Bomb.

On one of our camping trips, the boys brought along some smoke bombs.



Lots of great colo(u)rs. I liked the contrast with the blue of the sky.

Go fly a kite

Such a simple photo, but both the colors and symbolism are beautiful to me. One of my boys and a friend enjoying summer as only a couple of kids can. I was permitted to participate in their joy only because of my propinquity. And I love the clear blue sky and the brilliance of the kite. Of course, I could have cropped it, but I didn't want to.



Blogger has not been kind to me lately. I have had to attempt several times for each upload. Being oft refused does frustrate, but the price is right.

EXIF: 1/3200 sec; f5.6; 300mm (450mm equivalent); ISO 800 (Why???? Must have left it from dusk shooting the previous evening.)

Badlands sunset

Two renditions of the same picture, taken in the Badlands National Park (South Dakota), with the sun setting behind us. I took the picture in RAW format (Nikon's name is "nef"). Of course, I can't load a "nef" image onto blogspot and expect anyone to view it, so I change it to a jpeg. Curiously, when I used Nikon Capture, it reduced a 6 meg file to a 78k jpeg (the lower image here). I like the layering of the sky in this massively compressed file.

RawShooter does a much better job of allowing permutations (or at least I find it more intuitive.) Their best jpeg is 3-4 megs and this one came in a about 1.5.

The softness of the colors and the harshness of the landscape make a contrast that is intriguing to me.

King of the road

This is a bit better, obviously a repeat of yesterday. This heat was rising from the road in waves and that fades the original somewhat.

I tried to encourage my 16-year-old to stand by this bison -- what a picture that would have been! But he was uncharacteristically reticent (my son, that is). But he is a generous lad; he offered to take a picture of me sitting on the bison's back. I was concerned that some folks might think I was being cruel to the bison, although if my son continued taking pictures and watched the bison stomping my body for a bit, that might have mitigated concern of animal cruelty. There were about a dozen bison in this group.

I have to be careful; I took hundreds of pictures. But I have a warning light that goes off in my addlepated memory. When I was a freshman in college, I joined the choir and we travelled in the spring break. One night two of us were staying with this family who had a bunch of friends over and were showing slides of their trip to Mexico. These folks had not deleted any picture they took, and they took a lot. I remember seeing eight slides from varying distances of the entrance to a Mexican cemetary. When I noticed that my roomie Maury had fallen asleep, we bowed out, claiming it was a long day (not true.)

"Cemetary," by the way, is distinctly Christian in the origins of the way we use it. It is etymologically identical to the French "dormitory." Early Christians did not like "necropolis" (city of the dead), so they took the available equivalent of the place for sleep and applied it to the graveyard, thinking of the words about Lazarus, among others, "He is not dead, only sleeping."

Bummer

I am very unhappy with the way this last shot turned out, although it was really, really hot in the Badlands. It had just cooled off from 114F. Obviously I need to go back to the drawing board and do a lot more postprocessing, but not tonight. I had a wonderful vacation with no Internet access. Got home to discover we had a torrential rainstorm and had water in the basement with carpets, library and computer equipment. Got my younger son's PC up and running and then he downloaded some new drivers and did some other things so I ended up rebuilding that PC from scratch. Piles of work awaiting.

Bison stop

Sometimes it is wise to stop. This bison was almost as big as the car coming from the opposite direction. Taken in Badland National Park, South Dakota. Humming "Buffalo gal, won't you come out tonight" for those who know "It's a wonderful life."