives the reader this information.  Then you move in and do a more detailed photograph, as here, where the dad is showing the son something specific about, in this case, how to control the direction of the cast.  It was really nice seeing these fathers and sons together.

 

A "Sea" of Grocery Carts!

I have never seen so many grocery carts all together like this, ever in my life!  Of course this is at Costco, where there are lots and lots of shoppers, and they need lots and lots of carts.  Kathy and I went down there at suppertime which we find is a great time to go because it is much less crowded.  So with less people inside, there are more shopping carts outside.  I was stunned to see this many carts.  Usually there are less than half the number of carts when we have gone at busy times.   I was just stunned!  So, I did not have the "toy camera" with me - My Sony RX100 VII.  So I quickly got out my iPhone and did three quick shots.  I counted the number of carts in the row starting with the cart right in front of us here and it is 28 carts to the building.  Counting from left to right is just impossible.  IF there were 11 rows from the left to the right, that would be a minimum of 300 carts!  Astounding!  Please click on the image because it is an extra large size with more detai.

 

Which Wires Can't I Touch?

This is the "service entrance" for the electricity in our house.  The two black wires coming in from the top left are 120 volts AC each.  They are wrapped around a bare braided ground wire, so in the house, depending on how you set up the circuit breaker panel, you can get either 120 volts AC, or you can get 240 volts AC.  So you are looking at the newly painted siding on the house as well as the pipe that carries the wires into the house.  So I had to put my aluminum extension ladder in and around these wires in order to paint the house.  Which wires should I not touch?  At the bottom is the incoming fiber optic feed from Verizon FIOS for our internet, phone and cable TV.  OK so the answer is I touched them all because they are all insulated, so no risk to me.  But I sure was mindful of the voltage present.  Mainly I took this photo because it looked like some kind of artistic composition and I was fascinated by both the shapes of the wires, and the shadows of the wires..

 

Time to Revisit the Japanese maple Tree

I always glance at the beautiful Japanese maple tree by the side of the driveway every time I walk down to fetch the newspaper, which, of course is Newsday.  The tree always looks a bit different depending on the light and the weather.  For some reason it stopped me in my tracks this morning and I returned to the house to get my camera.  When we moved in to this house in 1970 it was a young tree and I sometimes still think of it as a "small tree."  But it is not!  Look at the size of the main limbs that join in the center!  This tree is just amazing and so beautiful.  I do worry that it is getting old, just like me, and that one of these large branches could break off and dramatically change how the tree looks.

You have seen photographs taken of this tree before using my camera that has been modified to only capture infrared light, and this is yet another photograph.  After doing the first photograph in color, I went back into the house and got the infrared camera, just to see once again how it transforms everything.  The most dramatic change is that any living plant with chlorophyl in the foliage reflects huge amounts of infrared light, and so those plants glow as white in terms of brightness.  It makes some scenes magical.