The Road Ahead and Behind

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Photo #371: Road AheadLocation Taken: Trout River, Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

You know, it’s been a year since I started this blog. Well, a year and a few days, but still. Still don’t seem to have many readers, given that the only people who really comment are my parents and the occasional spammer. Ah well, if you are reading this and don’t comment, don’t feel bad. I’m a near-professional lurker myself.

I’d have a better idea how many people found this if I still had a hit counter going. But I had to disable that back in June because it broke my site at an awkward time. Any time you have to download an ftp program to access the guts of your site and yank out some code definitely counts as awkward. Especially if you’re using the internet at a public library because you’re on vacation, and you have a time limit. I should find another one, but I get worried about that happening again.

But I shall still continue doing this, even with few readers. I enjoy posting my art and my thoughts each day, even if my thoughts are often “I have to get this posted in the next ten minutes, darn it!” Ah well, deadlines are good at compelling action.

Maybe I should set myself a deadline for, ya know, telling other parts of the internet about my blog. It’s been on my to-do list for a long time, but marketing is one of those things my social phobia hates, so I keep procrastinating on it…

I like procrastination. It’s so comfortable…

  

Black Land, Bright Sky

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Photo #370: Black Land Bright SkyLocation Taken: St. John’s, Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

There are some interesting lighting effects right before the sun rises and right after it sets. The sky is still bright, as the air is higher up and is still in sunlight. But the land is dark.

One fun thing I do to entertain myself while driving at such times is to watch the clouds slowly change color. Say it’s sunrise, and the sky starts switching to blue in the east. The clouds are dark and blend in to the sky. A bit later, the sky lights up enough for the dark clouds to be visible. The sunlight is hitting the upper atmosphere, but hasn’t reached the cloud layer yet. Then, the clouds start to brighten into a glorious pink color. It becomes brilliant against the underside of the cloud, still dark. And then, slowly but surely, the sun rises above the horizon, and the light filters through the cloud and the entire thing is pink, a lighter pink than before but still pink. It will whiten as the sun rises higher in the sky.

At night, the opposite happens. The clouds fade from white to the oranges and pinks of sunset, then to dark streaks against the setting sun. The land turns dark, and the only light aside from the sky and artificial sources is anything that reflects the sky. Those show brilliant against the black land.

  

I should Blog about a Dog and a Frog on a Log in a Bog…

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Photo #369: Swamp BogLocation Taken: Ithaca, New York
Time Taken: March 2010

I am astounded, I say, astounded!

I wanted to post a picture of a pitcher plant, you see. My Dad and I were bantering about what I’d be posting in my blog, and perhaps it would be a dog, in a bog!

And I said “Well, I have photos of dogs and I have photos of bogs, but I have no photos of dogs in bogs!”

So I went to my computer planning to post a picture of a bog, specifically a pitcher plant, since I’ve posted pictures of a dog. Makes perfect sense, you know.

I could have sworn I had taken photos of pitcher plants in the past. I’ve been in several bogs where they grew, and a swamp or two too, and I even know I brought my camera along on at least one of those trips!

Alas, thinking back, that was my film camera I had at the time, not a digital one…

And while I have the negatives for all my film photos, I have no plans to digitize them. I took them while I was still learning the photographer’s art, and while some of them were decent, none of them stood out as good enough to do the lengthy digitizing process for. Well, maybe one or two, but still…

But what this means is that I do not have enough photos of bogs! I have some photos of swamps, like this one, and some of those swamps might be bogs, but I cannot verify it! The tragedy!

  

The (Semi) Desert of Canada

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Photo #367: Kamloops DesertLocation Taken: Along the Trans-Canada Highway, a bit west of Kamloops
Time Taken: June 2010

I am oddly fond of near-desert terrains. By near-desert, I of course mean a dry climate without all the sand and camels so many people expect to be in a desert. This particular area is officially classified as semi-arid, so I’m not just making up classifications out of nowhere.

This type of climate can support plants, but trees are constrained to areas by waterways, like this river. You tend to have a lot of scrub-plants, low laying hardy bushes and grasses. It’s not the best for farming, thanks to the lack of water, but it takes well to cattle farms and irrigation.

It’s also usually really pretty. The low-lying plants let the rock show through. And one of the odd quirks of desert-like climates is how much of the landscape is primarily water-shaped. In climates that support trees, the trees hold the soil in place as well as break up and hide the rock. But in the desert, any rainstorm can wash away a much larger amount of ground than you’d expect. So you get a lot of gullies and cliffs and dynamic topography etched into the earth. It’s fantastic geology, really. It’s no wonder a lot of geologist spend a lot of their time in drier terrain.

This is also great for photographers, mind you. The dry air adds a clarity to the photos that you can’t find in humid areas. And the rock showing through adds a lot of additional colors to the landscape. Combine that with the dynamic terrain, and it’s not at all tough to get interesting photos.

This particular stretch in Canada is particularly pretty. There’s not much desert-like land in Canada, all of it caused by the rain shadow of the Canadian Rockies. There are large stretches elsewhere that don’t get much rainfall, but they’re classified as, say, subarctic tundra instead. The colder temperatures lead to a different mix of plants than you find in other semi-arid zones, and the local rocks have a nice color variety to them.

Not that I want to live in a semi-arid zone, mind you. I love visiting them, and especially love taking photos of them, but I get twitchy when I go too long without it raining. Really, I just need to live somewhere really wet where I can just hop over a set of mountains to go visit the desert whenever I get the urge for some serious photo-taking…