Enhanced

I keep hoping for bears in my backyard, but there have been other great visitors to my little neck of plains meet foothills. We had a gorgeous buck in the field on the other side of our fence, but all I had with me was my phone.

We had a Cooper’s hawk on the fence just after sunset, so it was nearly dark, and I had to fully zoom my point and shoot. Both photos came out pretty grainy, so I ran them through Photoshop filters and then an AI program to better illustrate the moments. I’m pretty pleased with the results.

Last weekend I got to sit on the porch for about an hour. I don't get to do that often anymore. I used to watch the birds through my window while I worked from home until 2024. Then we had to take down the birdfeeder from April to November due to bears. Now that most of the garden is going to seed, the birds are feeding again. Watching them from the porch, without a double sheet of glass between us was thrilling.

I've been cutting down most of the wild sunflowers because I didn't want them to overgrow the garden. Now that I've been able to photograph the birds feasting on the wild sunflowers again, I'm thinking maybe I'll let the sunflowers go wild again next year. That will extend my flower season by a month or more, too!

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Gone with the Wind

Back in November, I estimated overnight sustained wind speed at 70 mph with 100 mph gusts. I had absolutely nothing to base my numbers on other than the winds I've experienced over the years, particularly December 2021's Marshal Fire. I lost shingles during that storm, and I was forced to replace my roof in 2022. But I still have a roof. Connected to a home. Our horrific winds just a couple of months ago brought back painful and depressing memories of last year's tragic fire and also took trampolines, tables, chairs, porch cushions, windows, fences and trash bins places they'd never been. A couple of days later, I learned our official sustained wind speed in our village was 69 mph and that 120 mph gusts had been clocked.

We'd been having some work done on the foundation of our home, and the tarps the company used to cover up the holes took a real beating. Neighbors a couple of doors down lost scores of shingles. Boy, does my heart go out to them! Another neighbor's soccer goal net blew more than three houses down. Otherwise I think we and our immediate neighborhood fared well. We'd battened down the hatches, so to speak.

A tree skeleton behind our house I've often used while photographing sunrises and sunsets, particularly when we can't go anywhere for more exquisite scenery, has now seen its better days. This tree has had quite the modeling workout the past three years! I am really going to miss this tree!!!

Most memorable, of course, was the rainbow that fell exactly in the right place in 2014.

That one shot provided me with literally hours and hours of Photoshop entertainment.

While looking for photos of THE tree, I found this totally forgotten shot, one of my first panoramic photographs. That little skeleton tree is on the far right.

There undoubtedly will be more silhouettes of the Leaning Tree of Snowcatcher until it finally hits the ground completely. It's just a little more difficult to shoot now through the chainlink fence...

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