A Dog's Life

I was lining up for a Really Artistic Photograph of these puddles. I had the reflection of a very nice Douglas Fir all lined up in the puddles. Nice texture in the gravel around the puddles. The puddles had no ripples, they were like glass.

Fortunately, before I could make an Artistic Photograph, the dog intervened. First, he stepped directly in the farthest puddle. Then, he showed me what was REALLY important this morning - sniffing a really interesting spot where some Wild Animal apparently did something that made a nice (ahem), interesting smell.

Sometimes, I try to make one photograph but end up with a different, unexpected one. Life is like that. I like this photograph but it's not at all what I had in mind.

(about the title - if you haven't read Peter Mayle's wonderful book "A Dog's Life", you should do it right away.)

Moonset

It was quite cold this morning - hard frost again. Just as the sky began to brighten a bit, I noticed the moon setting. It made me think of the Thurber story, "Many Moons"

Unlike Princess Lenore, I am not ill of a surfeit of raspberry tarts. I'm content to leave the moon where it is. I don't think it's really caught in this tree, anyway.

Flying Home

Lionel Hampton’s signature tune is titled “Flying Home”. It’s considerably more upbeat than I feel. It’s late in the day. The planes are all running late. I don’t want to travel home, I want to have traveled home.

More Birthdays Coming Up

The Big Day

It’s not Thanksgiving without a fire in the fireplace.

Two traditional Thanksgiving activities: cooking and taking pictures of everyone standing around watching the cooking.

Let’s all sit down.

Wow, that was good. Is it time for coffee?

Getting Ready

1. Set a lot of places at the table

2. Cook a lot of good food

3. Eat a relaxing dinner. (AJ gives me ‘the look’ as everyone else listens to Joey)

Travel Time

Dawn at Seatac Airport. All the sleeping airplanes are waking up.

If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put them all there?

I'm not a big fan of crowds or cities. That might explain my fascination with places which are designed to have a lot of people in them but currently don't have any. I actually prefer them that way - what other people find empty or lonely, I find comforting.

The Seattle Center on Monday morning is just such a place.

More Backlog

There's something appealing about the tidy arrangement of these buildings. I drive past this spot often (it's on the way to about half of the known universe) and it looks great no matter what the light is like.

On this day, I actually was headed home, and had the time to stop and make an exposure.

The B(ack)log

I've a bit of a backlog. Rather than make life easy by doling them out one per day, I'll just put them all up here.

As I get older, I can't focus on things up close without optical assistance. Kodak, however, does not seem to think this means that he needs to stay back where I can focus on him. This is what Kodak looks like nowadays - up close, slightly out of focus, and giving me that look.

The trees cast shadows on the studio wall. Most days, I wouldn't pay attention. This time, though, I notice.

As I was driving into the Big City to get batteries for the dog collar and a 20 kg sack of dog food, the twilight looked like this.

Dinner Candles

Ralph Steiner once commented that the interesting problem, the big problem to be addressed when photographing, is to know which direction to point the camera. He meant that the real issue is deciding what we put inside the frame. Left unsaid is the flip side of that decision - in deciding what to include, we also decide what to exclude.

These candles were lit for dinner. It wasn't nearly as dark as this photo seems to imply. That's the way it is with photos - you get the picture, but rarely do you get the whole picture. Sometimes, that's good. Sometimes, it's bad.

One of my photographic heroes is Lewis Hine, who made hundreds of beautiful photographs that, along with being beautiful, advanced Hine's social agenda of exposing the conditions that children worked in and helped turn public opinion against child labor. Hine is reputed to have said "Photographs do not lie, but liars may photograph."

Morning Tea

Here's what it looked like when I sat down to drink my morning tea. The studio beckons.

Church

I just liked the way it looked in the rain with the yellow leaves and the green grass.

For Sale

Across the street from the post office, there's this lot for sale. The building is unused.

I'm not sure why I stopped to make this photo. Something about the unmowed grass, the faded For Sale sign, the back of the unused building, and the view beyond.

I don't think it's a great photo but it does capture something essential about how my day went.

Wednesday Morning, 6:15am

I apologize to the Simon and Garfunkel fans for the title. Clear skies overhead this morning, fog down in the valley. This is looking east from the Starbucks (coffee and schneck with Paula and Greg this morning, mmm). It was not quite getting light.

The world had that curious crispness this morning in Carnation, despite the fog.

Post Office

It was rainy. The trees looked nice. The pavement looked nice in that Hollywood "It Just Rained, Isn't It Amazingly Clean" (tm) way. The sign reads "now hiring".

Cool Car

This morning, trying to recover from that Monday Morning Feeling(tm) I rolled down the hill to Carnation, to get a cup of coffee, a breakfast snack, and sit quietly and read the latest Neal Stephenson novel. When I left the shop to go grocery shopping, Lo! This car was there.




It's all tree branches and oak leaves - the whole car. It's just so amazingly nifty, I stood there for a few minutes, admiring, probably with my mouth hanging open.

The guy who owns it was very nice. It's a sort of vinyl covering - he has lots of patterns.

Chairs

A few weeks ago, I put the patio chairs under the overhang, to keep them out of the winter rain. I stepped out onto the patio to listen to the stream, and there were the chairs.

The Parking Lot

I was waiting for Greg's appointment to end, so that we could drive over to the store and snap up a copy of Halo II. I'd arrived early, so I had a little while to sit and wait - a nice bit of down time.

"Hey," I thought, "there's no fog here. Time for some non-foggy pictures!" Looking out the car window, I spotted a bed of ivy, and I grabbed the camera thinking I'd make some photographs of the fallen leaves mingled with the green ivy. But when I got out of the car, better opportunities presented themselves. I got off nine exposures before the batteries gave out. These two were the best.

The Shadow Knows

The fog has been so unrelenting that I'm starting to wonder if Lamont Cranston has set up shop in my woods - hiding out and clouding my mind, using the secret he learned in the Orient.

I walked down my driveway to check the level in the propane tank. It looked like this.

I know, I know. But when it's foggy, it's hard not to make photographs of fog.

Veteran's Day

It's Veteran's Day. In Carnation, that means that the Hardware/Liquor/Wine/Lumber/Feed store has the flags up.

The Morning Outlook

When it's foggy, this is what greets me in the morning. Kodak is wondering why we're dithering outside in the cold and damp when we could be inside getting him his morning treat.

Fog in the trees

These days, where I live, mornings (my favorite time to photograph) are all about fog. It forms in the valley and drifts up the hill to where I live. Fog, trees, and a no trespassing sign - that about wraps it up.

Yesterday evening

Morning drive

This was part of my drive into town. If I had to articulate what I like about living where I do, this image would go a long way toward doing it.

Frost

Again, this morning, hard frost. I scraped the car for Greg, but by the time he left for school, the windows had frosted up again. I guess at that hour, the frost is still forming.

Frost and Fog

The skies were clear last night - when I walked outside to lock up, it was dark (no light smear on the clouds), and a wonderful array of stars splashed across the sky. The gravel crunched underfoot in that gritty way it does when it's both cold and damp.

This morning, we had a hard frost. Greg and I had to scrape the windshield on the Prius so that he could drive it to school. We drove down to Starbucks for breakfast, and the fog was drifting through the forest on the faint morning breeze.

Coffee was good. Breakfast with Greg was better. This is what it looked like when we went out, Greg to head to school, and me to head home.

Devil's Club

Devil's club is nasty stuff. A member of the ginseng family, it grows near streams here in the PNW. It can grow in large thickets, or as single, isolated plants.

Why is it nasty? The spines on the stem are terrible. The spines break off, and they're just like little slivers of glass. The wounds get infected. They itch, they hurt. Heck, when you cut the stuff down, it even smells bad - an evil, acrid smell.

It is no surprise, then, that the latin taxonomic name for Devil's Club is Oplopanax Horridus. Horrid, indeed.

This particular example is living just outside my bedroom window. Over the past few days, the color has changed, slowly, to a luminescent yellow. It's shaded by a fir tree, it's tucked into the woods a bit, and frankly, although I usually cut the darn stuff down when I spot it, I've left this one for some reason.

It appeals, somehow

Election Day

I voted this morning. For the first time in something like 20 years, I had to wait in line. Despite the imminent threat of flooding in the valley things in Carnation were wet but normal. No one at Starbucks (getting their pre-suffrage-exercise caffeine bracer) seemed excited about the rain, the election, or the fact that for the first time in perhaps three weeks the morning delivery of croissants to the Carnation, WA Starbucks franchise failed to arrive.

Well, no one but me. I am hoping that the missed breakfast croissant (I substituted a nice slice of pumpkin bread, complete with big-ass chunks of walnuts) is the worst part of the day. I suspect the flooding when the Tolt River jumps the banks right by the park and closes Tolt Hill Road will be worse. If NE 124th floods, and Greg has to drive home thru Duvall, that will definitely be worse. As far as the election goes, I’m hoping for the best and expecting the worst, just as I’ve done since I was old enough to vote.

Given all the acrimony of the past year on the political front, I was struck by how many smiles there were at the polls. I was struck by the fact that everyone, of all political stripes, was happily standing peaceably in line on the zigzag of masking tape laid down on the cheap nylon carpet to show us how to line up in a small space. In Carnation, if you live in Horseshoe precinct (I do) you vote in the portable classroom at Carnation Elementary, by filling in the ovals on the ballot with a black pen and then putting the ballot into the counting machine in the corner in the back. When you put your ballot in, the counter on the face of the machine increments by one. I put in my ballot, and the machine changed from 25 to 26. It’s sappy, I know, but I still get a thrill from voting. It’s especially nice when you can vote surrounded by the art produced by Miss Jane’s first grade class. When I lived in Provan precinct, we voted in the gym at Sunrise Elementary, and there were NO drawings of dogs, or ponies, or barns, or Mom. No drawings of anything, actually. It’s nicer with the art.

Down in Carnation, it smelled like wet street and (near Starbucks) like coffee. Here on the hill, it smells like wet woods, and in the studio it smells like wet dog. I think Kodak went wading in the stream. He brought back a big stick, which he subdued on the porch in front of the studio before barking to come in.