Lunch (or Maybe Breakfast) And Learn Session

It is time for a photography lesson. It always helps draw the eye to where you want if you can find a natural frame (such as an arch) around the central element. Being out in the woods, it was easy to find trees that could frame the mountain or scene I wanted to capture. Reflections are also a nice way to bring the light of the sky into the lower third of the shot. I was able to catch both in this first photo from Zion National Park back in 2005. For some reason, the mountain is a little washed out.

Next, it was the colors of the trees contrasted with the sky and the mountain peaks that drew me to this arch. I like the composition of this photograph.

And on this shot, I got both a nice footbridge and an arch framing another peak. That plus the nice shadows in the foreground really make the mountain stand out. If I had used the HDR technique (which I didn't really know about back then), I would have taken a second shot so the hill would not look quite so blown out. Sometimes with a single shot, you have to decide which level of light you want to capture. I obviously went for the trees, river and bridge over the mountain.

It's not always mountains that can be framed. Here, you can see the leaves backlit from the afternoon sun as we look through the canopy to the Virgin River. It might have been cool to use a polarizing filter to cut down on the sunlight shining off the waves, but I think the white of the river is part of the appeal of this shot.

Now, I do not want to forget to share the Clarity of Vision on the same day for which it was written.

Hey, got nothing planned for the weekend? How about some home maintenance. Here is an article on a home maintenance checklist from artofmanliness.com. You've got to trust stuff from a website with a name like that.

Who would take the time to rank Star Trek episodes (from all the series) to choose the Top 100? It seems some lady at i09.com did, and now she is sharing them with us. Two of the top three are from ST:TOS (Star Trek: The Original Series).

I read an article about how no one want to host the 2022 Olympics due to corruption. The story does seem to make a credible case that no US city is likely to be involved in the near future. What struck me most was the clever humor in the last line of the article. "So China or Kazakhstan it is, the last two suckers on earth willing to step up to this carnival barker. One lucky nation will win. The other will host the 2022 Winter Olympics."

Here is a totally useless piece of presidential trivia. Benjamin Harrison had electric lights installed in the White House in 1891, but he and his wife never touched a switch. They made their servants do it because they were afraid of electrocution. Shocking, right?

So, what have YOU done over the last hour? Louisiana has lost a football field of land while you sat there doing whatever you said when I asked you the question. Where is the land going? Into the Gulf of Mexico.

Are you a Twit, or a Twitterer, or whatever they call people who use Twitter? I am not, although an interesting site like History in Pictures does pique my interest.

"Come together, right now, over the story of Come Together". Maybe those are not the exact words, but then again, the words to the song are not the exact words that Timothy Leary requested, either. Come on. Read about it. You know you want to.

Here's something you probably don't know (and surely don't care about). "16 U.S.C. §773g & 50 C.F.R. §300.66(m) make it a crime to fillet Alaskan halibut in a way that prevents counting how many you caught to eat." You can learn about other weird laws at another Twitter site, A Crime A Day.

As you can see, finding interesting junk on the interweb is really hit or miss. For me, today was a hit. And today is also a hit because IT'S FRIDAY!! Have a great weekend, dear readers.