4/14/17

I've been very happy to see the butterflies around this Spring.  This past weekend there was a Monarch visiting as well and I was able to capture it in flight as it visited the Dandelion flowers in the yard.  Most people try to rid their yards of Dandelions as weeds but I like to have them because the butterflies and bees enjoy them in the Spring when there are not many other flowers blooming.

4/13/17

With our warm weather the Honey Bees are back and out gathering pollen.  I captured this one as it was zooming in on a Grape Hyacinth in the yard.  It's great to see them again.

4/12/17

Posting late as I was out of town at a Conference all day.  Last Thursday I went back out to the waterfall at the Geary State Lake.  We had had some more rain and I had not gotten a couple of shots to work out that I took the first time and so wanted to redo. This is the result of one of them.  The waterfall was flowing quite nicely, even a bit stronger than it had when I was first there.  The light was good as well and I was able to get this 3 second exposure with an ND filter.

4/11/17

The fruit trees around town have been in bloom for a while and making everything look so lovely.  In the City Park this Crabapple tree was blooming quite profusely and adding a lot of color to the area.  We had a freeze last night and I have not yet had time to see how everything that was coming up did through it, hopefully Ok since it's getting rather late for freezing now.  

4/10/17

With the really warm weather we have had the last few days, the butterflies are back!  Yay!  The Red Admiral Butterfly is one that is very common in Kansas and is usually one of the first to be seen in the Spring.  I captured this one enjoying the Lilac blooms this past Saturday in the wind.  A bit of movement can be seen in the image.  I captured this in a moment of relative calm in between it rocking back and forth in the wind.

4/9/17

Today's image goes back to Cass Mountain Scenic Railway in West Virginia where they have one of the few of these locomotives still in operation.  This is a Heisler type locomotive named for Charles L Heisler who designed it.  It was not as popular as a Shay or Climax style, probably because it went into production after them but was a logging type geared locomotive.  It's cylinders were set at 45 degree angles where a Climax was at 25 degrees.  There were only about 625 of them produced but they were built up until around WWII while the Climax locomotives stopped production in 1928.  This one sits warmed up and almost ready to go should it be needed that day at Cass to pull a train of tourists on the old logging route.

4/8/17

Well, it's going to be summer today, it's already in the 60s at 9:30 in the morning and heading towards the 80s.  My image is from after one of our recent rains.  It's an experiment in photo focus stacking and is 3 images put together.  I can see I should have taken a few more shots to bring all the drops into focus so this was a good experiment to see how it works and I did bring 8 raindrops into focus with the technique instead of just 2 or 3.  These raindrops are on Columbine leaves in my garden.