I used to love to sleep in on weekends. It doesn’t appeal to me much now. I wake up early on Saturday and think, “Hey, I don’t have to go to work today; I can write instead.” So, from 5:30 or 6:00 until about 9:30 I can take time to look over my folder of “potential blog photos” (about 250 now, and counting) to see what inspiration the Muse may lend me.

This particular Saturday morning delivered a smidgeon of serendipity in the form of a sleepy fellow paddling lethargically in the brassy glow of the rising sun:

Sometimes I’m so focused on the camera and the lining up of the panorama shots (this is four exposures stitched together) that I forget to note what else might be going on. However, this time I did notice the canoe coming and I got the timing very close. I was missing just a bit of the trailing edge of the canoe wake. I had to clone that in, but it doesn’t look too faked. I’m going to try to sell this one to Our Way as a cover shot. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

Sheba was out in the yard following me around and whining. She was longing desperately for her breakfast. I wanted to get a good shot of her in the warm glow of the sunrise. She’s such a mongrel – like me. She’s part Doberman and part Rottweiler with a healthy dose of German Shepherd tossed in at the last moment for good measure. She is a pup of Greg O’Keefe’s bitch and was owned briefly by Swami Monty and Meri, his luscious consort.

Here I was commanding “STAY!” about every five seconds while she fretted, “Why doesn’t the stupid biped feed me?” One can easily see the concerned expression on her pretty face:

I try to avoid taking hundreds of photos of Sheba and then forcing innocent captives to look at them. They are like baby photos. “Oh, here’s Junior spiting up, and here he is making kaka in the back yard, and, Oh look, here he is holding the dog by its ears. Doesn’t he remind you of Lyndon Johnson?” You have to be an aging Yank to get that reference.

This next shot seems a little out of place. As I looked through frames that I liked and had spent some time to make them just so, this one evoked some pleasant memories of Miss Rankin and all the good times we’ve enjoyed on her decks and under her hull. Here’s Carol seeming pensive as she watched the sunset on our way out of Tab Anchorage:

So, that’s my Saturday so far.

I hope my readers like the new look of the site. I’ll get the URL problems settled down eventually and hope I haven’t lost too many of you along the way. I’ll also clean up the messiness in the sidebar and fix the garish colours of the fonts.

For those of you with eyes like mine, I’m also going to increase the size of the body text and make it brighter so that it’s more easily readable. Generally speaking, I hate the black background sites because of the readability problem. But I can’t give it up now that I’ve seen how much better the photos look.

Related posts:

1. More Stupid Photography Tricks Photographers get bored like normal people, believe it or not. The hobby which has produced even more geeks than computers is not immune to ennui....
2. Madang Potpourri Lacking any coherent plan for writing today, I’ll bombard you with a wet, wet collection of miscellanea from Madang. When the sun slithers down western sky in the afternoon, the opposite side of the harbour takes on a winelight glow that is very pleasing: The lady in the canoe was...
3. Pale Plants – Canoe Boys – Our House What's with white leaves? Where's the chlorophyll? I don't get it. You'll get sunrises instead of answers. A picture of Our House and some boys in a canoe too....
4. Sheba – Princess of My Heart If my wife is the Queen of My Heart (and she is), then my dog, Sheba, is the Princess. What kind of blogger who loves his dog doesn’t feature his canine pal in a post occasionally? Heartless – that’s what it would be. I know she can’t read. She seldom...
5. The Sunrise Canoe While shooting the sunrise this morning I noticed my neighbours starting across the harbour in their canoe. I asked them if they would make a little detour....
6. Two Bunnies in a Canoe and Other Curiosities Once again, it’s time to ramble aimlessly through a few images that have caught my eye, but don’t seem to say enough to provoke a gush of prose from me. Just as well. The pictures tell the stories better than I can. Our next door neighbour got a couple of...
7. Oddities for You This is the biggest Sailors Eyeball (Valonia ventricosa) that I have ever seen. It is the size of my fist. You'd think it came from Pop-Eye the Sailor Man....

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 08:46 and is filed under Mixed Nuts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.