Month: July 2015

Of late I seem to be laundering an awful lot of dollar bills. I shove them into a back pocket of my jeans and forget about them. Because they’re flat and usually soft, I don’t feel them when I do a cursory check of pockets, usually from the outside, before throwing them into the washing machine. I decided I had to take a “money laundering” shot after discovering not only three ones newly cleaned in the washing machine and crisped in the dryer, but a dozen raffle tickets from the Fourth of July festivities the other day. One of those raffle tickets was a winner for me but I had already thrown them away when I decided to take the photograph so they’re not represented. I won a pair of lawn seat tickets from The Eagle 96.1FM radio station for the Van Halen concert tonight at the Concord Pavilion. I’m taking my friend Annie with me. I must admit that I’m not a die hard Van Halen fan but, much to my own amazement, I am familiar with quite a few of their songs. When discussing Thursday’s playlist with a friend, I had to point out that one of the songs they’ll be performing, “You Really Got Me,” is not originally a Van Halen song as she insisted, but rather a cover of a Kinks song from 1964. I may be out of it when it comes to music of the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s but I know my British Invasion!

This is the fabulous Dana Moret, performing with her band, the equally fabulous Mr. December, a Sacramento based band that plays a blend of rock, soul, R & B, and blues. Dana and her bandmates braved the blistering late afternoon Fourth of July temperatures to perform at the County Club Saloon in Loomis to benefit the Auburn Forgotten Soldiers Program. The day was hot. Dana’s singing was hotter than hot! Oh, that voice.

I’m taking a trip to New York City this fall with my two sisters-in-law. I’m in charge of planning and my friend Honora (recently featured in the blog) visited there about a year ago and she offered to loan me all of her maps, brochures, trip notes, and calendars to aid in my trip planning. We agreed to meet Monday afternoon at Hopmonk Tavern in Sonoma, an hour and a half away from my home. Just as I was pulling into the parking lot, Honora called to tell me she would be about a half hour late. Once seated, I ordered Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA and an appetizer while I waited. The beer was outstanding. I may have to start sampling more IPAs and expand my beer palate to more than Ales and Stouts. The delicious appetizer, called Tavern Samosas, featured curried onions, black beans, roasted peppers, pumpkin seeds and sweet corn wrapped in a crunchy wonton, and served with a killer cilantro/mango chutney. We discussed the ingredients with the bartender/waiter. He agreed that they should bottle and sell the stuff. I am definitely going to try to recreate it. The only photograph I took Monday was an iPhone shot of that appetizer while I awaited Honora’s arrival.

The reason this blog post is called “Hop(monk), Skip, And Jump” is because of what happened after we ate our lunch. It has nothing to do with the photograph of the Tavern Samosas. Before lunch, Honora and I chatted about New York City and she spread maps and brochures out on the table. Because she is Italian, she sometimes gestures with her hands and one such gesture knocked over her 2/3 full glass of the same IPA. I responded with a similar gesture, although I am not Italian, and my 1/3 full glass of beer was down. The bartender/waiter rushed over and cleaned up our mess and suggested we order lunch. We declined his offer of another beer even though we’d neither one finished our first. We were glad the New York Planning papers avoided the spill. But not so my iPhone, although no permanent damage was done. While I mopped the beer off my iPhone, I noticed I had a telephone message on my home phone, an app feature of my new Xfinity phone/TV/Internet package. The only trouble was, I couldn’t remember how to retrieve the voicemail away from home. I had been waiting for a call from the realtor who is selling my mother’s house so I was anxious to retrieve the message in case the call was about the house. I am the trustee of my mother’s trust and executor of her will. We have sold her house and we expected it to close escrow today. After several unsuccessful attempts at retrieving the message, I gave up and ate lunch, a delicious Greek Salad (an order, despite Greece’s current state of affairs, that is not a political statement of any kind…I just love Greek olives and Feta cheese). About 4PM I decided to Google how to retrieve the messages and finally succeeded.

The message was from an officer at the Title Company in Santa Rosa. They had called with the information that I needed to sign one additional form. I told her I was in Sonoma and that I wouldn’t be home to get the form from my e-mail, print it, sign it, scan it, and re-send it until evening meaning she wouldn’t get it until Tuesday. I offered to drive into Santa Rosa, about 40 minutes away if she would still be in her office then. She wondered if it might be more convenient for me to visit their Sonoma office. Well, duh! After consulting with the bartender, who by now was a good friend, although we neither one thought to ask his name, we discovered that the Title Company was only a block away—or rather a Hop(monk), skip, and a jump away. Honora and I walked over just as the e-mail from Santa Rosa arrived. Within a few minutes of first talking to the escrow officer in Santa Rosa, I had signed the document and returned to my car, still in the Hopmonk Tavern parking lot. It’s very nice when this kind of serendipity happens! And Honora and I both gave a great tip to our friend the bartender.

On Friday, I took a Fireworks Photography class at Action Camera and we traveled to the Fireworks and Freedom Concert at the El Dorado Hills Town Center to put our new-found skills into practice. Click here to see a few of the shots I posted on The Fourth of July. We spent an hour and a half in class; had a 40 minute drive to El Dorado Hills; set up at the venue; stood around waiting more than two and a half hours for the fireworks to begin; and then frantically verified exposure and focus (all manual) when the fireworks suddenly started exploding across from us. I had planned to try a couple of interesting techniques I learned in class but the fireworks ended after just 15 minutes and, although I had a flash light, I was reluctant to fiddle too much with my settings because the crowd had closed in behind us and was literally breathing down our necks. Any movement like changing lenses or camera position would have been awkward if not impossible. We had the best view of the fireworks because early on, we had claimed the railing of the bridge giving us a clear view of the fireworks directly across the pond. The crowd had been distracted by a band playing down the street but when the fireworks started, we were quickly inundated and it was difficult to move at all.

The event was so crowded that when we first attempted to leave after the fireworks ended, we sat in the parking lot without moving an inch for about 10 minutes. My friend suggested we pull back into the parking slot we’d vacated and find a place to have a glass of wine while we waited for the crowd to disperse. An hour later, we returned to the car and zipped right out of the parking lot, only to stop dead again as the roads were now clogged, the main road to the freeway was closed, and we were detoured in a circuitous route back to the freeway. I didn’t get home until about 12:30 AM and of course I had to review my photos to find some for a Fourth of July post before I went to bed. At that hour, I didn’t feel at all like writing anything about the experience so I didn’t.

This is the second time I’ve photographed fireworks. The photographs of fireworks at this event seem to be a bit different from those I photographed two years ago. The one common thing, though, is what I call the palm tree effect. When you hold the shutter open for several seconds, the camera records all of the light it sees during that time. The human eye doesn’t retain the light images the same way so we don’t see the palm tree effect as we’re watching the fireworks live. With the camera, everything the camera sees during the exposure is recorded in the photograph. If the shutter opens before the firework launches, the camera records the light reflected as the firework streaks upward as well as the the explosion, which creates the palm tree effect. As I reviewed the shots, I could hear Maria Muldaur singing in the background, “Midnight at the oasis, send your camel to bed….”

These are my favorite palm tree photographs from the other night. In the first shot, I included a bit of the horizon which can be seen as a few dots of light along the lower edge. I changed the angle of the camera and pointed it upward a bit more, eliminating the horizon and capturing more of the fireworks. I should have used a wider-angle lens. My 14-24mm lens was in the trunk of my car in the parking lot at Action Camera in Roseville. I used my 24-70mm lens which is my favorite lens but it didn’t have a wide enough angle to capture all of the fireworks in the sky and the horizon too.

Nature, as a category in photographic competitions sanctioned by the Photographic Society of America and, to which my club, the Placer Camera Club, adheres, is the story of nature. No human elements, i.e., the hand of man, can be a part of the image. There should be no obvious evidence that man has been there. I struggle with this limitation when I submit photos for judging because many of the wild bird photographs I take are in places with the imprint of the hand of man. Photographs of hummingbirds bathing in the fountain, or feeding at the feeder, even hawks perched on a telephone pole, are not allowed in the Nature category because of evidence of the hand of man.

I am featuring the “dreaded” hand of man in my post today because it is what will allow a baby scrub jay to soon survive in the wild. There are many wildlife rescue organizations in my area and I belong to and participate in some of them, including the California Foundation for Birds of Prey, an organization that rehabilitates injured birds of prey and when possible, returns them to the wild. Saturday morning, I discovered my next door neighbor is a one man wildlife rescue. He rang my doorbell and asked to come into my yard to retrieve the baby scrub jay he has been caring for for three days after he discovered it had fallen from its nest; the bird’s sibling did not survive. The bird doesn’t fly yet but it had scrambled through a crack in the fence and hid in a bush on my side of the fence.

I suspected a scrub jay nest was in the shrubs because a pair of jays had been flying in an out regularly and very secretively. Although I searched, I didn’t discover their nest until a couple of days ago and it was empty by then. In the past few days, the jays had become very vocal, very upset whenever I went into the yard, and very focused on an area by the fence between the back yards. When my neighbor, Gigham, retrieved the tiny bird from its hiding place under a shrub on my side of the fence, one of the adults dive bombed him and both parents stayed close eying us warily as I took photographs. I dribbled a little water into the bird’s mouth and cut off a piece of thread that had become entangled on its foot. Then Gigham took the little creature back to his side of the fence where he keeps the baby safe in a box where the parents can watch and feed it. When it gets too warm during the day, or it gets dark, Gigham moves the baby into a covered box and takes it indoors. Every morning he moves the baby back outside, much to the relief of its parents.

These photographs feature the hand of a man who cares enough about wild things that he takes the time to do something to help those wild things. The parents are close by watching as Gigham holds the baby for me to photograph. The red blob on the baby’s beak is the remnants of some sort of berry fed to it by its parent. While we looked for the baby in the shrub, I’d seen one of the adults with a berry in its beak, looking for its offspring.

Happy Birthday, USA!!!

The morning started off cloudy and muggy and when I walked out of the gym it had just begun to sprinkle, creating that unpleasant hot wet asphalt smell. By the time I reached my car, the rain was coming down in buckets but the squall must have been very localized because when I got home, just 5 miles away, there was no more rain. However, when I went out into the garden I noticed the patio was slightly damp and saw the rain droplets on this Winsome bud. I attached the macro lens to my D800, set it on the tripod, and used my new shutter release remote to trigger several shots focusing on different parts of the flower. Then I blended them in Photoshop.

These are real raindrops on the rosebud, quite a pleasant sight to see in our drought-plagued state in July.

The heat has been unrelenting until today when the temperature dropped a full ten degrees to a tolerable 95° with a slight Delta breeze to save us but, with a full cloud cover, the humidity is deadly. I decided to skip grilling dinner (I also skipped grilling yesterday but at about 106° that was a no-brainer) because I haven’t been to the grocery store in a few days and hadn’t thawed anything from the freezer. I decided a cool salad would be perfect. I wasn’t expecting anything to harvest, although I think I might have a few fingerling eggplants that I’ll be able to grill in a couple of days, but I wanted to see how my tomatoes were faring with the heat and the onslaught of chewing things; I didn’t see any huge tomato worms yet although I’m sure small ones are there, soon to be huge, but I did find a few of some other kind of tiny worm wreaking havoc on my tomatoes and peppers. While I peered at the plants, a bit of red, near the dirt, caught my eye. Two Juliet tomatoes fell into my hand when I reached down to feel how ripe they were. They are small, less than two inches, but I thought they’d be perfect in my dinner salad. I dropped them on a bed of spinach for the photo.

I used the macro lens because they were so small I needed to fill the frame with them. And, I used my new remote that will eventually, when I receive the other transmitter, allow me to trigger the shutter release on two cameras at once. I haven’t quite decided when I’ll need to do this but I’m happy to have the new shutter release for my D800 which until now has lacked a small shutter release remote like I had for my D90 and which still works on my D7100.

Today is the start of “National July Belongs to Blueberries Month.” Who knew? I already had some luscious blueberries on hand but stopped at Granny May’s Strawberry Stand on the way home from the gym this morning and picked up three baskets of strawberries and one of blackberries. I’m struggling to get back into the habit of going to the gym six days a week AND back in the habit of eating healthy foods. I’m hoping July will see me shed a few pounds and become a little more fit again.

I thought the berries looked so beautiful on the white plate so I took a few photographs, turning the plate to get various views. This was my favorite.