In the Zone

Right now the fun is never ending. I keep ignoring my Nature photos at the moment as Nature is teasing us with all sorts of wild weather.

I had a really nice compliment on a photo I did of Princess Sara in an email from a Lego Ambassador last week. I used a tutorial by FourBricksTall and tagged her in my write up on Flickr. I read that and felt inspired and had an AH HAH... moment.

I won't be a pro toy photographer ever or be hired by Lego any time ever. But I felt like my efforts of creativity and explorations were somewhat vindicated. 

Any...way...more about getting into the Zone. After that my head burst with all sorts of ideas. You know, the stuff that bangs around in that empty space of a brain. That echo chamber. 

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I first got this Lego minifig last Spring. I had her in my pocket in May while I was hunting fungi and other things as they came up from the forest floor. I decided her name would be Sara the Brave and she would be a Princess when I first set her on a mossy stump.

I really liked her but couldn't for the life of me figure out her 'Story'. Well, that is until I set up the photo I did a while ago. I plucked her off the shelf where she spent nearly a whole year and made her a central character in an adventure. 

Truly, I don't know where that adventure will take me, but I am glad to have Sara out and about. She makes an interesting character that wields a stick horse and a sword.

I walk around in the forest looking for cool things. The minifigs bounce around in their containers in my backpack. Some days I hike and never take them out. And then some days, things just click and I know that I found yet another clue in Sara's journey.

Of course she will find exotic looking plants and...

well...

it looks like those other forest critters may be watching her!
That looks like Big Foot is spying on them!

Will she meet some of those other fierce warrior women?
How about Ariel who also wears the blue knight armor just like Joan of Knight? 

She is an exceptional warrior who loves to fish.

Sometimes she even gets them to jump right out of the water!

 [Trick photography! I hot glued floral wire around the fish tail and pushed it into the stream bottom. I took the shot with the wire in the photo and took a shot without the fish there.👇]

I set the camera up to take 5 photos in a row while I threw rocks into the stream for splashes. 

The magic happens when you stack the two photos on top of each other and simply erase the wire. The photo in the second layer is just a shot of the Lego figure by itself. This was a trick I learned by watching a video by a Toy Photographer who goes by SirDork. 

While I was at it, I found another spot where Hannah the Hunter was. It seems she is looking for something in the forest also. 

Will all of these characters eventually find each other? I don't know. 

For now? Anything can happen.

One other note. Spring will be emerging all over the forest. I see the signs of Spring Beauty leaves poking up out of the leaves. I saw bluebells emerging too. It feels like this next snow/sleet/rain event is just telling us to be patient.

Suddenly Spring will emerge like a racehorse out of the gate.

But for now, I'm in the Zone... 

the play Zone.

Rib Mountain State Park and some fun

One of my goals in going to Wausau, aside from visiting with the grand kids, was to explore Rib Mountain State Park.


I like hills, I like rocks.  I like geology.
Rib Mountain, formerly called Rib Hill, is a four mile-long ridge of ancient rock dating back about 1.7 billion years. It is among the oldest geological features on earth. It is composed of very hard metamorphic rock called quartzite.
As early as 1893, the mountain was used in the manufacture of sandpaper. The Wausau Sandpaper Company was incorporated in 1900 and built a factory. In 1902, Wausau Quartz Company crushed the quartzite for grinding and polishing purposes. The two companies merged in 1905 to form Wausau Abrasives, which was purchased by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing in 1929.
From Rib Mountain History.

Friday it stopped raining and we decided to go.  Lily and I got dressed for the weather and got to Rib Mountain quite early.  We were the only vehicle at the very end of the parking areas.
One of the first things we did was to climb the 60 foot tower and take a look around us.

Lily took a shot with my FujiFilm camera and was able to see our motel. There is a pink circle around the Motel 8 sign.
The hotel was about 5 miles away, just so you can get a perspective on it.

The view was really quite neat even with the heavily overcast skies.

Parachute People flung off the tower at some point in time.

Lily's dad along with Elena and Sterling were to join us at the park.  Lily and I decided to go ahead and do a bit of exploring while we were waiting for them to come.

Lily got along just fine with my P&S FujiFilm camera.  We started along the Blue Trail which stayed close enough to the tower we climbed but not so far that we couldn't go back to the parking lot and meet up with her dad.

We swapped over to the Red Trail and circled back towards the Blue Trail.

What we had been looking for was the Grey trail which was my goal.  The grey trail would take us to the old quarry.  But we didn't find that trail until we were ready to leave.

We actually didn't hike very far, we found so many interesting things to look at like fungi, moss, rocks and of course acorns.

Taking a ten year old hiking is a much different experience than taking an older person.  It is more fun to see things through a young person's eyes.

When we got to a stone staircase we decided to try some fun photography.

First the stairway.

Lily wanted to see what it would look like in Infrared.  So I set it up.

Then I asked her to be in the shot and to stand absolutely still.  She wanted a spooky weird shot.

And there she was, a ghostly figure in a strange looking land.

We had so much fun with that, she wanted a IR photo of the two of us on a bench.

Our cam colors came out white and it was sort of spooky and creepy looking.

After exploring some mossy rocks and other things we headed back to the playground in hopes of meeting up with her dad.

We played on the Merry go Round and then I set up a camera on a tripod and had some more fun with 'trick' photography.

By 2:30 PM we decided to vacate the mountain and promised each other to come back and explore it again.

We went to her dad's place and visited.