Sunday Stills - Extreme Weather

I just noticed this was supposed to be "bad" weather, but for some reason I had "extreme" in my head and figured -10 and miserable to 62 and fishing was pretty darn extreme.  I have a feeling after standing in the icy river for an hour Saint Tim is probably voting for "bad" ;-).

For more Sunday Stills...

 

Sunday Stills - A Day In The Life

This could be the biggest challenge yet so here are the rules. Pick a day in the upcoming week and take your camera with you, no archives. Take and post no more than 4 pics during the day that show how you spend the day. For some this will be a breeze and for others you may have to go out and do something. Just remember no more than 4 pics and no archives.

Well, I didn't catch the only take four pictures part until just now. I was thinking that we were just to only post four. Sorry Ed.



Wednesday. I skirted 25 fleeces. It's a messy job and I just decided to plow through it so I could move on to washing. I take each sheep's freshly shorn fleece and open it up on the special screened skirting table on the porch of the wool house. I then pull off all the coarse, dirty wool from around the legs, any hay or straw and shake out the second cuts.

The wind had caught some wool from a few weeks ago and you can see some stray bits still hanging on the forsythia bush. The birds are happy to come grab it for their nests and had picked the bush so clean I had to add some more. I love to see our wool in their nests.



After each fleece is skirted, I place it in a large paper bag and carry it into the barn for storage. Past the cashed out sheep, flaunting their lives of leisure. This is Popcorn PeePee Pants and Emily in the background. Most of our sheep don't sleep flat out like this, but I frequently see PP laid out. Frequently being the key word here. Actually, 'frequently laid out' fits most of the animals here throughout the day.



As I unwrap each fleece, I pull their tag and make notes as to quality, size, color... The stack at the end of the day.

I took several other pictures of the day, but none were of any real photographic interest. I could have posted more pictures of sleeping sheep, cats, dogs, chickens... I could have posted the barn shelves full of bags of wool. I could have posted Graham Lamb's fleece being washed...

In the end, I decided to post a funny picture I took that evening while I was tooling down the river with Saint Tim, because that was what I thought was the most important. Sorry about the drool ;-).



‘Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.’ Henry David Thoreau

Ice Capades

Saturday afternoon Saint Tim and I headed to the river. There is an otter family over there and I was hoping they'd be out and willing to work a photo shoot. No such luck, but it was a nice afternoon regardless.



Yes, he's wearing waders, but apparently it was still pretty cold.



I tried to catch some interesting pictures. I like the "conflict" between the still water and where it turns to riffles.



Little fairy houses?









Hobbit houses?



And a little good news for those of you jonesing for spring. These geese were actually flying north. They've been flying east (?). I'm trying not to think about it.

Sunday Stills - Sports

Well, I thought on this all week, and in the middle of January about the only sports I could come up with involved drinking games. The weather broke though...a bit...and it warmed up enough today for a little fishing on the Elkhorn Creek.



Jaybird, Saint Tim and the ultimate fishing pontoon.



Originally I was to meet them at 3:45. They'd been skunked so far, but two minutes after they talked to me, the fish began to bite. "Give us until 4:30." This shot is as the sun was starting to set on the creek closer to, um, 5:00.



The reason I'm setting up the time of day is to give a clue to how "dark" it was on this already cloudy day. Not ideal for pictures...especially as I decided I wanted to take all my shots in manual mode today. And my main goal was to try to capture the lure splashing into the water.



I took a ton of pictures - many too dark, too bright, too blurry, not blurry enough... It was a challenge trying to figure out how to balance the shutter speed and exposure.



I didn't get exactly what I wanted, but I was proud to have gotten what I did. And I was able to use the manual settings on my camera to capture shots I couldn't have gotten otherwise. Great practice!

For more Sunday Stills...

Back Atcha, Eli

"So, how'd you end up today, Eli? Catch anything like this?"



"How about this? What? I can't hear you. Oh, I see..."

Eli, you ought to know better than smack talk about fishing.

Saint Tim was finally able to sneak out for a little river time this afternoon. I met up with him as the sun was setting and as we floated near the railroad trestle, a train came thundering through. Pretty exciting. I grabbed a few pictures and then thought, what would City Boy do if he were here? He'd take a video!





This is the under view of the trestle. I thought it was pretty cool at the time. Now I'm thinking it looks pretty, um, small - yikes!



Even in the fading light...beautiful.

Editor's note: no fish were harmed for this Eli rebuttal. Scared maybe probably, but Saint Tim practices catch and release :-).