Taking another Sunday to clean up some, but not all of the March images that I haven’t shared in the past. This will be a fairly short post, but there are more March images to clean up.
Some of these were alternate images taken for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. For the themes HOBBIES and GOVERNMENT.
Someday I’m going to get back to Formal Portrait Sundays. I swear this is true.
Full intellectual honest, I hate flippie floppies and don’t own a pair. The worst “shoes” ever designed by, I don’t know, the devil! I could write for hours about how they are terrible. They are so terrible, I don’t even like to see other people wearing them.
However, that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the second half of the photo collection of me on a boat. Everybody look at me, cause I’m on a boat!
If you’re on the shore, then you’re sure not me, oh!
The next time we visit a county to look at auxiliary images from THE TOWN SIGN PROJECT, we will visit Allamakee County.
Back in early December Carla, Teresa, and I went to Pella to experience their Krestmarkt. A Krestmarkt is a Dutch open air Christmas Market. It was pretty dang cold that day. If we would have went the day before the temperature was in the 50s. I think it was in the low 20s or teens when we were there. It was a pretty good time!
It was a great trip and I hope we make it back again next year. However, that wasn’t the end of the trip…
One of my unwritten (spoiler: they are all unwritten) goals for 2023 it to bring back the wishing of happy birthdays to the important people in my life.
So happy birthday Tim!
If I don’t wish you a birthday of happiness on this website, it is because I forgot, or don’t know when your birthday is, or don’t love you. You will have to figure out which one it is.
One of these days, I’m going to get back to Formal Portrait Sunday. I swear it. But, this isn’t this Sunday. This Sunday I’m going to clean out all the pictures from February of last year that just didn’t have a spot in other posts for various reasons.
Another month cleaned up. Feels pretty good!
Time to share the final collection of auxiliary images I took while harvesting the town signs of Fayette and Winneshiek Counties. Included in this collection are pictures taken at Montauk. Montauk is the mansion and home Iowa’s 12th Governor William Larrabee. I don’t know anything about William Larrabee, but I’m guessing his entire platform wasn’t to destroy rural schools to line the pocketbooks of the out-of-state interests that funded his campaign.
Here is the final collection of images:
Montauk
Clermont
Elgin
If you don’t know what The Straight Story is, here it is from the Wiki:
In June 1994, Straight’s 80-year-old brother Henry Straight (Palisade, January 4, 1914 – Iowa, June 15, 1998) had suffered a stroke. At the age of 73 and in poor health from diabetes, emphysema and other ailments, Straight could not see well enough for a driver’s license, so he decided his only option was to travel on his 1966 John Deere riding lawn mower.
Setting off in early July 1994, Straight drove the mower along highway shoulders, towing a trailer loaded with gasoline, camping gear, clothes, and food from his home in Laurens, Iowa to his brother in Blue River, Wisconsin.
About four days and 21 miles into the trip, the lawn mower broke down in West Bend, Iowa. Straight spent $250 on replacement parts, including a condenser, plugs, a generator, and a starter.
After traveling another 90 miles, Straight ran out of money while in Charles City, Iowa. He camped there for a few days until his next Social Security checks arrived in August. He was interviewed by local newspapers. On August 15, Straight’s lawn mower broke down again when he was two miles from his brother’s house near Blue River. A farmer stopped and helped him push it the rest of the way. At a top speed of 5 miles per hour (8.0 km/h), the trip took six weeks in all. After the visit, his nephew, Dayne Straight, drove him back to Iowa in his pickup truck.
Henry Straight recovered from his stroke and moved back to Iowa to be closer to Alvin Straight and the rest of his family.
Paul Condit, president and general manager of Texas Equipment Company, Inc., in Seminole, Texas, heard about the trip and gave Straight a 17-horsepower John Deere replacement riding mower worth $5,000. Straight disliked the media attention from the lawn mower trip. He turned down offers to appear on various TV talk shows including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Show with David Letterman.
David Lynch (of all filmmakers) turned the story into the movie THE STRAIGHT STORY. Richard Farnsworth played Alvin Straight and was nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
The film was shot in chronological order along the original route that Alvin Straight took. Richard Farnsworth was suffering from terminal cancer during production and the paralysis of his legs shown in the film was real. He took his own life they year after the shooting of the film.
The movie currently streams on Disney+.
The next county we will visit for auxiliary images will be a little bit different. It will mostly involve a camping trip I made with Carla and Jason, but I consider them to be auxiliary images because I did take one town sign picture on the trip.
Today seems like a good day to share the rest of the pictures that I considered for the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar, but did not use.
Just because I rejected these images this year, doesn’t mean that one of them couldn’t show up in a future calendar.
This is your reminder that this week’s THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme is TRAINS, PLANES, & AUTOMOBILES:
But what is a TRAINS, PLANES, AND AUTOBOMILES picture? Simply put it is a picture that involves a TRAIN or a PLANE or an AUTOMOBILE. All 3 don’t have to be in the picture. One will suffice. The picture can also be of anything that is tangential to TRAINS, PLANES, AND AUTOMBILES. Roads, bridges, train tracks, terminals, stations, are all fair game.
I made this a theme this year because it will be one of the categories in this years Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest. If you submit a photo for this theme, you have a picture you can enter in the Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest.
Happy photo harvesting!
It is the first day of 2023. I’m not really a “resolutions” person. Pastor Adam was on vacation today so we had a substitute seromizer in church this morning. He gave an impassioned, longwinded sermon on resolve. It took more than a bit of my resolve to stay awake during the longest sermon these ears have heard in quite sometime.
But if I were to take the words on resolve to heart, I would say that I’m not without goals. Last year my main goal was to complete THE TOWN SIGN PROJECT. I did that.
My main goal in 2023 is to complete Phase 2 of THE TOWN SIGN PROJECT and put the book together. I should be freeing up sometime to work on that buy dropping a couple of photo projects that I did in 2022.
My second goal in 2023 is to begin work and complete my new photo project. Details are still foggy, but it is to create Boone postcard. Not a bunch of Boone postcards. Not even to print up a bunch of one Boone postcard. But to make one big image of one Boone postcard. While the end goal is one image, it will involve taking at least several hundred (probably thousand) images. It will make more sense when I get going on it.
My third goal in 2023 is to keep the positive momentum that was achieved in 2022 in participation rates for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. I’m not likely to go out and beat the drums looking for participants, but doesn’t mean you guys can’t. Right?
My fourth goal in 2023 is to consider and maybe take action on visiting and photographing every State Park in Iowa.
That seems more straight forward than it actually is because in addition to State Parks there are State Forests and State Preserves and State Recreation Areas. Boone County contains 3 Minor State Forests alone! We will see where this one goes, but we all know I could use the exercise.
I don’t have any goals related to the Iowa State Fair Photography Salon. That type of stuff is a considerable amount of luck. So best not to have goals that are out of one’s hands. Maybe my goal should just be to give my best effort.
Hopefully 2023 is a good year for all of us!
Time to share the December images for the FatMumSlim Photo A Day Challenge. This is also the final collection of images as I will be dropping this pursuit in 2023. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but it still eats up a fair amount of time. Hopefully time freed up that I can use to pursue some of those 2023 goals.
Here are the December images:
December 2 – I Bought This!
December 3 – Starts with T
December 4 – I Held This
December 5 – Something Red
December 6 – Peace
December 7 – Tree
December 8 – Looking Up
December 9 – Small
December 10 – Out + About
December 11 – Free Choice
December 12 – Lights
December 13 – Something Green
December 14 – Decoration
December 15 – A Star
December 16 – Candy Cane
December 17 – A Hat
December 18 – I Made This!
December 19 – Joy Is…
December 20 – Begins with S
December 21 – On the Floor
December 22 – A Gift
December 23 – A Tradition
December 24 – Someone I Love
December 25 – My Day
December 26 – This is Delish
December 27 – Colourful
December 28 – A Book
December 29 – Us
December 30 – How I Relax
December 31 – Best Part of 2022
Top 9 Most Popular Images
I did enjoy this project and I’m not walking away from it because I didn’t enjoy it. I “met” numerous other people in this community that I will continue to follow, like @bea.photoaday, @sara.fms.photoaday, @outnbout, @gerkgirl, @pink_koffie, and @lostfate13.
But there were other things I didn’t like. Most people used the challenge to curate images, rather than take new images every day. The person that ran the challenge is Australian. That meant that a lot of the prompts were seasonal for Australia, meaning they weren’t seasonal for Iowa. Prompts repeated an awful lot. Not that they wouldn’t after 365 days, but I felt like they repeated more than necessary.
These minor complaints aside, I would consider doing it again in a future year. Just not this year. I’m sure many of you have minor complaints about how I run THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE as well.
It is time for me to reveal the November image of the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar:
The November image is a picture of the Tin Man sculpture in Stanley, Iowa. In retrospect, it does feel a little strange that I chose to process this image in black and white when the Tin Man is only in the color portion of THE WIZARD OF OZ. But I do love processing the decrepit in black & white because black & white photography shows off the textures so much better. I chose November for this image as November is when Olivia’s birthday is and THE WIZARD OF OZ was her favorite movie.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
CAMERA: Sony ILCE-7M2
DATE: May 28, 2022 – 11:03 AM
LENS: Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8
FOCAL LENGTH: 75mm
APERTURE: f/9
EXPOSURE: 1/250
ISO: 100
EXPOSURE BIAS: +1.0
Tomorrow I will reveal the December image for the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar.
Last week we had a mini office party for the few people that actually work in the physical computer mine. I was tasked (sorta) for taking some pictures of the even for the computer mine socials.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Michelle took the picture that I am in.
I hope next year we are able to bring back the chili cook-off. Even if it is just Me vs. Jesse vs. Micky.
Time to reveal the September image for the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar:
The September image is a macro image of a gazania. This picture was taken in my yard. I put this picture in September because that is the birthday month of my Mom and she taught me the joy of growing flowers. She had some of the best flowerbeds and was constantly experimenting with new flowers.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
CAMERA: Sony ILCE-7M4
DATE: June 23 – 1:23 PM
LENS: Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro
FOCAL LENGTH: 105mm
APERTURE: f/11
EXPOSURE: 1/160
ISO: 800
EXPOSURE BIAS: +.3
Tomorrow I will reveal the October image for the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar.
Time for another collection of auxiliary images from my road trip to Fayette and Winneshiek Counties to harvest their town signs. Many of these pictures were taken at the Bily Clocks Museum in Spillville.
Here is some information on a pretty cool little piece of Iowa history and some amazing clocks:
The history of the Bily Brothers, Frank and Joseph, began on the farm where they were born and raised. Located between Ridgeway and Spillville, Iowa, the farm is where the two brothers started their carvings. These uniquely designed clocks have attracted people from all areas of the United States, Canada and from many foreign countries as well.
Beginning in 1913, the brothers employed the idle hours of long winter days and evenings with their skills of woodcarving. Being farmers and carpenters, they carved only as a hobby while still doing their regular chores and maintaining a well kept farm. In 1915 and 1916, they built the Apostle Clock from which the Twelve Apostles appear on the hour. During the period of 1923-1927, the Bily Brothers added their masterpiece to the collection, The American Pioneer History Clock. A memorial clock to Charles Lindbergh was carved in 1928 commemorating his historic flight. In these beautiful artistically carved clocks the brothers have used woods from a number of foreign countries as well as numerous pieces of walnut, butternut, maple and oaks from North America.
The Bily Brothers moved their collection to Spillville in 1946. They bequeathed the clocks to the town of Spillville with an agreement that they would never be sold or moved from their present location.The second floor of the building was the home of the famous Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak, and his family during the summer of 1893.
-From https://www.bilyclocks.org/the-bily-brothers
It is definitely worth a visit if you are in the area.
Here is the 3rd collection of auxiliary images from these counties:
Ossian
Calmar
Postville
Postville is actually mostly in Allamakee County and partially in Clayton County.
One more collection of pictures from this road trip still to come.
It is time to reveal the August image for the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar:
This picture is of the only fire watch tower in the state of Iowa. It is located in the Yellow River State Forest in northeast Iowa. It is only accessible via forest road. So if you plan on going to see it, don’t take a sedan. That isn’t to say the road is really rough. It doesn’t require a 4×4, but you definitely want something with some ground clearance. It is also basically a one lane road, so if you meet somebody coming the other way, you do need to make some room.
You can not climb up the fire watch tower. There is a fence around it. If you stand near it and look straight up, there is no floor.
I took this picture with Rodan139. There is not necessarily a strong reason for it to be with August. Teresa was with me when I took the picture and she was born in August. However, she never got out of the vehicle. She might have thought what we were doing was illegal. Which it wasn’t. I will let you know if what we are doing is illegal or questionably legal.
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
CAMERA: Hasselblad L1D-20c
DATE: June 25, 2022 – f/2.8
LENS: 28mm f/2.8
FOCAL LENGTH: 28mm
APERTURE: f/5.6
EXPOSURE: 1/400
ISO: 100
EXPOSURE BIAS: -.7
ALTITUDE: 363m Above Sea Level
Tomorrow I will reveal the September image of the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar.
Time to share a second collection of the 90 images I rejected for the 2023 Photography 139 Calendar:
I still have one more collection of rejected calendar images left to share.
