An Alternate Universe

This was taken in the late winter, 2006.  I was out running my two Border Collies, Franny and Zooey, at Clay County park, just west of Vermillion, SD, and brought my mom's 3MP camera along.  There's something about those hills along the Missouri.  They seem embued with a natural enchantment.  I look upon them and instantly my heart is inspired by the promise of creative freedom, leisure and exploration.  The river and stars together for me have offered a silent witness to the everpresent origin of all things, which I've felt intimate with on occasion.  After the dogs had exhausted themselves in the woods, chasing deer and rabbits to their hearts' content, I would bring them riverside to drink.  On hot days they would wade in chest-deep, but no further (Bordie Collies do not enjoy the water as other breeds do, partly because they don't trust the water, and partly, I think, because they don't like to get wet, unnecessarily, precocious as they are).  On this day it was a bit cold, so Franny approached the water daintily at first and only waded in a little in order to drink.  I liked the lighting of this shot, taken just before sundown.

Ivie came running up to me, yelling, "Daddy, Daddy, the sun is going down, and it looks bew-tee-full!" (She had heard Shara making remarks about the sky.) I grabbed the camera and set it up on the back porch, facing west just over the roof of our house. The dogs were drawn to the tripod like those apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the monolith, approaching it with great curiosity and trepidation. You can tell from the picture where their noses bumped the camera. In one frame a few birds are captured passing overhead.

Still fooling around with time-lapse. I was hoping the sky would turn chaotic today, but it ended up being a relatively demure spring shower. However, the time-lapse does reveal how fast the clouds were actually moving (to the unaided eye the sky looked merely overcast). The camera was set to take a picture every minute, and I let it run for fifty minutes. Nothing spectacular here, but there are nevertheless small details, such as the swaying trees, which make this worthwhile. This view is of our front driveway, facing west.

Saturday night (March 29th, 2008), right before church, I set up the tripod in the kitchen facing east out the back window. The camera was set to shoot fifty times, once every two minutes. I started shooting roughly five minutes before 6:00 PM, so the camera finished shooting at approximately 7:35 PM. Franny can be seen lounging for a few minutes in the middle of the backyard, and again she is glimpsed relieving herself toward the back of the lawn. Also, in the street behind the houses you can catch a quick glimpse of a person walking by. This was only a spur of the moment experimentation with time-lapse photography; in the future I plan on capturing more interesting scenery. Notice as the light fails that the auto-focus starts to pay attention to the water spots on the window rather than the backyard. The two little figurines seen at the bottom left are the bride and groom which stood at the top of our wedding cake