Laughing Ravens

 More than anything, this was just a chance to test out new gear and see how it felt to try to narrate and shoot at the same time. By and large, I am finding the videography part much harder than my usual photography. If I had to guess, I think my attention span is affecting a lot of the process.  Part of what I was testing last week was the new wireless lav mic I picked up after Christmas... which should allow me (and potentially another person in an interview setting) to talk, and have that audio recorded directly to the camera. I know the rest of the world has been doing this for ages... but for me, this is a whole new world. Tons to learn and tons to play with.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on how this video came through for you. I wish that Blogger had a way to store videos without having to go through YouTube, but from what I can tell, that's the only path for videos longer than a minute or two. If you know of other places I could host videos, please let me know....

By and large, I look forward to winter. The cold and the snow are a welcome change from sweating continually in July and August. A week ago the thermometer struggled to climb into the single digits after nights below zero. Earlier this week felt downright balmy. The thermometer had climbed to nearly 30°F which meant we could walk outside in just a fleece and feel the sun's warmth.  Woke up yesterday morning to the wind howling. Bits of ice pelted the windows and bounced off the metal roof. Every now and then, a gust would push the house enough to feel it flex and bow. With the heat being drawn from the house with every blast of wind, I figured it was a perfect morning to pull the covers tighter and catch just a tiny bit more sleep.  After the winds relented and the snow settled, I took a quick walk outside. In some areas, there was snow only on one vertical face. The other side of trees and shrubs were completed blasted clean.   Iris bed, tucked in for the winter This aft...

When faced with the bleak dreary skies of January, it is easy to want to fast-forward into April when blooms start to appear in the garden again. Let me rephrase that. There are two faces of winter. One face is sun-shiny and snow blankets the countryside. The other gives you a side-eye, pelts you with ice pellets, and hides the sun behind thick, unmoving clouds for weeks. You'd never guess that I love winter.  The local expression for this kind of snow is "Ithacation." It consists primarily of sideways snow and ice that nearly always finds a way inside your collar and into your ears.  Every few years we are gifted with the Norman Rockwell "winters of year's past"... and the sky opens up, dumps feet of snow on us and then the sun comes out and everything is still for a brief moment.  So how is one to deal with the interminable time between the rich colors of fall and the ebullient outbursts of color in spring? Around here, that can extend from November well i...