one drop tells a story

There is a new weekly assignment that I want to try. It is called storyboards. You tell a story in three photographs. I like the idea. I chose to tell the story of a drop. Today's administrator offered a tip about using a tool called Mosaic Maker. I tried it. I like it.

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About our subject: It was not easy to get the right models for this project. Unfortunately, I do not have continuous shooting with my old camera, so we had to interview dozens of prospects before finding just the right ones. What's that you say? All drops look the same to you? Please, that's not a very sensitive remark... a drop might take offense to that!

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(The guy from Steve's Digicams is not me. Back in the year 2000, he did a nice job reviewing the kind of camera that I now own.)

hasta la vista, Bug Lady

[click on any picture to enlarge]

You meet interesting folks in the blogosphere. One recent find was Joan from South Africa. She called herself "Bug Lady." She took lots of remarkable photos, and I loved to visit her blog. The macro shots of bugs were astounding, and this lady had a great sense of humor.

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She has stopped blogging now, and I miss her. That reminded me of how I have learned to numb myself from the pain of losing people. Yesterday, a dear family moved out of the country. One person moves away or changes jobs. Another passes away. In Joan's case, she closed her blog.

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We need to make sure that we make the most of it when people are here, because you never know when they may be taken away by any set of circumstances. Who knows, but that it may even be us, who are shuttled off to who-knows-where.

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About the bee... Those two pics are of a yellow-jacket. One of my sons found a dead bee and brought it to me. (You can see the clear tape that I used to hold it in place.) I was thrilled to have this opportunity, because I had been so eager to photograph ocelli. Those are a bug's tiny simple eyes, located in the middle of the forehead. Most of the time, we only see their large, compound eyes, but some bugs have more than two... and it's not just spiders.

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Anyway, it means a lot to me that we can "visit" by blogging. Hasta la vista, Bug Lady. (sigh) I think I'm gonna need a mug of hot cocoa.

high jumps

It's a fuzzy blur how the whole thing got started, but here I was, running. Not trying to escape from anything, just running. And this was not like casual jogging either, but more like racing. Funny thing... it was effortless, and I wasn't even breathing hard. This was a residential area, and I found myself running perpendicular to the houses, so that I had to hop fences.

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This is where it got really weird. (As if it wasn't already!) These fences were approximately six feet high. I wasn't hurdling or vaulting those fences. Instead, I would join both feet at the base of the fence, and from that planted position, do a clean vertical hop. Again, all of this was effortless. I have no idea how high I could have gone, and I was enjoying myself so much, I could have gone on and on!

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Then I woke up. Interestingly, I got up experiencing soreness (more than usual) in both of my knees and my lower back.