3 Shots: Thanksgiving Hike

My family loves to hike, especially now that my parents have two very energetic bird dogs.  Their names are Argus and Murphy, and they're amazing.  Anyway, on Thanksgiving (before the festivities began), we went on a hike in the Mud Lake section of Leelanau State Park.  Leelanau, by the way, is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and very few people outside of Michigan know about it, as it's not easy to get to.  But anyway, here are some pictures from Thanksgiving:

This one is not from Thanksgiving, or from Northern Michigan.  It was taken in my parents' house, and I think it illustrates well what living with Argus and Murphy is like.  There were two racoons in a tree behind the house, and the dogs were very alert, as was my sister.  My only wish is that the lamp were not there at all, or at least behind my sister and the dog.  I think it's distracting.

This one's from the hike.  When they're outside, the dogs always think that they are hunting. Argus is the one in focus, and Murphy is the one behind him - although now that I've blown the picture up a bit, I can see that actually, the grass right in front of Argus is in focus.  Whoops.

Cool mushrooms.  'Nuff said.

Bonus picture! Here's my family.

3 Shots: Fall at First Landing

First Landing State Park is a small, swampy state park that sits on Cape Henry, the cape between the Chesapeake and The Atlantic in Virginia Beach.  It's not exactly Yosemite, but it's strikingly beautiful in its own way.  Here's three shots from a walk I took there a couple of weeks ago:

This is Long Creek, looking inland from a spot near the mouth.  The park's geography is really odd - there are a bunch of creeks like this, all running pretty much parallel to each other.  All of the trails, therefore, walk along the former sand dunes between the swamps.  I wonder about how exactly this land was formed.

This is Long Creek as well, I think.  I'm not sure about this picture.  Maybe it's too busy.  But I think it's a cool angle nonetheless, though the exposure was really difficult to figure out.

I'm proud of this one.  It was a pretty simple picture to take - backlit spanish moss with a zoom lens anda small aperture.  Spanish moss has really amazing shapes, I think, and its nearly invisible hair around the stems makes for a great halo effect.

3 Shots: Fall begins in Virginia Beach

I wrote last year that fall begins slowly and imperceptibly in Virginia Beach.  This year, however, fall began with a bang: Hurricane Matthew.  Three days later, streets all over the city are still flooded and thousands lack power.  My house was unaffected, thank goodness, and we got a day off from school.  So, I went and took some pictures.  My goal was to try and capture the cool clarity of fall that settled into the air after the storm left

This is the handrail on the beach access ramp at 64th street. As you can see, the sand's blown a bit higher than normal.  When I see this picture, I primarily see how underdeveloped, overcontrasted and oversaturated it is.  I've got to get better at Lightroom.  Maybe later, I'll reupload an adjusted one.

This is the "The" in "The Belvedere," which is one of the older beachfront hotels on the northern oceanfront.  I've biked past it 1000 times probably, but never noticed how picturesque it is, if that's the word.  Again, I don't think this is perfectly developed, and it bothers me how the angle of the bricks tells you I'm shooting from below.  On the flip side, I really like the faded paint underneath the letters, which wouldn't be visible from dead on.  It feels evocative to me, but I don't know exactly of what.

I'm proud of this picture.  It's just a torn greenbriar leaf, but I love the fading in the background, the balance of the limb and leaf, and the linear aberrations on the left side of the picture (which, by the way, are severely out-of-focus pine needles in the foreground of the picture).  Again, I think it could be a bit more exposed - all of these pictures make me want to turn up the brightness on my screen.  Fun fact - immediately after taking this picture, a bee stung my ear.  It's still swollen and itchy, and teaching while on Benadryll is proving to be a big challenge.

3 Shots: France

It's a shocking oversight, but Megan and I went to France, and somehow none of the pictures made it to Misadventures.  Accordingly, here's our trip in 3 shots (One note - this was hard.  If you want to see more pictures from France, check out the "Pictures" page):

Here is the obligatory lavender fields picture.  I'm not sure exactly where this is, as we were in the middle of a drive that went vaguely around Provence.  The contrast of the yellow and purple, however, and the mountains in the background, well-deserved stopping and taking some pictures.  Interestingly, on the other end of the field there was a rundown caravan park with one caravan in it - I can't think of a more beautiful place to put up your mobile home.

This is Isle Sur La Sorgue, a charming little tourist town in Provence.  Here the Sorgue splits into canals and streams, making the center of the city a maze of footbridges, waterways and quayside cafes.  Occasionally people (French tourists, mostly), take little punts up and down the river, scrambling over the low head dams, and getting soaked as a result.  Under the red tent to the left, I had my first steak tartare.

After leaving Megan's mother and her new husband in Blois (of which, sadly, I didn't include any pictures), we headed for Paris.  This shot, from the Louvre's collection of Islamic Art, is the back of a Moorish door.  The fronts of the doors were incredible in their level of detail and workmanship, but I found the backs just as lovely, and much more compelling.  The facade is lovely, but the work needed to support beauty has its own humble grace.

3 Shots: White Mountains

I've found that teaching full time (and running a outdoor leadership program and playing 1-3 adult recreational sports and doing everything else a normal adult human needs to do) doesn't leave much mental bandwidth for writing.  And yet, I still want to blog.  So, I'm introducing a new thing: posts consisting of 3 pictures and brief captions.  It's an exercise in restraint, or an exercise in laziness: you decide.

These pictures from from my recent trip to the White Mountains with my friends Michael and Xavier.  I took a bunch of pictures, but here are three that I think tell the story:

This is No Ketchum Pond, with Wildcat Mountain and Carter Dome in the background.  It's a peaceful black-water pond, fringed by thick, dewy bushes. At around 7am, when this picture was taken, it was silent but for the rustling of the wind over our heads and the twittering of a few birds.  I had hoped to see a moose, but no luck.  Also pictured is Xavier getting a nice water bottle of mud water.

This isn't a masterpiece of a picture, but is one of those worth 1000 words cases (the whole point of this type of post).  We left our tent poles on top of a mountain, and so when we arrived a No Ketchum, we faced a conundrum.  Here, you can see the 4 small dead trees we chose to hold up the tent, as well as my bootlace tying them together.  It wasn't elegant, but hey it held up the tent.

This is our last night in the woods, at the Imp Shelter.  There's a considerable amount of post-processing in this photo, but suffice to say sitting at the bench overlooking the sunset was wonderful and beautiful.  All in all, it was a fantastic trip, and we were lucky to have the opportunity to do it.