Seamus Helps Make Charlotte's Birthday Cake

The 29th was Charlotte's 1st birthday! Here, before the important day is Seamus and Anna baking her a cake. As you can see Seamus is lots of help. He really like to get with both feet.

Sunshine and a Few flowers

With the return of the sun, we get poppies visited by busy bees. I'm glad the bees are not affected by the coronavirus and can continue working away. There are already many threats to their lives and they certainly don't need another one. While a bee's life is a hard one, at least they get to work outdoors in a beautifully appointed and colored "cubicle" often scented quite sweetly. That's more than most of us can say. 

Snails!

One of the features of living in a temperate rainforest is there are times when, in addition to raining water, it seems to rain snails.

Found Things and Critters at the Beach

Although I cannot name nearly anything we saw at the beach at low tide, it was all interesting. These bits of sea plants make interest compositions.

More Beach Fun

This is fun stretch of beach in large part because this is a marine reserve and lots of scuba divers come here to dive and visit with the underwater bits. They were certainly out on this day (although you don't see any in the photos here).

A Day at the Beach

Like everyone else in the world, we are really tired of being at home and looking for any excuse to get out and any place to go. We decided this weeked to make a family outing to Edmonds to the beach at Brackett's Landing. Normally, it is a narrow beach but today with the significant low tide, it was a wide, if messy, one.

Wet Flowers in the Front Yard (Again)

As I noticed the other day when discussing the image of the fence with the plants growing through, it is often the intrusions and mistakes that make life interesting. Here, we have catmint poking its lavender blossoms up among the leaves of a Harvest Festival Red St. John's Wort. Although the blooms clearly have nothing to do with the leaves around them, there is a naturalness to the grouping.

More Wet Plants Up Close

Some green leaves with water drops is always a good way to start the day. These sorts of leaves are good for this since they are pretty hydrophobic on top and we get good beads of water.

A Few More Leaves With Water on Them

Of all the images I took during the failed IR attempt, the one above is my favorite. I really like the detail in the central leaf and the water drops really add to the clarity.

I think this fits the season...graduation. I'm quite sure that every graduate at every level from elementary to graduate school feels like the central leaf above looks: the focus of the world and special. And they are. All the families and all the schools in the world are focused on their respective graduates.

Pulling Victory from the Jaws of Defeat

I mentioned last week that I was working a way to bring a little something new to the images in the blog. Well, that has pretty much flopped. I ordered a couple infrared filters to try out and after much waiting for the delivery, trimming and assembling the filters in the frame and taking a few test images... a mess. The images are just crappy. Hence you don't see them here. Either I'm doing something pretty wrong or these Fuji cameras are just not suited to this sort of photography.

Moving on.

So while I waited out in front of the house for the 4 minute (4 minutes!) exposures to end and then another 4 minutes for the sensor to make a dark slide to subtract out the sensor noise, I took some water-on-the-leaves kinds of images. I hope these are to your liking.

Recent Images in B&W

Since we are now going through a rainy spell, I've gone back to some of the recent flower images and tried my hand at B&W conversion for them. I hope you enjoy these.

A Wider View

I've shown you so much of our little town from a few inches to a few feet away, thought I'd take a wider view today and show you some of it in panorama. Above is Avenue A (streets are numbered and avenues are lettered). From the location I was standing, looking in between the church and firehouse towers is roughly the direction of Mt. Rainier from here. Were there no clouds on the horizon we might well see it.

With a wider view comes clutter. I have mentioned before that only towns and road make spaces in the continuous carpet of evergreen forest. As a result, these are on the places you see wires. Endless wires overhead. It is a bit like noticing that the only place you see corrupt politicians is in politics. Put a corrupt politician in their backyard and you lose sight of them pretty quickly.

And Now, for Some Flowers

The summer flowers are showing their faces around town now. The delphinium in the front yard brings a splash of color to our home.

A Few Things I Saw While Walking

Isn't is still amazing that in the 21st century we still have people that cling to talismans to guide their fates? I suppose these people have always been with us and always will be. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that one of our neighbors has put a horseshoe on their rock wall. There are millions who cling to a book (like those written by Ayn Rand) or a person (Trump comes to mind) for guidance in much the same way. So much magical thinking the world is really depressing.

More Along the River

When I get the shutter speed about right, there are some nice abstract patterns of foamy swirls in the river. I liked the way the stump and ferns in the foreground worked with the opposite shore to create some depth in the image. The blurred swirl in the center is a nice focal point.

Along the Stillaguamish

Although there were a fair number of people out along the Mt. Loop Road who had parked their cars to go hiking into the forest, it was possible to find places to stop and get out for a few minutes to enjoy the river.

Twenty-Two Creek

Not so very far (as the crow flies) from the Mt. Loop Road lies Lake Twenty-Two. We can both imagine how this place got its name (I certainly don't know). But it empties into the Stillaguamish River by the Twenty-Two Creek. Looking upstream, this is the creek as it prepares to cross under the road.

This is a nice waterfall. I just sich i had found the sign on the fallen tree before I output the image and removed it. Otherwise, a respectable photo.

Into the Rainforest

On our first outing during the lockdown, we drove out to a tiny place called Verlot. Today we went that way again, drove farther and did it without rain. As a result, we've got a little glimpse of what it is like to live in a rainforest.

Raptor Foundation

Back in 2015 as we were getting started good in this business of house and pet sitting, we had a sit in the small village of Warboys, not far from Cambridge, UK. Near there is the Raptor Foundation where I spent most of a day photographing their large raptors perched and in flight. In flight is hard, but here are two of my more memorable images of perched birds.

Between Rain Showers

As the spring flowers fade and the summer flower begin to bloom, I'm trying to diversify the portfolio of flowers you see here. Today, in between showers, I found a few images in the front yard.

Above is the Lupine growing out by the sidewalk in front of the house.