Verboten!

decrepit tree stump in Jordan Lake
See this stump? This is the Infrequently Posting Mr Bugg’s stump. It is forbidden for anyone else to photograph it. I took this photo just to show everyone else what it was that they could not photograph – you know, so accidents won’t happen, and no one can say they didn’t know it was this stump they were supposed to avoid. If any readers really need to know exactly where to avoid doing forbidden stump photos, they should contact me to learn the precise location.

Mr Bugg, of course, has photos of it, and presumably, you will see them at some point, because he assured me that he will be doing better at posting than he has for the past two months, and he is a man of his word. Any of those photographs will be the certified, official images, even if they’re not as dramatic as this one, or fail to show the moon like this one (it’s up there just to the right off the top of the stump.) Mr Bugg has not so far claimed the moon, but perhaps you should move quickly.

While recording this to protect others, I couldn’t resist playing with perspective a bit and held the camera down at water level to frame it against the sky – so that anyone else doing the same would not fail to recognize it. This meant I was shooting blind, aiming the camera without using the viewfinder, so I had to fire off a few frames and check the results in the LCD afterward, something rather derisively known as “chimping” – it is very unprofessional-looking and really tells you nothing that you wouldn’t already have seen in the viewfinder, save for the effect of any camera flash, which wasn’t used for this. But since I hadn’t used the viewfinder, it told me how well I’d framed it.

All that said, the lack of scale and comparison might be misleading (not at all my intent,) so I’ll tell you that this stump stood no more than 70cm from the water’s surface – really, not an impressive stump to claim as one’s own, but who am I to judge?

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