A visit to the Portland Rose Garden

On Sunday the 22nd Marie's family started to gather for a family reunion in Oregon. Those of us that were here decided to go to The Portland Rose Garden late that afternoon since I had been there before and was anxious to see the garden a little earlier in the season. The last time it seemed that most of the roses were past the good blooming stages when we visited. I was well rewarded and took around 250 pictures but could have spent the entire day there and still not seen or even photographed a part of what was there. But for the hour or so that I did get to photograph here are a few of the images.


I loved this last one since it looked like a bird. I was looking at it from several angles when I noticed this angle and just had to capture it.

A couple more from Good Morning emails.

The best thing that I enjoy doing while camping is getting up early and going for a walk with my camera. It amazing how much wildlife you can see when there are not any of the other campers making noise.

Some various images fro Good Morning Emails

I have decided to put a few more of my Good Morning Emailed images on the blog today. I am headed to Oregon for a wedding and may not have a chance, depending on internet access, to add to my blog for a week or so. If I can I will but even if I do or I don't you can know that I will be busy taking pictures of anything I can while in that beautiful state. I will hopefully come back with a lot of images for future blogs and Good Morning Emails.

Just Look Around You

OK so by now you know that I photograph Silver Beavers. (Scouting Council Awards given to top Scouters in each Council of the Boy Scouts of America.) Anyway last night I had 7 scheduled to meet me at an LDS church in Spanish Fork, Utah and I did my usual waiting game. However last night was a little bit different. When I arrived I was sitting there thinking about blog material and well there just wasn't anything to photograph. There was major construction going on in the street next to the church and there were several large trees around the church that were dug up and laying in heaps of limbs and dying leaves but this just didn't seem like things I wanted to photograph. As I was sitting there looking at three trees with big red x's on their trunks and thinking about the fact that those were apparently going to be on the chopping block so to speak in the next few days I was a little bit taken back into thoughts of when they were possibly planted and how long they had possibly been growing there near that church. They had most likely been there almost as long as the church and they were probably pretty small when planted.  Then I was looking across at the construction and there near the parked cars in the church parking lot was a tree with the branches kind of wrapping around as though to comfort each other in the terrible loss of the other trees that were there possibly many years before even they were. Here below is the image of what I saw.

Then it hit me and I looked closer at the trees I could see from the chair on the lawn where I was sitting and I suddenly realized that there was some real beauty in the branches of the trees so I took the following images while sitting in one spot surrounded on three sides by these magnificent old trees, at least two of which will not be there in a few short days. Sometimes progress is not progress when you consider things that have stood the test of time and weathered through some tough storms and seen some heavy snow falls collect on their branches. Maybe this is just one way to preserve a little memory of them.





And here again I will leave up to you, the viewer, to see what beauty may come to you from these images and then ask you to look closely at trees around where you live and find in them the beauty that they have to share as well. You might even want to photograph them.

Here's the corrections.

Well I still don't really know what happened to these two images yesterday but I did find that I had loaded them to the web in a CMYK mode rather than a typical RGB and figure that must have been why they turned out almost as an inverted file. See I continue to learn everyday also. CMYK is used in printing images and RGB in saving for web. Makes a big difference apparently.

A few more from September

Well I have been rather busy the last few days and have not been able to get more photos ready so I am sending some more from my Good Morning emails of Sept 2007. I hope you enjoy them.

A journey started Sept 13, 2006

Last year on Sept 13 I started a good morning email blast to some of my co-workers. Now several months later the list includes family members, former co-workers as well as the co-workers that I originally started to send images to each morning. It was an effort to help them get started on a beautiful note so that the pressures of the job might be taken a little easier during the day. When I started it I didn't realize how fun it would be or even to some extent how hard it might become. Not hard in that it is difficult to do or not fun to do but hard in remembering what I had sent and not repeating images. I have I found myself now more than ever before doing the time outs during photo shoots just to capture possible images to keep the good morning greeting fresh and new. I have found it fun to see what people enjoy in the images such as a little spot of blue color in one that was a little bit of sky showing through the image of a squirrel. One person loves the flowers while other like old barns or desert scenes and others like the animals. I have discovered that my desire from childhood to capture all that I could of nature on film has made it possible for me to bring happiness to a lot of different people with a lot of different likes and passions. Below are some of the first images that I sent and even though the list of people I send to now exceeds 40 I know many of them never got to see these images. 

(Currently the top two images are loading kind of strangely so just know they are not what was sent and that as soon as I can figure out why they are loading that way and I can get them to load correctly I'll add them to this blog. Even now though they make for a fairly interesting image.)