This is one of the towers on the aerial lift bridge in Duluth. The bridge looks like it was made from a giant Erector Set. I wonder, do they even make Erector Sets anymore? (Please, no Viagra jokes.) And, no, I'm not in Duluth right now (Oregon actually). I took this on a trip to Wisconsin last fall.

At first glance I thought it looked like these buffalo had some extra horns in odd places, but it was just some birds looking for dinner or a ride.

I love the color palette of the sagebrush terrain, especially when the flowers are blooming. The low evening light doesn't hurt the effect either.

Some of the same tree line as yesterday, from a different vantage point and different lighting.

The Teton mountain range is a perfect example of the sublime landscape--wild awe inspiring nature, vast and powerful. But a short distance away across the Snake River one can find contrasting pastoral landscapes--inhabited, comfortable and tame. I enjoy both. This shot was taken from near the Gros Ventre river. The bluish background beyond the far line of trees is not a dark sky but the Teton range in shadow.  

 

I did nothing in Photoshop to create the painterly look of this photo. That was the fortunate result of combining shooting handheld through a 500mm telephoto lens and some hazy evening sunlight. Together they created a rather pleasing blur that could pass perhaps for strokes in a pastel painting.

A bit of a change of pace for the next few days to some color images I took on my trip to Jackson, Wyoming for the art fair there last weekend. I'm not positive this is actually Death Canyon--I was way across the valley in the flats and took this picture using my telephoto lens. I went with the Death Canyon name because it's either Death Canyon or the one next to it and  because I've actually hiked up Death Canyon before.  

 

Whichever canyon this is, it has some nice evening colors, lighting, and an intriguingly rugged composition. It looks like it could be a detail from a Bierstadt painting, say the one below (which we had a framed print of hanging on our living room wall until it succumbed to too much UV light). With real mountains as big and rugged as the Tetons or the Sierra Nevadas, it's hard to imagine why Bierstadt thought he needed to exaggerate what he saw to the extent he did. Just his way of communicating the impression the mountains had on him I guess. 

 

 

 

Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains California 

Albert Bierstadt 

1868 

A highly manipulated, but hopefully highly effective image.

I don't think birds understand much about electricity, otherwise they wouldn't seem so comfortable in settings like these. Still, very few get electrocuted, so maybe it's me that doesn't understand electricity.

I'm sure they do it all the time, but this crow didn't seem too thrilled about getting its feet wet.

There was a bad situation near here recently where a mother grizzly and her three cubs went on a rampage in a campground just outside Yellowstone National Park, attacking a number of sleeping campers. One man was killed and several others injured. Later there were reports that a photographer may have been baiting wildlife in the area and there was concern that the baiting attracted the bears and contributed to the tragedy. I don't what became of those accusations, but today's photo reminded of the bear story because I baited the crows in a parking lot in Bozeman to get this picture. I hope that act didn't make me liable if this crow subsequently flew off and pooped on someone's clean car or something.

I'm in Jackson, Wyoming for the art show here and went to Grand Teton National Park after the show closed yesterday and spent some time photographing a heard of buffalo there. This isn't one of the shots I took yesterday, but I thought I'd post it since I've been thinking about buffalo. Except that it's about 100 years too late, this would have made a good pose for the buffalo nickel. The actual model for the buffalo nickel was a stuffed buffalo that originated and now resides again in Ft. Benton, Montana.  

 

Just to make it clear, I know that they're really bison not buffalo, but who ever heard of a bison nickel? I was weaned in childhood on stories and TV shows about the American West filled with buffalo, so I don't think they'll ever be anything else to me. (And, yes, I still think of Pluto as a planet too.)

Not ravens or crows, but a good bird photo nonetheless. These are either golden eagles or immature bald eagles (I can't always tell, but I think they are the former) that were flying over our house.

This really isn't a particularly interesting photo, but I posted it anyway because I liked the obvious title.

I think they are pie cherries but this guy didn't seem interested in delayed gratification.

Actually it's a twosome with one raven featured in two different poses.

I've been taking time off from photographing crows and ravens this summer, but just had an exhibition proposal for the work accepted. The show is not until January but I need to round out the collection so have been back at it this week. (You can see some of the images that will be in the exhibition in my Opus Corvus folios.) 

 

This image immediately brought to mind the song Sky Pilot by Eric Burdon and the Animals. While the title fits, the song itself doesn't really relate to the image that well. But since it came to mind, here's the song courtesy of the Way Back Machine (aka Youtube). It's an interesting example of the dominant music and political themes from 42 years ago, or at least the dominant themes for the baby boomers. 

 

The cracks in this dried up mud puddle look almost like Japanese calligraphy. Perhaps they form the symbol for drought.

If the American flag were round, maybe this is the way it would look. Not quite enough strips but there are exactly 50 stars.

The Crowne Plaza, at 23 stories, is the highest high-rise in Billings. One thing that intrigues me about these gridlock photos is that the scale of the photos can be visually ambiguous. That is particularly true of this one. While my brain knows it shows curtains in windows, my eyes keep seeing file folders stuffed in cubby-holes of some sort.

Outside of Montana, and perhaps Wyoming, the city of Billings wouldn't seem the best destination for shots of high-rise buildings. But it does have the tallest buildings in the state, providing the best opportunity in these parts for shots for my gridlock series.

Not a shed, but another colorful shot from Bozeman's eccentric north side. A little more cutesy than my typical photograph, but sometimes I can't help myself.

One of the famous sheds on Bozeman's north side--home of the annual Parade of Sheds.

Even the best art shows have their slow times, and apparently my stimulating conversation wasn't enough to carry my wife through this particular lull at Arts in the Park in Kalispell a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately things perked up before she nodded off completely and fell off the stool she was sitting on.

A foggy, drizzly day on the trip to my exhibition opening in Abilene last fall.

This is the reflection of some cattails in the water of one of our ponds. Photographing the not quite still reflection plus adding some grain on the computer gives the image it's painterly, lithographic look.

It's going to fall, it's just a matter of when.  

 

I had a hard time deciding between two commercial references for the title of this photo, "anticipation" or "good to the last drop." It seemed like it came down to a matter of choosing between catsup and coffee, Heinz and Maxwell House. But in the end, I went with the one with the best musical reference. 

 

We've seen a lot of clouds like this in recent weeks in Montana. They're quite impressive to watch but I'm hoping not to see any this weekend during the local outdoor art show.

A peaceful disturbance seems like an oxymoronic concept, but that's what a single set of ripples caused by tossing a pebble into calm water produces. Toss a bunch of pebbles at once though, and the peaceful aspect quickly disappears--falling victim to too much of a good thing.

The word on the sign is actually Montmartre, as in the well-trod tourist destination in Paris. A lot of tourists (myself included) go to Paris in part with the hope of getting a feel for life in the old City of Light from the days of the Impressionist painters or perhaps the later literary enclaves of Hemingway and company. I'm not talking about the Paris of the huge monumental icons such as the Eiffle Tower and the Louvre which of course still flourish. Rather I'm thinking of the workaday neighborhoods where the artists and writers spent their daily lives. As time goes on, that more mundane Paris get harder and harder to divine; there are just too many tourists out and about anymore and too much modernization. Still there are remnants such as this old sign that at least to me seem to retain a dusty aura from those earlier days.

I climbed Livingston Peak the other day with a couple of friends. The view was so great in every direction I had a hard time deciding which way to face when I sat down to eat a snack. Afterwards I walked over a ways from the top and took a series of photos to produce this 360 degree panorama shot. Not a perfect job of stitching the images together in Photoshop, but it gets the point across: a good view in every direction. (Unless you have an extra-wide monitor, you'll need to scroll back and forth quite a bit to see the whole photo.)

I took this photo a number of years ago and don't think the store is open any more. I guess there just wasn't that much demand for "Things Notical, Cowboy, Tomboy, Fine Lady and Gent" as the sign above the door advertises.