Month: October 2015

We spotted this tiny (less than an inch) Sierran tree frog, (Pseudacris sierra), hopping among the petroglyphs and well camouflaged on the granite and tree bark. I used the macro lens and kneeled down on the excruciatingly hard granite without my knee pad which remained in the trunk of my car in back in Auburn. I cropped the first shot because I didn’t realize I could get so close to him. When I leaned in as close as the little guy would tolerate, I was just inches away from him. The second shot is not cropped.

After we visited the petroglyphs on Tuesday, Bruce drove toward Portola, a place in the Sierras I’d never visited. We drove along Heriot Road where cattle grazed behind barbed wire fences. When I spotted a hawk perched atop a windmill, Bruce turned the truck around and returned to the site. There was no room on the side of the road to set up a tripod so I wedged Big Bertha between the truck door and frame, resting the end of the lens on the hood of the truck. It was very unwieldy and awkward and by the time I got settled, the hawk took off but I did manage to get two shots as it flew off the windmill. I’m including one because it’s my first hand-held shot with Big Bertha, although I did have a little help from the truck. A few minutes later, we found another red tailed hawk that was more cooperative and it perched on a “now-considered-part-of-Nature” fence post. The previous adjective string alludes to the Photographic Society of America (PSA), which has always prohibited “the hand of man” in ‘Nature’ photos, now allowing such things as fence posts when photographing hawks for a “Nature” competition.

When the hawk decided to fly off, I was unable to follow its flight because I was wedged in the space between the door and the truck body and I wasn’t using the tripod and my fancy gimbal head which would have allowed me to do that. Maybe another day. But I’m very happy with these shots. They are not cropped. In the last shot, the red tail is preparing to take off.

As Roseville Police Officer Aguirre put it, I now have “3-D Pin Stripes” on the driver side of my Toyota Camry. First, let me tell you I wasn’t in the car at the time it was side swiped Thursday afternoon and no one was injured in the accident but there was considerable property damage. The other two cars appeared to be totaled and had to be towed. My car got the least of the impact and of the three cars involved, mine was the only vehicle able to drive away from the scene.

I wasn’t supposed to be there, of course. Kayla, my hair stylist, texted me to see if I wanted to get my hair cut a few days early. When I drove into Historic Old Town Roseville to the salon on Main Street, I didn’t see a parking space so I drove around the corner and parked on Lincoln St. next to the old McCrae Block Building in a spot that was shaded by the wooden balcony over the sidewalk. When I came out of the hair salon an hour and a half later, I noticed a hook and ladder firetruck blocking the intersection of Main and Lincoln Streets. When I rounded the corner and saw the cars blocking mine, I didn’t realize at first that my vehicle was involved. But when Office Aguirre approached me and asked if I was Carol, I knew I had a problem. Apparently, the faulty driver veered out of the lane and hit the car parked behind me. Fortunately for me, there was an empty space between us because that car was spun around and took out one of the poles supporting the balcony over the sidewalk. The offending vehicle came to rest parallel to my car, creasing the rear fender and rear door and creating those “3-D pin stripes.”

After the two other vehicles were towed away, the fire fighters discussed how best to bring the pole supporting the balcony back into alignment. At that point, Officer Aguirre advised me to leave the scene in case they ended up pulling down the entire balcony causing even more damage to my car. I took advantage of the opportunity to leave when the hook and ladder truck backed away to let me out.

The other day, Bruce, a friend from the Placer Camera Club, took me to photograph the Meadow Lake Petroglyphs, listed in the National Registry of Historic Places, located in a remote area of the Sierras in the Tahoe National Forest. What we saw were just some of the prehistoric rock carvings made by the Middle Archaic Martis people who lived in the region between 4000 and 1500 hundred years ago. The site has been studied since the late 1800s after the gold and silver mining camp there proved unprofitable and was abandoned, but it is not highly publicized for fear that it might be ruined by vandals and obliterated by too much foot traffic because many of the petroglyphs have begun to flake off the rocks as the rocks freeze and thaw and cracks let in moisture.

We were above 7300 feet and it was a beautiful day in the Sierras. After leaving Highway 89 out of Truckee, we drove for more than an hour over unpaved, bumpy, potholed roads and then spent several hours clamoring over the granite outcroppings. Some vandals have already added their mark, first in 1910, but the site remains quite beautiful and its remoteness helps keep it pristine. The were a few carvings that were obviously new, perhaps only 40 years old and seemed more like hippie symbols that were unlike those of the Martis people. These petroglyphs are in one of the most extensive petroglyph sites in the northern Sierra Nevada. It was fascinating to see and I had no idea that such a site existed so close to where I live.

The first five shots are of the ancient petroglyphs. The last shot shows the work of a 1910 vandal who impressively managed to chisel cursive into the granite but while possibly obliterating some of the original petroglyphs that are barely visible to the right of the script. The straight lines on the granite are the result of glacial movement.

While I was struggling with Big Bertha the other day, I realized that not much was happening with the lone egret I’d already taken a zillion photos of. I turned the lens to telephone wires a hundred yards or so away in the opposite direction in time to see a flock of starlings swarming around the wires. I feel a bit sheepish saying this, but I was actually too close to get the photograph I wanted: lots of starlings on the wires, with at least one pole showing. Since I couldn’t really back away further, that composition wasn’t gonna happen so I concentrated on getting as many birds as possible on the wires at once. Six was the most I got. This is a composite; I added the one bird flying down from the wire from another shot. Then, I edited the composite shot in a Topaz Impression Cave Man filter.

My friend Melinda commented on the Italian Pepper I posted the other day that I had edited using the Topaz Impression colored pencils filter. She suggested I should start a “kitchen collection.” I took her suggestion to heart when I went to the grocery store for the first time since my return from NYC. I bought lots of veggies and because it’s fall, Whole Foods featured some odd pumpkins and gourds. Of course I bought a butternut squash to make soup and then I saw the tiger striped pumpkins. I have no idea if they’re edible but I liked their look and they were cheap enough to buy as a photo prop alone. Then, the requisite apples, cilantro, carrots, bell peppers, and Ciabatta to make croutons for the butternut squash soup all found their way into my grocery cart and in front of my lens. I edited these using the same colored pencil filter and assembled them into a collage using TurboCollage.

Sunday afternoon I needed a “bird” fix. I wanted to see if I could manage Big Bertha out in the field without any help. So, I loaded the car with Big Bertha, my Gitzo tripod with the new Zenelli’s gimbal head, my D7100 and the 1.4X teleconverter and ventured out to see if I could find some big birds to photograph.

I drove west on Elverta Road to the Garden Highway and saw nothing so I drove along some of the back roads through the rice fields that are being harvested now and still saw nothing so on my way home east on Elverta, I was forced to turn around because of a grass fire in a field. I turned onto Levee Road and saw an egret in Steelhead Creek, had a place to pull over, and did.

I took quite a few photos of three different egrets, a great blue heron and a red shouldered hawk that was hunting on the ground along with the heron and one of the egrets. I got a few shots of the three of them together but none of the shots was in perfect focus. I guess I have to figure out how to focus this lens because only a few of the many shots I took were in focus. The shots are cropped to a 9 X 16 ratio. I was standing quite a distance from this bird. I was atop the levee road, across the road and about a three hundred feet away.

I’m not a very good farmer. My tomato crop was paltry even before whatever creature ate them all. My herbs all seemed to go to seed before I harvested much and my eggplant, jalapeño, and Italian sweet peppers barely hung on. The creature finally got my two jalapeños but the Italian sweet pepper, which had languished all summer, finally produced one tiny pepper. It grew to about three inches and had turned red by the time I returned from NYC so I harvested and photographed it using the macro lens. It was just a picture of a pepper so I edited it in Topaz Impression using the colored pencil filter which made it a bit more interesting.

After coffee at the local Starbuck’s, we spent our last morning in NYC walking along Broadway which parallels Riverside Drive where we stayed. It was cool and overcast, quite a contrast to the lovely weather we experienced during the rest of our visit. I was amused by some of the things I saw on our stroll so I did take a few shots during our stroll.

In past years, my New York friends have referred to pigeons at flying rats. We saw very few pigeons during our visit. I would have loved to have photographed pigeons on the wrought iron fence next to this sign but I’m guessing the residents on this street have taken this admonition to heart as there were no pigeons in sight.

I loved the look of this faded advertisement painted on the brick wall; parts of the old sign have been obliterated by replacement bricks.

The bright fall colors caught my eye and then I noticed the spelling which amused me.

We saw rats scurrying across the sidewalk as Michael walked us back to our apartment after dinner on our first night in NYC, but I was very amused that this small park, in the median strip along Broadway, marked every rat hole with a laminated photograph. I’m not sure what purpose these signs serve, whether they are there to protect the rat holes or to make them targets or to make a statement about waste in government (or something else) but it gave me chuckle.

We never made it to Wall Street on our visit in NYC but I got to see and either appreciate or contemplate the considerable examples of “wall” street art there. Some is very sophisticated and is probably not really considered graffiti, and some, while rather crude, is still very compelling.

.

A stroll through Washington Square Park near NYU in Greenwich Village Sunday afternoon gave me an opportunity to do a little street photography and enjoy some of the interesting people there.