contest results

I entered 7 photos in this contest, and unfortunately didn't place in any category. 500+ photos is a lot to contend with. However a couple friends of mine made it into runners-up or honorable mention spots, like Ian Hoppe, from my family's old church (he got 2nd place in "Other Wildlife"!).

Ah well. Here were my entries, which I still think are pretty swell :) :

This is just one of over a dozen photos I have "faved" on Flickr. This one is from user aftab, published on October 11.

Click here to visit my "favorites" page, which has shots as cool or cooler than this - like super-close shots of raindrops mirroring flowers, or a swan on a lake burnished bright gold from the setting sun. Or a frozen spider web backlit by a sunset.

My own photo site is here. I've been trying to join groups, add photos and comment, and I'm having a little bit of success with kind compliments. But mostly I'm getting under 2 views per photo, which means either people just don't know it's there or don't care to see it close-up. It's a bit of a popularity contest. If you have tons of followers, you'll get like 96 comments and end up on the "Explore" page on Flickr, which is where I found most of my favorites. And usually stuff with that many comments, or on Explore, really does legitimately deserve it. Not always. But I try to remind myself that the goal is not to get on Explore, or to have over 50 comments on a photo. It's just to share what I've been doing lately. Sigh. ...if only it were as fabulous as those faved pics, though!!

husker football from my perspective

Yep, these are photos from my one and only Husker experience - and the first entire game I have actually sat through. Yes, I know it's too much. It was all Julie's doing.

We were crammed in one row from the top of the student's section. I did not know the student section STANDS... the entire time! Our bench had a tendency to wobble forward and backward, sometimes making Julie and I grab each other's arms. I found the bazillion balloons everyone let go at the first Husker point more fascinating than anything that happened on the field - as you can see in my photos. I never took pictures of anything on the field - I suppose for one because nothing was actually HAPPENING, from a fan's standpoint, and second my camera could never get anything useful from that distance anyway.

So, I have faithfully dipped my toes into the world of Husker football... and I found everything around me except the field pretty interesting :) A guy in front of us got escorted out by police for his drunken, shirtless debauchery. Good times!

-Oh, and it looks like Slide cut off the edges of a few pictures strangely... like a balloons-in-the-sky one and a shadow picture at the end. If you want the true artistic effect I guess you'll just have to go through the Slide album yourself :)

red on the trees

I took over 400 pictures last weekend. ...yikes. A lot to go through.

I'm going to throw up some shots I like and this time not worry about whether it is a comprehensive gathering of every single highlight.

So... through the magic of Slide, 14 shots:

memories...

While selecting some shots for a photo competition, I happened upon photos from an excursion in October of 2008 with Anna and her kids. I pulled out the old CD with the shots on them - and realized some were never edited and/or put online. So, here's a look back at the past - a fantastic little trip to Pioneers Park with Anna, Cami and Calvin, & her camera :)

butterfly in the sky. I can go twice as high

These are the results from one frustrated evening of chasing monarch butterflies.

I went out behind my parents' house on gorgeous evening, and I swear there were at least eight butterflies sitting in a single view of a clover patch. They, having wings, however, did not want to sit still.

At one point I discovered they were grouping together, hanging upside down like they do in nature shows, from tree branches - very far away, but I tried to zoom in. The little things were SO ANNOYING... but even at a distance, as a nicely shaped black speck, they are inspiringly beautiful.

If you want to see my best shot of the hanging group, wait for the last shot! (about 9 pictures in all)

Thank you to God and butterflies for - existing :)

*** Two of the photos wouldn't show up correctly, so here they are.

new lesson

So the last three-ish days were several shades of awful. I came home for the weekend and realized one evening that I had forgotten to refill a certain prescription of mine. Oh well, I thought.

I enjoyed a nice meal with the fam - peach pie included - and went to bed feeling slightly sick. My brain filled with flashing images of the overly-long photo shoot I did that day, I - stayed up pretty much all night, excepting 2-3 hours. I drove back to the house, and spent the rest of that afternoon nauseated and exhausted - literally staring at details in my wallpaper. It got bad enough at 1 a.m. that I had my parents come pick me up and take me home again, where I weathered another day of the same until, finally, around 3:30, Mom came home with the blessed prescription. I hadn't eaten (or kept down) much of anything for about 2 days.

I had a hunch, the night my parents came to pick me up, that I should check out Google to see if my situation was at all pill-related. Google was replete with links warning you not to "abruptly stop" taking this drug, for "nausea, vomiting and sleeplessness" will occur. Exactly my symptoms. Lesson learned.

We worried that now I that I had the drug, whether I'd be able to keep it down, but by the grace of God (or something like it) I managed to and am back to a hesitant normalcy. I actually have energy to do things mentally like read, things requiring more staring at the wall. My stomach no longer feels like it has marbles in it. Yay hooray.

***

I told myself I was too sick of taking pictures to do any editing, but... can I help myself? No, not really. This is a little baby monarch caterpillar that was doing some serious chowing when I spotted it on a milkweed plant.



The plant had several stalks chewed to the nubs - so cute. There was a second, much much fatter caterpillar (like that rhythm - fatter caterpillar) chilling on a milkweed nearby - he never really moved and seemed unfazed by my presence, unlike the little guy who would hide. He really, really seemed to want to live. (Figuring how I spotted several monarch -butterflies- in that same area, it seemed he had some ground to catch up on!!)

Speaking of chewed plants...



The work of grasshoppers along the edge of our property. The whole tree, such as it was, was like that.

Here's some stuff from the nitty gritty, when I waded in a small pond (and thankfully nothing bit me):



So many drowned sunflowers in the water - seemed beautiful in a kind of morbid way. You think of Ophelia from Hamlet, committing suicide in a river, surrounded by flowers.





The second-to-last one is of the -reflection- of a normal sunflower in the water.

It really was fun - although I luckily spotted a medium-sized spider in his web to the side, and managed to get a good macro of another, muchmuch smaller one on a leaf. Teeming with life, as they say, and all that.

My leg in the sweltering pool (I don't know why sweltering - it just seemed like a good word):

That's probably enough for pictures. Ciao.