I took the shot above in July of 2007 on the Gaspe Peninsula on Canada’s eastern coast. The lupines were in full bloom and they were everywhere — planted in people’s lawns and growing wild in big patches like this one. I’ve wanted to grow lupines at home ever since but they may not appreciate our hot summers. Everyone in town that I’ve talked to about Lupines that has tried to grow them has had a tale of woe and disaster. Unfazed, I’m going ahead with my plan. Living my dream. Planting my lupines.

Inspired by the hillside of blooms in the photo, I chose a little lump of a hill in the yard not too far from the front door. In my mind it will be just like the scene in Canada — lush green and thick with blooms. I bought one largish potted lupine and six smaller ones at the local greenhouse. The largish pot had a good sized bud so I figured that if everything went south, I might at least get one bloom before the hillside returns to wasteland. Lo and behold, a couple of weeks later I have my bloom.

This may be all I get this year. Heck, it may be all I get ever. I’ve been chasing rabbits out of the patch nearly every morning and the dreaded heat has not even set in yet. My fingers are still crossed, though. If these survive, I’ll supplement my little hill with more next spring and keep at it until you’ll swear you’re in the Gaspe when you walk up to my front door (except there won’t be a vast sea of blue in the distance — but I could leave a couple of kayaks in the yard just for effect).

I found this photo, provided by a Sharon McClure, on a Ripley County, Indiana geneaology site. You can learn so much by googling yourself. In this case, I’ve learned that, not only will I die in 1872, but I will also invent a time machine. Or at least own one… or borrow one for a day. Why I’ll visit 19th century Ripley County is a still a mystery. I guess I’ll just have to wait for those details to unfold.

I also did find a couple of interesting photo uses. My shot of the lighthouse in Grand Haven, Michigan turned up on the CNBC site, and this one from Kalamazoo appears on Forbes.com. Congrats to Grand Haven/Holland for being named one of America’s happiest cities and to Kalamazoo for being named one of the best cities for doing business. And thanks for providing me a little business along the way.

Now, off to start googling for time machine plans…

Since I’ll be on the road for the next couple of weeks, and my ability to post may be hindered, I hated to leave you staring at a photo of my feet. Instead, I’ll leave you with the first sign of Spring in our backyard — the Witch Hazels that we planted last summer are blooming.

See you all soon!

My travel schedule is just about to shift into high gear. I leave for Thailand in a few hours with a short stop in Dubai along the way. I’ve been busily making preparations for weeks: getting photography permits, researching locations, etc., etc. But it’s the air travel that will define a large portion of this trip. In just over two weeks, I’ll have a dozen flights. Everything has been booked and a few days ago I logged in to the airline websites to check my seat assignments.

This is where the real strategy begins. I have a couple of long, overnight flights — around 13 hours each — and seating decisions can make the difference between arriving rested or arriving cramped and in a sleep-deprived haze. Being able to make seat selections online is great. Airlines’ sites are getting better and there are sites like SeatGuru that give all kinds of information by airline and plane type regarding location of power outlets, seats with extra legroom, less under-seat storage, etc. It’s great. Almost too great because now your seat assignment is your decision and not something you have to leave up to the fates and the person behind the gate counter.

So back to those long flights. Here’s the conundrum: window seat (where you can lean on the side of the plane to sleep but you’re trapped by your seat mate if you need to get up), aisle seat (where you have elbow room on one side and easy access to move around whenever you want but you have to constantly let your seat mate out), or the dreaded middle seats (where you can be pinned in on each side by your fellow flyers — no space and no freedom of movement).

Then you have to think about the other empty seats. Do you take a window seat in a two-seat row in hopes that no one will take the seat next to you so that you can spread out a little? Or do you take the bigger risk of going for an empty 5-seat center section? You run the risk of other seats filling after you book and being stuck shoulder to shoulder but — if you can pull it off — you can flip up all the armrests and practically have a bed to sleep in (albeit a bed with seatbelt buckles that like to find the small of your back in the middle of the night). This is the holy grail of economy class long distance flight but it doesn’t come easy. Others will spot you in-flight and you may need to protect your turf. After all, who are YOU to get 5 seats all to yourself? Feigning a drooling sleep will ward them off for a while but beware when you sit up to eat or make a bathroom run. It’s every man for himself.

I’ve gone with a hybrid strategy. Traveling to Thailand, I’ll stop in Dubai for two nights so I’ll arrive in Dubai in the evening and can get a good night’s sleep. Arriving in Bangkok two evenings later, I’ll get another good night’s sleep. Since sleeping on the plane won’t be so critical, I’m going for a window seat in a two seat row — currently there’s an empty seat beside me. Hopefully I’ll get to spread out a little and maybe I’ll be able to get a shot or two of the palm islands upon approach to Dubai (I made sure I wasn’t seated over the wing).

Flying home, I’ll have about 27 hours of nearly-continuous flying time in four legs with brief connections. I’ll want to sleep on this one so I’m taking a gamble on a 5-seat center section. I took the aisle so that, if it fills up, I’ll still have elbow room on one side but maybe I’ll get lucky and get the whole row. That would be pretty sweet.

It’s a shot I took of some monks at Haeinsa Temple in South Korea. The temple stay program there is featured as one of Rough Guides’ 1000 must-do experiences. It’s an interesting book with tons of ideas for adventurous travel. Some of them I’ve already experienced but so many more of them I have not. So much to do, so little time. Anyway, I thought it was interesting that this particular usage would pop up just as I was having thoughts of making the most of my own time on earth.

I’ve been busy planning upcoming trips and trying to get my stock files fed at various agencies. Good work to do when it’s cold and snowy out. More on the upcoming travel plans later but, for any cat people out there, I’ll leave you with an update on our broken-legged cat. You may remember that Caper fell from an upstairs bannister and broke his leg around Thanksgiving. After two surgeries and weeks of seclusion in a room emptied of anything he might jump on, Caper has finally been cleared to resume all cat duties. He’s still hesitant to make the big jumps but he’s getting around really well. Here he’s enjoying watching the snow fall:

I had brought the camera to the living room window to shoot the snow-covered redbud tree in the front yard. As I was framing the shot, an SUV came sliding down the street, out of control. I instinctively tracked the car’s path with my Nikon and fired off a burst of shots just as it slammed into the neighbor’s mailbox across the street. The driver then left without so much as a “sorry ’bout that”. I jotted down the license number as they drove away and reported the incident to our local police, following up with an email that included the series of photos along with one enlargement of the car’s plates. Needless to say, the neighbors were quite pleased.

Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2005 was a year of assignments throughout the Midwest for me. I like to take driving trips when it makes sense. I enjoy driving and like to be able to arrive at a place gradually, to know what is between here and there, and to have some sense of distance. When you fly, you get dropped into a new place with no bearings. You don’t have a sense of scale for how far you’ve traveled. You don’t know how the landscape unraveled between here and there. And, for me at least, it’s more difficult to get a feel for directions. If I drove in from the east, then I arrive knowing east from west, north from south. When arriving by air, I need to depend more on maps and make a conscious effort to pay attention to sun angles, etc. Obviously, flying is often necessary, either for speed, efficiency, or to just plain get somewhere that you can’t drive to.

The first two shots in this post are from a prairie burn and related festival that I shot in the spring of 2005. I live near some of the largest remaining sections of tallgrass prairie in North America. Ranchers who graze cattle on this land have learned that a controlled burn in the spring will help new grass grow that will better fatten their livestock. These burns are often done at night while winds are low and it’s an amazing experience when driving across the prairie to see lines of fire in the distance and smell the sweet scent of burning grass.

Other assignments required far more driving than this one did. 2005 seems to have been the Year of the Roundup. In magazine-speak, a roundup is a story that bundles several locations together by theme. You’ve seen them: Best Places to See Fall Color in the Great Lakes, Children’s Museums of the Midwest, Ten Places You Can Still Find a Real Soda Fountain. That sort of thing. For several years we would shoot an annual story on the Best Christmas Shopping in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis and Des Moines.

These are difficult trips to make work financially. A roundup may not pay more than a story on a single destination but, if the publication doesn’t pay expenses, you can see where the costs would add up when you need to visit several cities over several days. I’ve always tried to combine as many assignments or stock opportunities into each trip as possible. I’ll let art directors I work with often know where I’m going to be to see if they have something else in the area that I can tag on or I’ll look for iconic or unusual scenes in the area that I can use in my stock files. It works but it requires a lot of planning and a lot of driving.

I’m located about as close to the center of the US as you can get but in 2004 and 2005 I drove to both coasts in addition to several trips to the Great Lakes region and various other places around the Midwest and Western US. In 2004, we drove to Portland, Maine for an MTWA meeting, took the ferry to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, drove up across the Gaspe to the St. Lawrence and then back home through Quebec, Montreal and Toronto.

In 2005 we drove to the west coast for a different reason. We had decided to take a serious look at relocating. We’d lived in the same house for nearly 20 years and had outgrown it when we both began working from home in the late 90s. In 2003 we leased office space downtown to have some more room. It worked for awhile but we realized we were more efficient when we had a home office. We decided to look for some place large enough to accommodate our home and office and we decided that, if we were moving, maybe we should make a big move.

We made a list of things we would want from a new home and a cool, but not cold climate was high on the list. From our travels, we decided that the Pacific Northwest was our best option. We researched towns and put together a driving circuit that would take us through several places that we thought had great potential, mostly along the Oregon and Washington coasts. We threw in some towns in Wyoming and Idaho for the trips out and back as well. The panorama above was taken near our first stop: Laramie, Wyoming.

Port Angeles, Washington, was high on our list based on the experiences we’d had there on a previous trip in 1997. What we learned by our second visit to this town — and actually from this entire experiment — was that you need to look at a town completely differently if you are planning on visiting as a tourist or moving there permanently. The things we loved about Port Angeles were quickly overshadowed by things that now seemed unworkable for us in terms of a home. In general, all of the places we looked at had much higher property values than what we currently had in Kansas (this was before the real estate bubble burst but we could see that coming and didn’t want to get caught up in it). We liked the smaller coastal towns but were concerned about being further from international airports and having mountain roads between us and larger cities.

In the end, we decided to move just 30 miles east of our old home to Lawrence, Kansas. It’s a university town so it has a lot of diversity and a vibrant arts community. It’s 30 minutes closer to our international airport in Kansas City. And it’s incredibly affordable compared to the west coast. You can get a 3000 sq. ft. house here for what a double-wide might cost you on the west coast. It has worked out great for us and we’re very happy with our choice.

The Blizzard of 2009 pretty much shut things down around here and we were basically house-bound for four days. The good side is that I made an incredible amount of progress on my image files – a DVD full of Mexico sent off to one stock agency, almost 900 shots of Egypt uploaded to Alamy (that alone took most of three days) and another 650 or so images of China prepped for submission.

While processing the China shots, I ran across this one that I’ve intended to blog about for awhile now. It’s a basket of trash that had just been swept up at the Master of Nets Garden in Suzhou. What strikes me about this is that I was compelled to photograph someone’s trash. Had I shot this in the US, you’d most likely be looking at a bulging plastic bag sitting on some cracked concrete. But there’s something beautiful about this trash. Sure, it’s just leaves and not discarded paper and junk, but it’s also being kept in an honest basket with a useful but colorful handle. The pavement is rough and stained but it’s real materials and carefully laid. I don’t know. It just says something to me. Makes me wish for less plastic and paper in the world and that all of our trash could be this beautiful.

I’ve made a long overdue update to my website by changing the home page photo to a couple from my Feb ‘09 Egypt trip. It’s something I’ve always intended to do on a monthly basis at least. This time it went for over a year.

This winter I made plans to make lots of updates to the site, this blog, and especially to my other Shade of the Cottonwood site. I usually have a lull in travel over the holidays and winter months so I thought it would be a good catch-up period.

Well… that was the plan. Reality often bears little resemblance to my plans and, so far, this winter is no exception. It is becoming one of those “one step forward, two steps back” periods. When I returned from Mexico in October, I planned to get through the processing of images from that trip and then I’d be free to dig into my “winter projects”. Then the cat fell from the balcony and broke his leg resulting in 8 weeks of heavily supervised recovery. While hanging out with him in his cushy rehab pad (actually Sally’s sewing room) we noticed the carpet was damp. After some exploration, it was discovered that the hot water heater was leaking and, although there is a floor drain less than three feet away it’s apparently uphill from the water heater. Plumber called, new water heater installed and now we are in the middle of the carpet drying process — pulling the carpet and pad up, fans everywhere, etc.

I won’t go on with my entire list of distractions (and there are a lot more), but you get the picture. Today I decided to ignore everything else (except the cat duties, of course) and make a dent in the web site updates. Much progress has been made but it will be a while before you begin to see it online. Hopefully not too long.

To help me get down to work, I used up some remaining credits I had in the iTunes store and added Ceu’s “Cangote” EP and Minipop’s “A New Hope” album to my library. I find it really helpful to crank up some new tunes when working at the desk. It’s a trick I use when post-processing a shoot, too. I usually buy some local music while I’m on the road and then I listen to it while processing the images. Listening to Chinese pop while processing Shanghai images or a Desert Beat compilation while going through an Egypt take keeps me connected to the place. Plus, music makes a great souvenir that’s easy to pack.

Meet our cat, Caper. He doesn’t always wear the hat — he was posing for a Christmas card a few years ago. The image on the right is him, too. His right hind leg, to be exact. Busted.

Caper loves to race up the stairs, jump onto the railing and jump again *over* the stairs onto the roof of our living room wet bar (the house was built in the early ’70s — didn’t everyone have a wet bar?). Three times now, that we know of, he hasn’t made the second jump. When that happens, gravity does its thing and Caper goes down, a little over 1 full floor, to the downstairs hallway floor.

Normally he’s springy like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh. Today he was less Tigger-ish and broke his leg. We took him to one vet 30 minutes to our west who recommended that we take him to another, 30 minutes to our east. That’s where he is now, awaiting surgery in the morning.

Sure, we had plans for today. I’m sure Caper had plans for today, too. My day might not have gone according to plan but at least it was better than Caper’s. And yes, we’re already making plans for a minor renovation of the stairwell to try and prevent a repeat performance.

UPDATE: After having a steel plate surgically attached to his broken bone, Caper came home yesterday. After less than 45 minutes in a room we had “cat-proofed” to keep him from jumping, he bent the plate and had to go back in for a second surgery. We hear he’ll be coming home again today and I plan on bubble-wrapping him to prevent any more re-injuries. I should also mention that the vet techs are calling him “Houdini” due to his ability to escape splints and bandages. It’s going to be a long recovery period…

Really — I’ll get back to the subject of photography soon. I promise.

I returned from Ohio on Saturday and ran right back out the door for a shoot at a winery near Kansas City on Sunday. The plan was that there would be a large number of people harvesting grapes but that work has been postponed for a week to let the fruit build up some more sugar. I’ll probably go back again next weekend but thought I’d better get something in the can yesterday since the weather was good. No telling what next Sunday might be like. So, I made do with the absolutely terrific owners of the winery and staged a little bit of a harvest. I really like what I got but also look forward to shooting the entire process with buckets and buckets of grapes.

The Ohio trip also went well but there was always a little something that prevented me from getting what I had in my head onto the card. I usually have some preconceived idea for a shoot before I arrive on location. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. The best is what seems to happen most often and that is discovering something that is even better than what I had in mind. Certainly a lot of that happened on this trip but there were also a few shots that I would have loved to have captured that just didn’t come together. I’ll post more about those missed opportunities over the next few days.

Oh, and I finally have a shiny, new version of WordPress powering this blog. There have been a few hiccups so far but I hope to soon be able to add some new bells and whistles.