Tag Archives: Yellowstone National Park

The Devil in Hot Shoes

Posted on by

A great egret flies through the air at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina

I’m not sure if I’m going to win NaNoWriMo this year.

I did well in 2005, starting out strong on day one and the words kept flowing until I met the goal of 50,000 words almost a week early. This year, while I’m making steady progress (click on the NaNo Stats tab to see a chart of my daily totals versus where I should be), at the moment I’m way behind.

Which has surprised me, as I know what I want to write.

I didn’t get off to a strong start, on Halloween I was laid low by a nasty headache and didn’t eat a single piece of candy, a first for me. So rather than start off writing at midnight, I went to bed instead, continued slow for the first few days and am still struggling to get back on track.

I thought I would get caught up yesterday, it was windy and pouring rain all day long, a good day to stay inside instead of doing yardwork. But Ellie was in a mood yesterday and wanted to play hedgehog all day long, so combined with another headache I didn’t write as much as I hoped.

And then there is the devil in hot shoes, the Canon 7D, that I ordered on Friday and which will be here tomorrow. It’s gone from Phoenix to Oakland and has already arrived in Portland (not that I’m checking frequently) and I’m resisting the urge to go down and raid the UPS depot. There is enough new stuff on the camera compared to my old ones that I’ll need to spend some time reading the manual, time I would have spent writing.

And of course there will be pictures to be taken, to play around with the new auto-focus and see how it compares to what I’m used to, as the AF has been a weak spot on past cameras. While the Internet is abuzz about it’s ability to track BIF’s — birds in flight — that’s not my biggest concern. As you may have noticed, for someone who photographs a lot of birds, I don’t often photograph them in flight as I don’t find the results to be that interesting, unless the wings are flared coming in for a landing.

I’m more interested in MIF’s — mammals in fields — or even ducks in the water. And low-contrast subjects, like a black bear on a cloudy day, where my past cameras have been fairly useless for AF.

So hopefully I can still find the time for 50,000 words, but what I really wanted was to get back into a writing groove after a long layoff, and win or lose that’s my ultimate goal.

A coyote runs through a meadow in Yellowstone National Park

Gaseous Emissions

Posted on by

A fumarole in Yellowstone National Park

Why would I include a picture of a fumarole in a post about my dog?

Well, the other day Ellie added to her growing list of dietary adventures by eating a tub of margarine. That evening, Sam was sleeping on my lap as Ellie’s digestive system struggled to cope. Every so often he’d raise his head up and I knew his superior senses detected an incoming round that mine did not. Much like when I photograph the fumaroles and mud pots and geysers in Yellowstone, I was thankful that I have such a poor sense of smell.

First of the West

Posted on by

A red squirrel sits on a tree branch beside Shoshone Lake on the Shoshone Lake Trail at Yellowstone National Park

I was first exposed to the noisy chatter of red squirrels while hiking in West Virginia when I lived back east. I would see them a few times more before moving to Oregon, where I wouldn’t see or hear them again until my first real trip to Yellowstone in 2004. On my first hike in my first few hours in the park, I came across this red squirrel near the beach of Shoshone Lake on the Shoshone Lake Trail. I’ve since seen them quite a bit in the park, but good pictures usually elude me, so this first picture remains my favorite of my pictures of red squirrels in Yellowstone.