More Covid Diary Thoughts

Morning shots from yesterday, the 13th. I went out to look for Comet Neowise. I did see it!

I was not successful at photographing it, but I did enjoy a long predawn quiet of watching the sky and the fog change with the light.

Up at 4am because...well, because I had to blanch a LOT of green beans and get them ready for the dehydrator. 

I'm in that mode now. The saving produce mode. Pick carrots and green beans as soon as there is enough light. Wash them and trim them on the porch before noon and then set them in the fridge for the next morning.

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I ran out of freezer bags on Friday and thought since I had to run to the post office to pick up our new mattress I'd ordered, I'd run into WallyWorld and grab some freezer bags.

Imagine my surprise that the shelves were barren. Not only were there no bags of any sort, there were no 'Seal A Meal' items either.

Then of course there were the tourists, or the weekenders. More than one mom with Little Vectors and no masks walking about the store. 

I stopped in my tracks. What has this Covid-19 done to me? I stared at the kids as if I could make them go away and with carefree mask-less attitudes. Was I right? Was I wrong? Was I an idiot? Was I paranoid? Why did I see her and her own kids as dangerous.

6 months ago, I wouldn't have had a second thought.

I grabbed two other items I was looking for and vowed never to return to any store on a Saturday morning.

Ok. 

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Pick the veggies.

Wash the veggies.

Cut them up....

Dehydrate them! 

The cukes went into a refrigerator sweet pickle salad of onions and cukes.

To tell you the truth, I sort of have a love/hate relationship with doing vegetables. I know I will enjoy them in the winter. I sort of resent having to take up a good part of my day caring for them.

I'd much rather plant flowers and mess around with them.

But as my husband likes to point out.

You can't eat pretty flowers.

But, you can put pretty flowers with your unusual dried veggies and do a Still Life photo of them, right?

Just for information. 

That pint jar [vacuum sealed] of green beans hold about 22 servings of green beans for 2 people. I generally mix my dried veggies up in a jar like the carrots and green beans and open them when it is soup making time in the winter.

I toss a handful of dried veggies in the crockpot along with the broth and in about 6 hours, I have some incredible tasting soup.

I am careful to plan ahead and use up the dehydrated veggies during the winter months. Apparently they don't last forever in this state.

Another thought to consider is the storage. I can store more vegetables in a dehydrated state than I can in a freezer.

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Last Covid thoughts for today.

My Grandmother lived through the 1918 Pandemic and WWI. After that she had to deal with Prohibition. The Depression. WWII and raising a family with rations.

I get it now.

I get why Grandpa and she never let one tiny thing go to waste. Why Grandpa would bring home items from the dump. Why he kept every tin can and used it for things like seed starters or earth worm containers when we went fishing.

Why they even kept balls of twine or string. Or...even old bed coils. How they picked up old windows and built a green house...why not even a ratty old shirt got tossed...it could be used for a wash cloth, or...woven into a rag rug.

My grandparents were the original 'up-cycle' folks.

Life has changed.

I used to run to the store just on a whim. I was used to finding what I wanted when I wanted it.

My whole thought on humanity has changed.

...and it

is very 

un--nerving.

What has happened to us?

 

Taking photos/Random Thoughts

Of course there will always be the debate about how much editing is acceptable.
There will always be a huge debate.
To Edit or To Not Edit.

I am somewhat in the middle. A little editing can go a very long way. 

I like to take .RAW files now. I can breeze through them in CorelAfterShotPro 3 and get a good job done quickly. I guess I am plugging Corel because they haven't gone the way of Adobe where you have to pay monthly to use Lightroom and CC.

I've also found ON1 to be extremely easy and fun to use.
It has the ability of taking my .ORF and my .NEF files and working with them and I can save them in a variety of file types.

However, I am always interested in improving what I do. I read up on tutorials and watch the occasional video. 

One of the items I see floating around the internet is videos that teach you in certain programs of how to change the sky in your photo that you've taken.
Yikes! Okay, that is fun and it can add a lot of drama to a photo.

But when did we stop taking real photos? Or better yet, why do some folks post edit photos and spend more time on them in the digital dark room than they did thinking about taking the shot.

I've harped on this before. And I am as guilty as the next person for post editing shots. And perhaps I am all wrong too...

I have learned a few tricks that could help me get a more interesting shot than the conventional way. But swapping out skies seems a bit extreme for me.

I don't mind cloning out a small distraction, but going to the far end of the spectrum is a bit unrealistic.
So I don't know if I'd qualify as a purest ~ no, I am not. But I won't spend hours swapping skies, cloning in or out rocks, and other items on a photo.

I think about what I want to do, watch the weather for a perfect sky and then try to compose something that will work.

Here is an edit that is very obvious.

Here is another. Replaced sky added a moon, but it is all quite obvious.

Here is a shot I took a long time to think out and do. I took many shots on a beautiful morning. I used an Infrared filter and also did some shots with a ND filter.

I came up with this, edited to black and white.

[This shot was taken obviously before our house remodel.]

I like to do less as more.

I studied the lighting in this shot and went with what filtered through the window in the late evening out onto the porch.

I've done some pretty wild stuff, but always seem to come back to the basics.
I even once in a while go a bit overboard in exploring things like HDR.

Recently I've gotten an interest in bugs. I've read up on how some of the professionals get great 'insect' shots and learned about something called Image Stacking. Image stacking led me to Focus Peaking and searching out how to manual focus properly in an Automatic Focus world.

I'm making the circles. Landscapes, Macro, Panoramic, High Dynamic Range, Long Exposures, Still Life, and Infrared Photography, a bit of over the top artistic stuff, and then back to the basics.

All challenges to make taking a photo interesting and challenging at the time.

Edit? Of course. Have fun with it. 
After all when the debate dust settles, I guess it all comes back to the photographer and what the Artist Photographer wants to portray.

I guess if you are going to take photos, you just need to enjoy what you are doing.

Dog Obedience can be used for Equine Obedience

The principal is much the same I've realize now after all of these years.

The lessons I learned in my first week of dog classes in 1980-something, was that it was important for your dog to learn to pay attention to you.

This was what we did for just one week in short 15 minute daily workouts.

A longe line was used, a very light cord tied to the collar.  In this case I had a corrective 'choke' collar.  We were never to nag or choke the dog.  The dog was to wander around and eventually 'not pay attention to the handler'.  As soon as the dog's eyes were not on you, you walked swiftly in the opposite direction.

Within two to three times my dog realized that she ought to keep an eye on where I was and she knew exactly how long that line was.

Now I wasn't working her a as a puppy, or taking her on walks as I did Morris as a pup because I lived in a city.  Her work started way after her puppy-hood.

How are equine trained?

In a round pen or on a longe line.  They need to learn to focus on the handler.
Wow.
Does that sound familiar?

Dog Obedience can be transferred quickly to Equine Obedience.

Today's world is all about non painful training or Politically Correct training. Yet still the principles are the same and the goals are the same.
Happy are those dogs who understand what is expected of them and the rules of conduct.
Why not the same for equine?
I see so many equine walking all over their handlers...



Yesterday, as I was reading through the old lessons and the paper work I saw a very parallel line between equine and dog 'trickery'.

I used the method I'd learned in how to teach a dog how to 'heel' and transferred it into teaching a mule or donkey to 'heel' at my elbow on lead line.

I was surprised at how easily it was accomplished and how much faster the donkey and mules picked it up.  
And let me tell anyone who wants to know.....
No harm, no pain!

Not only that, I can walk my 'tricked' mules on a loose lead.  Siera is my new shining star in that respect.
She will 'heel' me in the pasture.  She will stop and stand if I stop.  If I turn into her and give her the shoulder signal to back up, she backs up as I turn into her.

I've shown this to visitors at our farm, and the believe I have a 'trick' mule.  All I did was apply Dog Obedience 'Heel' training to her at halter.

To some who've seen it, they think I've preformed magic on her.  No, I applied a few weeks of 'leash' work to her!

In the Chicago Tribune on November 3, 1976 an article was done on Shepherd House and its Obedience Training classes.  One of the men interviewed said if he called his classes 'Trick' classes, he'd have more people sign up.
They did not use the strict Koehler method for training as they felt is was a bit harsh in some cases and wouldn't work on 'all' breeds.
So they developed a very non-harsh method that drew from several behavioral theorists.