man & nature # 28 ~ pictures in my head

Road, field and mist • click
to embiggenYesterday, at my normal time of around 3-3:30PM, I left the house for a round of golf. Arriving at the course - not my regular / home course - I was informed that it was closed for an outing event but, if I returned an hour later, I would have the entire course to myself.

So, uncharacteristically, I found myself teeing off a little after 5PM and finishing up around 8:10PM. In turned out that I did not have the course to myself - in truth there were no other people and most likely because of that fact, I was accompanied throughout the round by quite a number of deer (several mothers with fawns), one fox, hawks, terns, heron, and, how could I forget, about 10,000 mosquitoes.

As I have mentioned, we've had lots of rain this Summer so the mosquitoes are thriving in places that don't normally have standing water. My only problem last evening was that I could picture (in my head) my green bottle of bug repellent sitting on the counter in our back porch. But, it wasn't the only thing I could picture in my head.

After the round, less than a mile from the course, I could also picture my tripod leaning again the disconnected radiator (at about a 10 degree angle) in the upstairs hallway, just outside my bedroom door. Under the circumstances, the vision was particularly vivid and strangely alluring.

Now, that tripod must have felt out of place because its normal residence is on the back seat or floor of my car where, quite honestly, it languishes unused for weeks at a time. In camera IS and a relatively steady hand have not exactly rendered it superfluous but it's not the steady workhorse it used to be. It still comes in very handy from time to time - times like last evening to name just one.

Using the IS and f2.8, I did manage to get by with 1/8-1/15s SS for 3 of the 4 pictures you see here. August moon • click to embiggenBut a very short time and distance later, on Lake Champlain (the largest lake in the US of A that's not a Great Lake), the camera was asking for 1/2-1s SS. It was at that time that another picture appeared in my head. Under a clump of stuff on my back seat - a pair of long pants, a rain/wind golf parka, canoe paddles, 1 life vest, and extra golf caps - I saw (in my head) my seldom-used monopod.

Lo and behold, it was actually there. So, keeping it short and bracing it with my foot against a roadside guardrail, I managed to get the picture.

FYI, the mountains seen across Lake Chaplain are Vermont's Green Mountains. The big one on the left is Camels Hump. The lights on the Vermont side towards the center of the picture are from Burlington. I always refer to this as Vermont's best side - the one you can see from NY.