Bear Stories

I'm a whimsical person. I do creative stuff on a whim. Yesterday was chilly yucky cold icky grey nasty windy ...did I say icky windy and nasty?

Oddly enough the other half had a headache and didn't feel well. I had phone calls and 'business' to take care of and instead of doing my grocery shopping, I stayed at home to keep an eye on the hubby. He wanted me to stay in the house in case he felt worse.

I got restless and sort of bored so I sorted through a DIY site and found some cool ideas for making a 'bark' vase out of a tin can and yeah...bark.

I made a righteous mess and sat on the kitchen floor with my two sided tape and chunks of bark. The two sided tape was a good idea but I eventually got out the old hot glue gun which doesn't work well, but I did manage to 'make' the vases. Which I decided would look better as fake tree trunks with toys than vases.

I tried making a diorama scene and used Groot and Ricky as my posers. I was not fulfilled and it felt like I failed. Meh. Even with messing with it...meh...bleh.

Being quiet and watchful without being obvious is hard. So I decided to browse some ideas regarding Still Life. 
I found some rather interesting Low Key ideas that represented more of a Noir black and white theme with a Teddy Bear.

OHHHH! I went with the black and white theme as this teddy has been washed down my creek more than once and is kind of a yucky mud/white color. I just thought it was neater in B&W.

Bear leaves sand wherever he sits. Pfft. But the coffee was good.

So my brain went off on a tangent and I wondered about Bear meeting someone and how would Bear act?

OH the Romantic side of Bear!

The pink bear is a one eyed cast off bear I found at Walmart a long time ago. It was stuck on a shelf by itself, all of the other ones were sold. I bought her for a $1. I loved that she was so different.

Time to let the bears have some privacy I guess.

[I like the retro faded look I experimented with. Makes it less real and more like a dream.]

The End.

I like night. Night shooting.

Well what do you do when you have to work the 'graveyard' shifts or get off at odd times of the morning and there is a clear sky and bright moonlight....

you almost can't pass up the chance to experiment a bit with night shooting in the moonlight.

The biggest issue is that even in bright moonlight your auto focus cannot pick up anything. I solved this when I had my friend stand and I could shine a light and focus on her. Without another person, it is a bit harder.

For this shot I turned on the vehicle headlights, got a focus and pressed the shutter with a 12 second delay. I ran back to the car and flipped off the lights.

Bravo! I got a 60 second shot!

Then I thought the moonlit road would be interesting.

And...it really wasn't interesting other than only being lit by moonlight.

And then a 'shot' in the dark. I used to moon to get a focus and then pointed the camera an tripod behind the car.
At least there are stars in this one and the colors are more interesting.
The picture is noisy and has some funky pixels in it.
I was too cold to continue at this point, the temperature was 10 degrees.

So I packed up and went home to bed.

Since I had to work another midnight shift, I thought I'd take a few moments on my way to work to try out some other night shots.

I went to the pedestrian crossing near the Genoa

This shot was a total mistake. I didn't use the timer to prevent a jiggle in the exposure and the plant lights were too bright.
But one has to make mistakes in order to improve.

6 seconds of exposure at f 4.5 was too much. I should have gone to an f 11 perhaps.
I didn't have time to really take other shots, I had to be at the plant in 10 minutes after taking this shot.

However I pointed the camera with the same settings in the other direction towards the dam and got this shot. The color version was a mixed back of odd colors from the bright lights at the dam and the different kinds of light they have, so I turned it into a Black and White shot.

This turned out much better.

It was cold and I had little time to experiment, so I wrapped things up and went to work.

On my way home I couldn't help but pull over and take a shot in Romance, WI. The Bad Axe river was steaming and the trees were full of frost.
I pulled onto a side road and walked through the ditch to try and get a decent shot.

The light was so glaring and different from Night shooting.
But it was worth the walk through the crunchy snow.

Tonight the 15th will probably be my last night for any moonlit shots for this month. I can look forward to this again in April.

Perhaps I can convince my night hiking pal to help me go out tonight and take some of the snow lit up by the moon.
We will see!