Week Eight - 2017 in Photographs

Day 50

 This week is about mountains. Even the two pictures of trunks of trees are about mountains. About my mountains. Those which surround where I live. They are on national forest land surrounded by ranches and homes of people who love looking at those mountains. And the air is so clear and clean the view is almost always fantastic. The skies so blue and free of clouds mostly I seek out the cloudy days to record. It is sort of the visual equivalent of man bites dog of which Mark Twain wrote.

Day 51

Day 52

 And that explanation also explains the tree trunks below. I remember key lines from Mark Twain but also sentences from books on photography or art. I have that sort of brain. And this one photography book (I never remember the titles) said you did not have to have the top and bottom of a tree in a photograph. And in fact that could be limiting. So I give you must the bottoms in the next two photographs.

Day 53

Day 54

And except for the very last photograph I have decided it applies to mountains too. Do you need more than just the tops to have it be a photograph of a mountain?

Day 55

Day 56

And so I see this photograph as not so much a photograph of a mountain range as a portrait of a ranch at its base.

Week Seven - 2017 in Photographs

Day 43

 This week begins and ends with a sunrise. And then luck and location gave me the opportunity to photograph some wildlife in the area. Deer seem more prevalent then elk currently. The elk are probably still up above me because it has been a warm winter. They should be down in May to calve.

Day 44

 With the warmer weather I decided to photograph the melting snow on the mountains and the hill sides.

Day 45

 And then I decided to try a black and white version of my favorite mountain range. The textures show up better in the black and white I believe.

Day 46

Day 47

 I usually go for beauty over cute but I could not resist these three fawns from this last spring.

Day 48

Day 49

Week Six - 2017 in Photographs

Day 36

 Confession. I have no photo to post for day 43. I have had issues with getting out there with the camera. And today, since it didn't snow as promised, I may do still life photography as I clean up the flat surfaces in the studio. My attention is definitely divided. But I try to remember to take out the camera and snap something.

Day 37

 Fortunately flowers bloom around me. And the sun shines and casts shadows across the snow.

Day 38

Day 39

 And there are still the subjects I am trying to get just the right composition on. This one gets very close.

Day 40

 And then there are the "assignments" I get like taking a great photo of a house guest.

Day 41

 And then there is playing around with the photos which didn't quite work as they came off the camera. And I confess I have two uploads on the computer I have not post processed. But I did take the photos. It is like leaving a half exposed roll of film in the camera. Yes, I am that old.

Day 42

Week Five - 2017 in Photographs

Day 29

A friend of mine posted on social media that she was wandering around lost again and I totally understood what she meant by that. Me too. And that really showed up today as I searched for a Day 36 photo to post on Binford-Bell Studio. The folder for the coming week was empty. A quick perusal of my uploaded photo files shows I have fallen really behind on post processing. As much as I would like to believe my art is a stabilizing influence in my life there are times the chaos in the world destabilizes that.

And when the Thursday morning massacre occurred in my little world chaos reigned supreme. It is sad when politics make it unsafe for artists. That said let me apologize for the scattered nature of this week's offerings. And I am not really sure next week will be better. I have to reorder a lot of my life because of Thursday. I was deeply involved with the arts in my neighboring town and that will no longer be the case. Ultimately that will give me more time for art and photography. But I have to divest myself of a lot of groups I supported.

Day 30

Shakespeare said, "First thing we do is kill all the lawyers."

But if you want to make a society soulless first you suppress all the artists. Hilter took it one step further and stole all the art from every country he conquered. In our country you just take away all opportunities to display their art, cut all funding to the arts, and then denounce them as unnecessary. Hell, who needs photographers now that we have iphones? Next they take the internet. They already want to slow it down for all but corporations.

Okay, I will admit to being a bit overly dramatic about now. I have been trumped.

Day 31

Day 32

Day 33

Day 34

Day 35