~ firefly-dreaming a virtual home to learn (or teach!) alternative methods of solving problems we find facing us each day. By sharing ideas & knowledge on living with less stress, more joy & embracing tolerance & compassion we are working towards building a sustainable future for all living beings.
I fell in love with the Columbia River Gorge on my first visit to Portland, OR when I was 9. My great-aunt Margaret had moved from Danville, IL to Lake Oswego, OR to enjoy her retirement living near her son & his wife. Her sister, my beloved Grandma Florence, decided that in the summer of 1980 that she & her boyfriend would take me on a summer road-trip to see Margaret. It was a fantastic trip where I flew from my home of Bangor, ME to Chicago and then we drove to Oregon. I got to see lots of things both on the way there and then back including the Grand Tetons, the Black Hills and lots of cornfields! Heh, I also read lots & lots of my Nancy Drew mysteries in the back of my Grandma's big ol' Cadillac as we made our way across the west. Once in the lush rainforest of the Willamette Valley we were treated to lots of beauty courtesy of my 2nd cousin Bob (Margaret's son) & his wife Sue. One of these gems of Oregon beauty was "The Gorge". Picture at left is my fiance & I looking out from the Crown Point Vista House towards the east end of the gorge
Everything in photography composition can be boiled down to just three things:
Where the camera is pointed i.e. what is in the viewfinder/viewscreen
Lighting
What is in focus and what isn't
It is the last of these that I want to deal with here. As always, this will be written with point and shoots in mind but most if not all will be transferable to dSLRs. I suspect that this will be old news to most dSLR owners though.
A reminder of (much) colder days here on the lakefront
There was a bit of snow around but it didn't feel very cold, at least not by January NW Indiana standards. A few moody shots of the lake under low cloud cover seemed a great idea so I parked at a friend's house and walked the 50 yards or so to the beach at the Southern tip of Lake Michigan.
Sometimes it is good to step out of a comfort zone.
I live in a town with a traditional type high street. Many people including the mayor, who I believe to be a good guy overall, is very proud of the towns high street. It looks nice, as long as everything is looked at from a distance of a couple of dozen feet or more and the paint jobs on the store fronts that are a couple of years past their best and the 50% off tickets that seem to have swarmed don't come into sharp focus. At first glance everything looks fine, as long as you don't look too closely that is.
I like photographing geometry. I am attracted to images where parallel lines, circles, squares feature strongly. This extends to the third dimension with the simple volumes all appealing, i.e spheres, cubes, cones and pyramids. I also possess the photographers love of and obsession with light. This combination is probably to be expected of someone who claims to have an affinity for minimalism.
In 1986 something momentous happened in the world of British journalism. A new broadsheet was launched, It was touted as center left and largely out of the tensions created by Murdoch but that was not the momentous thing. The momentous thing was that the paper put emphasis on the quality of the photography that it used. The newspaper in question? The Independent, one of only two British papers worth a look - the other being the Guardian.
(until knuck comes back, i'll keep promoting this one
- promoted by RiaD)
As usual, I`m back on Fridays to post my coral reef images & to lend my small support to all the people from the gulf, & for all the plants & animals, above & belowthe surface.
I fear the damage will affect more the denizens of the deep, than the more visible surface land inhabitants.
As I`m sure you`ll all concur, I believe this was by design, ... to minimize the visible surface damage, at the much greater expense of the out-of-sight underwater damage.
I`m encouraged, albeit minimally, of the renewed pushback against the mantra of "the oil is gone", a magical feat, (read, pack of lies) akin to the (mushroom cloud from WMD`S in Iraq).
Lately, I`ve been not so enthused about the progress in the gulf.
I see the ramping up of activism in diaries with multiple posters, that, great unto themselves, the collective impact is much more than the sum of it`s parts.
Here are a few links.
It seems there has been a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the government to push for a final & definitive push to do a bottom kill .
I would not expect the officials at BP to listen to us, but you`d think the government would.
I realize I`m a dreamer, but when I think of all the damage, seen & unseen, to plant & animal life, I seem to be in a constant nightmare.
I fell in love with the 
