Photographing Adirondack Industry

I have been so ridiculously busy lately that my blogging has really suffered.  I'm not complaining, mind you - we've been doing so many fun things with great people.  For the most part, it's been a decision among frolicking, blogging, or sleeping.  The latter two have suffered.  Take this past weekend, for example:

We attended a BBQ on Saturday, hosted by our friend M and his housemate, that started early afternoon and lasted well into the night.  It was a blast.  Great people, very fun games.  I'm not very good at horseshoes.  I hadn't played badminton in umpteen years, and discovered that I'm so-so at it (but would be better when there wasn't so much wind).  I had never played frisbee at night before with a frisbee that has LED lights embedded in the rim.  I'm downright awful at frisbee, even in daylight.  But thankfully I was playing with folks who were both better than I am and remarkably understanding about my shots that kept flying over the neighbor's fence and into the back corner of the yard where the dog poo had been shoveled earlier in the day (oops).

Too fun.  I could have stayed frolicking all night, but...

Sunday we had to get up at the crack of dawn to do some Adirondacks photography with our friend D.  I am NOT a morning person.  Getting me out of bed before 6 a.m. requires a cattle prod and coffee so strong the stirrer stands up on its own in it. 

Once awake, though, it was a wonderful day.  Our friend D has done work as a professional photographer, and spent much of his day giving my husband and me lessons.  He, too, is a Nikon guy, so knew how to use our camera.  D hauled out all his old equipment for us to play with. 

For the Nikon camera nerds, here's the info on what we shot with.  Others probably want to skip this geeky paragraph:

Spouse took a roll of 35 mm on D's old Nikon F4, which was essentially the best-of-the-best Nikon film camera from about 15 years ago.  My husband also used D's old D70 (which is the same camera I have) for part of the day.  Mostly Spouse used D's Tokina 28-70 f2.8 lens, which is a sweet lens.  Sooo much brighter than the Tamron 18-200 I have.  He also did some shooting with D's Nikon 20mm f2 lens.  (I love wide angle lenses!)  D used his Nikon D300, which I think he has a Nikon 18-200 lens with VR on.  I even took a few photos with a kit cardboard pinhole camera I made.  That little sucker will be the feature of a blog post, once I have the photos from it, if any turn out at all (I'm skeptical).

It was quite ridiculous: among the 3 of us, we had 6 cameras and probably at least 10 lenses. 

Photos from Sunday will be appearing for the next few days, I presume.  I took more than 450 photos.  Sorting through and editing those is going to be quite an undertaking!  The lighting was not great - heavily overcast.  I still wound up with a lot of underexposed photos, even under D's excellent tutilage.  While we checked my D70's light meter at one setting, I think we should have spent more time determining whether its light meter is really functioning properly.  Regardless, I did get some nice photos.

My favorite shots of the day, rather surprisingly, were not the typical fall foliage and Adirondack waterfalls shots.  Instead, my favorites turned out to be some more industrial shots I took of old rusting bridges, crumbling factory towers, and water pipelines.  Here are a few I particularly liked, mostly of rust:

 

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Worries

The worst part of pet ownership?  When pets are hurt or sick, and they can't tell you what's wrong, and you have to figure out what's best for them.  It's a lot of responsibility.

My poor Lucy hasn't quite been herself for the past couple of weeks.  There has been nothing we could really put our finger on, though - just a general feeling that something wasn't right.  She still has a good appetite (she's a Basset hound - if she ever stops being interested in food I'll know something very serious is wrong).  But she's been a little quieter than usual, and a little grouchy.  She actually groused at Simon yesterday, which is practically unheard of.  Usually they're like this:

(photo courtesy of our friend M)

For a day she limped on one of her back legs, but then the problem seemed to go away.  Yesterday she woke up limping badly on her one good front leg.  It's not going away.  Of course, I have to keep reminding myself that Lucy has been known to play up injuries (or non-injuries) for attention, too, so it's hard to gauge just how bad it is.  But she really cuts a pathetic figure with her stumpy front leg and her gimpy front leg.  We've put the rock climbing harness on her and have been hoisting her about the house and yard.  She's spent most of her time sleeping.

Poor kid.  I'm left worrying about all the bad things that could be wrong with her.  Is it just an injury?  Is it possible for dogs who have been vaccinated against Lyme Disease to get it anyway?  Could it be an autoimmune disease?   My mind always races to the worst case scenarios.

We go to the vet tomorrow.  I'm sure it will cost a fortune.  I'm sure I don't really care so long as we find a way to make my poor fuzzy kid feel better.

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Starting to Look a Lot Like Autumn

I have such a love/hate relationship with fall.  I love the colors.  The rich reds and golds that lace their way through the fields are so striking, and of course the leaves are beautiful too.  I love fall hiking - it's our time for being in the Adirondacks.  The cool weather feels fresh and crisp, and once we get a frost, the mosquitoes will disappear.

But fall also means winter is coming.  I am a summer girl - it's my season.  I get cold starting in September and don't get warm again until June.  As the humidity drops, my skin and eyes get drier and my contact lenses start to annoy the heck out of me.  I start contemplating buying stock in a lotion company.  I have to put on shoes and socks again, and I can't ever feel truly happy unless my feet are bare.  Soon I will forget the blissful freedom of getting up in the morning and not being cold, or of stepping out doors with only a light summer dress on.  Heavy coats, heavy boots, and being tense from the cold quickly drive away the memory of all that soul warming sunshine.  While I can appreciate the other seasons, nothing compares with summer, and I'm feeling a little blue about the fact that it's ending for another year.

All I can do is focus on the good things about  fall, I guess.  On Saturday I went to a gathering at a friend's house outside of Cazenovia, and while I was driving I had to stop and take some pictures of the late summer fields.  Goldenrod makes me sneeze, but it is absolutely lovely stuff.  I thought I'd share a few starting-to-look-like-autumn pictures:

I didn't think this was my best shot, but when I got home I was pleasantly surprised I had captured a butterfly in the top left that I hadn't even noticed at the time.

There were bugs all hovering over the goldenrod, too.

At the end of the day, as my husband and I were driving to the store, we stopped so I could take a picture of the amazing clouds:

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How Brave am I?

Last weekend we moved the giant tub that we use for our herb garden.  For some reason - I have no idea why - it had gotten set on top of one of our chopping blocks this spring and had been left there through the summer.

As an aside, I can safely say with 100% confidence that I did not set the giant wooden 1/2 barrel up there.  Why?  Because, despite all the work my trainer/friend M has made me do, I can't even begin to lift the thing.  So spouse gets the blame/credit for setting it there.  Ah, if only all our household disputes were so easy to resolve.  Even when I want to, I can't ever confidently blame my husband for setting the dirty plate on top of the dresser and leaving it there because I'm perfectly capable (and at least as likely) to have done so.  Same problem with who put the iPod in some obscure place.  Apparently I just need to have only objects that are so heavy I can't lift them, then we'll always know I can blame him for putting them where I didn't want them.

Anyway, when my husband lifted the tub off, I was pleasantly surprised to see this:

And up close:

I thought they were lovely, so snapped a few pictures of them.  I figured that now they were exposed to direct sunlight, they'd wither and die within a day.

Not so.

A week later, here they are:

I happen to think they're even lovelier now.  The question is, what are they?  They look to me like the oyster mushrooms I buy at the grocery store.  I pay a small fortune for oyster mushrooms because I love them.  And these sure look like them.  I consulted my mushroom field guides, and they seem to indicate they are oyster mushrooms, too.

But ARE they?  If I could know for certain that they were oyster mushrooms, I'd scoop them off and fry them up in a little ghee and salt.  Yummy.

I was raised to be a little bit paranoid about eating wild mushrooms.  In fact, when I was young, my Dad was so worried that my sister and I would eat the wild ones we saw hiking that he called all fungus we found in the woods "toadstools" just so we wouldn't get confused.  I admit that my Father has good reasons to be a little tense about eating wild mushrooms.  When he was a kid, his parents picked some wild mushrooms and cooked them for the family.  Only trouble was, although they looked alike, the mushrooms my grandparents picked were not the same variety as the ones they were used to picking and eating where they grew up in Poland, and my father's whole family was violently ill.  I can see why that memory wouldn't fade easily.

Having been raised to be afraid of eating the things, it then didn't help that my husband's uncle picked and ate a poisonous mushroom not that long ago.  It reinforced my paranoia.

Alas, when it comes right down to it, I am my father's daughter and I don't have what it takes to try my mushrooms-that-could-be-extremely-yummy-oyster-mushrooms.  I shall settle for looking at them, photographing them, and wondering...

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