April 1 - "Play"

The first in my "photo-a-day" series for April. Prompt is "play." I'll be straight up and tell you that I'm cheating right off the bat. I took this yesterday. Sue me.

Dolphins at play.

Stow-Away

Gotta check this out!

"Bear" with me

Ok, time for something a little light-hearted.  This had me going for a minute! Pretty cute video...

Smarter than we know!

Wow! Check this out.

I knew dolphins were smart, really smart, but this blew me away! Thank goodness these divers were able to help!

December Photo-a-Day challenge, day 13

"Lights"

Thank you Mother Nature.

 

And hello uninvited guest.

December Photo-a-day challenge, day 4

"Black and White"

Same picture, two versions.  Kona and Brutus, aka, Ebony and Ivory.

 

Here is a similar photo I took a while back (March 2011) and converted to black and white. I loved how this came out. Animal portraits are tough, but I love trying...

Tomorrow's prompt is "looking up"....that one should be interesting!

What is Murmuration?

Wow! Check this out!

Talk about a once in a lifetime event! How cool it must have been for these girls to see this in person - and so lucky to have a camera with a video option handy. ...and people as me why I never leave home without a camera. It's for times like this, or for when Brad Pitt shows up unexpectedly...hey, a girl can dream, can't she?

Reunited

My friend Robert shared this video with me and I'd like to pass it on to you. I don't know the circumstances behind the story, just the outcome. Wow! Talk about touching!

Fluttering By

This morning, in an attempt to keep my mind off of other things, I joined a group of photographer friends at the San Diego Safari Park (formerly known as the San Diego Wild Animal Park). We were there specifically to visit the butterfly exhibit, which was simply spectacular. My camera, although kind of on the "fritz", managed to capture a few shots I was relatively pleased with. Here are a few of my favorites. They are unedited, not photoshopped, or even cropped. I'm way too lazy for that right now.

A Whale of a Tale!

Take a few minutes and watch this video. It was incredible and luckily has a happy ending. Be sure to watch until after they have cut the last of the net off. Watch until at least the 7:45 mark and you will see this beautiful creature show her thanks. All I can say is WOW!

Fenton

My friend Jack shared this with me the other day. I cracked up when I watched it...I can completely relate to this poor guy yelling after his dog.

And poor Fenton, I can only imagine what happened when Daddy caught up with him.

Don't Mess with this Momma!

Warning - this footage is a bit disturbing...but ends ok.

Think you've got big problems? Nah...

Look at the camels first and then read the message below.

This is a picture taken from directly above these camels in the desert at sunset. It is considered to be one of the best pictures of the year. When you look closely, you can see that the camels are the little white lines in the picture. The black images you see are just the shadows! Sometimes, our "problems" seem to be as big as the shadows...but they are little. Have a great day!

~ Thanks to my "White Water Rafting Guru" Andy for sharing this with me.

Our Second Full Day-part 2-Road Trip Games

Before this trip, we hadn't ever been on a road trip this long. I tried to come up with a couple of games that we could play together as a family to help pass a little time. Currently we are playing two games.

The first one is the "license plate" game. I printed out a list of all of the states and we are keeping track of each time we see a license plate from a state we hadn't seen before. When we see one from a state we cross that off our list. Between yesterday and today, we've already seen plates from 37 states, and 4 Canadian provinces! We even saw a plate from Hawaii while we were in Kansas today- talk about random!



The second game we are playing is called "our digital safari" this one is all about taking of pictures of animals we see along the way. Each animal only counts once-if you take a picture of one cow, no need to take a picture of another.

So far we've seen pretty "normal" animals, Shirley and Ed's cat, Bear, some horses, cows, sheep, etc...and up until this afternoon I hadn't gotten any noteworthy pictures...that was until Hubby spotted these fellows for me!




Needless to say, I was pretty tickled to see these American Buffalo (or as AJ insists "they are BISON Mom!")

Anywhooo...We are now in Missouri, and almost ready to stop for the night in Columbia. Another long day of driving is nearly done, and the best news is that we only have about 350 miles left to drive tomorrow!



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad as we are getting off the freeway in Columbia, Missouri to rest for the evening.

My Lion

Ok, here's my first attempt at a decent black and white.

What do you think?

Elephants in Black and White

I don't know if you've seen a power-point presentation of black and white photos by Nick Brandt or not, but I had to share a few with you. These come from his "A Shadow Falls" collection. When I grow up and become a real photographer, I want to take pictures like these.

You can see more of his spectacular photography here.

Nick Brandt is my crush of the week.

A Quick Dip

Apparently this little fellow doesn't mind that the pool is only in the low 50's! He came by yesterday for a quick dip, as he has on and off for the last couple of months. Hubby says that's a heck of an expensive bird bath we've got out there!

One of THOSE days...

Have you ever had one of those days...you know the days when it just seems that nothing much goes right? That's how my day was...

It started off good enough, with me picking up Bear and heading to the Wild Animal Park to join my Photography group for a meetup. All was well until I opened up my camera bag, and realized that I'd FORGOTTEN TO PUT MY CAMERA IN IT! Good Lord, if my head wasn't screwed on, I'm pretty sure I'd forget that half the time.

Getting old sucks...between that, and having way too much going on sometimes, I should have just called it a day, come home, and went back to bed. Oh well...lesson learned.

Thankfully, I did have my little Sony Cybershot with me, so I got a couple of pictures but nothing like what I was hoping for. Bear let me borrow her camera and I snapped off a couple nice shots of a gorgeous male lion (much better than the one picture I'm going to share here) but in typical fashion for the day, I forgot to get the pictures off of the memory card before she headed home today.

Throw in a whole bunch of other garbage that happened today, and like I said, I should have just stayed in bed.

C'est la vie...such is life sometimes, such is life.

This grumpy looking fella has nothing on me today...

I'd like to be tearing something up too...

I know how ya feel brother....

Pictures-a-Plenty

With Hubby out of town this week (he returned safely this evening from Sioux Falls, South Dakota-burr!) I took as many opportunities not only to not cook, but to get out as often as I could with my camera. I took nearly a thousand pictures over the last four days mainly at the zoo and La Jolla Shores.

Although I may not be very proud of most of them, these are a few that I was pretty happy with, that I didn't already post this week. (My favorites from La Jolla Shores were posted earlier this week.)