Mt. Airy - Mayberry, NC

During our travels from the coast to the mountains on our vacation, we stopped by a small town to get something to drink. Image our surprise when we discovered it was the home of the TV series Mayberry.

And the soda fountain where we bought an ice cream cone was called 'Barney's Cafe'. Sorry i didn't get a photograph of it. At that time we were sitting on a bench in front of the store rather puzzled at the old police car that kept circulating up and down the street ... so we began to look closer and discovered, yes we asked someone, that Mountain Airy was the shooting location of many of the Mayberry TV scenes. Surprises in the mountains on a hot July summer day!

More B&W

July travels —

Last week, we spent the week traveling along the Outer Banks to Cape Hatteras Lighthouse:

The largest lighthouse on the east coast, maybe in the US. It was moved about 2500 feet in the latter part of the 90's as the rising seawater was beginning to effect the base.

Looking at the center of the photo where the water washes onto the sand you can see the remains of an old wooden pier, or at least the dark line going into the water; behind that is a green turfed circle of sand and that is where the lighthouse use to sit. With hundreds of people's body and brains working, they figured out how to move the lighthouse in a straight line towards the camera. The parking was not there at the time. Look it up online, very interesting.

https://www.nps.gov/caha/learn/historyculture/movingthelighthouse.htm and there are some videos of the actual moving.

And it turns out that the man i met at Beaver Lake Dam here in Asheville is the photographer that took the photographs of the move - amazing, eh?

In Winston-Salem we spent the night as we made our way to Laurel Forks, VA, a mostly non-existent town on the west side of the Blue Ridge Parkway and as we were leaving W-S, S said, "go this way, i think there is a photographic opportunity up ahead."

Have you even seen anything like that? An old Shell station, that, i assume, was a working station at one time. There was no information at the site and it was closed and clearly well cared for.

B&W

This site:  https://shoottokyo.com/blog/what-gift-did-this-give-me  inspires me and moves me to try B&W again. This is some of my first efforts:

I feel that this is my best so far. The environment helped as the clouds were white, puffy and everywhere and the lake was quiet and smooth lending itself to great reflections.

This shot, not so good and i'm not sure why.

Maybe because i used a different piece of software which required more skills of me which i didn't have. A lesson for the future.

Yes, it was the software i was using. This one turned out pretty good although its appearing darker on my screen then i like - ahh, i just moved it over to my photo-monitor and its looking much more the way i want it to.

What do you think? How do you like my efforts at working in B&W?

Feeding Birds

Put up a couple of bird feeders last weekend along with a cake of suet. All this was in the backyard and the starlings immediately took over and none of the other birds would use the feeders. There is a medium size flock of starlings living in the trees in the adjoining years (they have the larger trees).

So i bought another double-hanger and moved it all to the front of the house where we could see them from the front room. Occasionally a starling stops by but i chase it off and the wrens, cardinals, etc., seem happy to use it.

A couple of shots from the first day:

Sometimes, he thinks, and behaves, as though it was his stash of food.

Fireworks, sorta, well maybe . . .

Its not that i don't like watching fireworks - rather they all seem sorta the same after a while. Obviously they are not the same and are mostly different in color and patterns — mostly.

So when they are going off i usually don't bother going outdoors to see them. And because this is a tourist town and Biltmore is here, there are often fireworks throughout the summer. Yesterday when the fireworks for the 4th of July began to go off, i didn't give it much thought. At some point S asked me to step out and look, that they were really beautiful ... so i did, step out.

And they were, beautiful; so i picked up my new Sony and began to shoot and ... what, it wouldn't work, wouldn't focus, nothing. So i ran upstairs to my bird lens and camera, which was already set up and began to shoot thru the screen on the upstairs window.

And lo, i loved the results:

Don't really look like traditional fireworks, eh? And watching thru the screen they didn't look anything like that either ... only with the camera photographing thru the screen did they turn out like this ... i like 'em better then the traditional ones.

Enjoy —

Poke Weed

A few days ago i was trimming around the fence and cut down some very tall weeks. I saw that they had small blooms and some had opened into small flowers. I decided to keep two of the tall weeds and then cut a few of the blooms, with stems, and brought them into the macro photography area. They seemed to be an interesting way for me to learn more about stacking macro images. Here are some of those results:

leaves, stem and small blooms; the top ones

not open yet and the bottoms ones fully open.

I think this is the first series i've felt that i actually was able to do what i was trying to do which is give a sense of the whole plant (the stem-branch) down to its smallest component.  

There is still more to go as the pistil can be photographed separately and the green pillow-stool is pretty amazing.

Stay tuned, more to follow.