Chumps and nitpickers

A couple of days ago we had a really nice evening here in Lancaster. The moon was very nearly full, the sky was mostly clear, and the temperature was in the 70's. And when we have weather like that I feel like a chump if I spend much time inside...so I went outside – and took my camera and tripod with me. It was pretty much dark – most of the light was coming from the moon (or from the sun reflecting off the moon, I should say to please any nitpickers in the crowd) so the tripod was a must because there would be no way in hell that I could handhold a 30 second exposure. I took a bunch of pictures and the two I put on here were the best of those.

I did some canoing on Sunday and took my camera with me. It was an awesome day. I got to the landing and on the water at around 10 a.m. The water was pretty low (I was at the Mississippi backwaters) and I had a hard time getting around in my canoe because there were spots that were too shallow for my canoe (or the water was only 3” deep which is plenty to float the conoe but it's hard to paddle in only 3” of water). I usually try to go in places where powerboaters can't go (they're noisy, smelly, make waves, etc.) – and that wasn't much of a problem. There were some deeper channels that the powerboats were confined to – they couldn't really go lots of places.

Moonrise over the Lancaster golf course.

These leaves I happened to see as I was done taking pictures (or thought I was done) and heading home. It was dark out but I didn't use a flash at all. I used the light from a street lamp to light things. The leaves are green in daylight but they look orangish here because of the way that the camera “sees” the light (different types of lights have different wavelengths...which is why pictures taken under fluorescent lights make people look like zombies).

I had found a little sandbar on a little side channel and beached my canoe and ate some lunch. I noticed a reddish/pinkish flower that looked interesting so I decided to walk over to and take its picture. As I was walking towards the reddish/pinkish flower I turned back and looked back towards my canoe (it's amazing how often you can see interesting things that you just walked by by just turning around and looking) and saw that the way the sun was hitting the Arrowhead leaves was pretty cool. So I took a picture - and this is it. I have read that its usually a good idea to have the sun behind you so the things you take pictures of are well lit. Well that may be true much of the time but some things look pretty cool when they're backlit. For this picture I was facing directly into the sun and the sunlight was coming through this leaf. And the picture I took of the reddish/pinkish flower was out of focus and pretty boring.

Some people might not find this picture all that appealing. And I wouldn't blame them – it's a dead leaf stuck in mud for crying out loud. But I must confess, I kind of like it.

I was walking around in the river and decided to take a picture of my feet like I do fairly often for this blog. I walked a ways and when I walked it stirred up the mud. I was going to wait until the mud was washed away in the current to take the picture. Well, the current was awful slow and after a bit I reasoned thus: “This is the Mississippi. Its supposed to be muddy. I should take a picture to represent that...and plus I am sick of waiting for this damn mud to clear.” So I took the picture with the mud clouds in the water. [You can see my reflection in the picture. No I wasn't wearing a shirt. Yes, I got sunburned.]

I always thought that this flower was a just a plain old Water Lily. But according to my Peterson Wildflower Field Guide it's an “American Lotus” that's in the water lily family. There are a huge amount of them growing in the Mississippi backwaters and when you're in water that's shallow and the bottom is muddy it's pretty likely that they're going to be around. They can make getting around rather interesting...but they're another barrier to keep powerboats away from me. This is another example of a backlit picture.

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