Grate Expectations

After a morning of purposeful picture-taking in Annapolis and Eastport, went off to do some of the day's errands. As I was walking back to my car in a parking lot, I stumbled across this scene.

All morning long, I was composing images in mind - beautiful images of beautiful places in the harbor on this beautiful morning. Yet, even though this one came outside of my picture-taking session, I think it's the best photo of the day.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

Opa and Ben

Here's my favorite photo of my my late father and Ben. I took it in February 1992, when Ben was not quite six years old.

What prompted me to get this one out and scan it is that Ben finished his very last day of school this past Thursday (classes, at least - finals are this week.) I asked him to have someone take his photo on campus so that I could pair it with the one Sandy took of him on his first day of kindergarten. While I was looking for that picture, I found this one just a few pages later in Sandy's well-organized photo album.

Back in '92, I had considered myself no longer a photographer, but simply a family snapshooter. I used a succession of auto-focus rangefinders that I bought for Sandy, my "good cameras" having been long before sold off.

But every once in a while, the photographer in me would come out, and this was one of those times. I had visualized this photo earlier in the day, knowing that Grandma and Opa were coming to visit. I got out my dusty, little-used Nikon EM and had Dad and Ben pose for just a few seconds.

I'll take some of the credit for this photo but not by any means all of it - the lion's share is thanks to the loving bond between Dad and his grandson.

Morning Stroll

Our resident heron takes a stroll across the Pond.

Pick'n At Seed

I brought some birdseed with me last Sunday morning to the pond and thew some on this fallen log at the edge of the water.

Of all the ducks and geese in the pond, this one was the only one with enough initiative to hop onto the log. I enjoyed watching him chow down.

Mixed Flotilla

A Pekin duck (aka Long Island duck) trails just behind two geese this morning at Druid Ridge pond.

Fishy Abstract

Last month, we had a wonderful time visiting our cousins in Virginia Beach. We stayed with cousins Marcy and Paul Terkeltaub and also we all got together with cousins Lisa and Murray Rosenbach, who live nearby.

Marcy and Lisa are enthusiastic photographers (and pretty good, too!) so we decided to head out to the actual beach at Virginia Beach early Saturday morning for some picture-taking. Cousin Murray came along, and proved to be a first-rate picture spotter, gull-chaser and cheerful companion.

Since I've gone all-digital-all-the-time, one of the things I've found useful when I go out to purposely take photos is to just start taking them right away, even if I don't see a strikingly "keeper" image. I find that I need to warm-up my photo-eye, just like I would need to warm up before exercizing (if I were to ever exercize.)

One of the first things we came across along the boardwalk was this set of whimsical fish sculptures. I took a sister-and-brother photo of Marcy and Murray, and then, along with Marcy and Lisa, started to crawl around the fish, looking for interesting angles. This fishy abstract is one of the images I came up with.

Whitewalls

If you haven't guessed already, I love repeating patterns.

But somehow, when I was visiting our cousins in Virginia Beach, I walked right past this bike rental place without seeing the dozen or so good repeating-pattern images.

Luckily, Cousin Murray had caught on quickly to my patternmania, and pointed this one out to me.

Thanks, Cuz!