I mean, it’s been three days without a post – what am I breaking from? From sorting video clips, of which I got too far behind on. I am doing what I should be doing with the still photos, which is adding details to a spreadsheet as I go – species, behavior, location, et cetera. It’s virtually necessary with the videos since there is no adequate thumbnail program to skim through them quickly, so without a spreadsheet, I have to watch the clips to see what’s on them, and I’ve done this before; searching back and forth for that one that shows the wood duck killing the bear takes far too much time. So I’m being conscientious and saving myself future time by spending it now to catalog properly.
But this means watching every clip almost all the way through to see what it actually contains, and then adding those details to the spreadsheet. It helps, slightly, in that I delete almost half of what I’d shot, but I still have to watch them to see that they’re worthless. It takes a while, and makes me buggy fairly quickly, so frequent breaks are in order. I can’t imagine doing this every day.
Thus, I’m on break, and posting a few pics from yesterday, just for the hell of it (and because I’m not up to writing up the details on the other pics I have sitting in the folder awaiting treatment – they’ll be along.) These were obtained yesterday afternoon as the clouds got dramatic. The weather did not – it remained hot and still – but the clouds tried to pretend otherwise.
Which works better: the more direct focus on the individual growing ‘mushroom’ with the distinct diagonal of shadow, or the wider shot that shows more rays but more trees?
From the yard, I wasn’t getting any better view than this – I should have been down at the waterfront, but that was just far enough away that the view would have been at least a little different, if the clouds didn’t shift entirely in the time that it would take to get down there. I also should’ve taken my cue to go down about an hour later to actually watch sunset on the water, but I didn’t. I did turn around a bit to see what lay in that direction, again using the trees because there were no majestic condors wheeling against the sky for a focal point.
I probably couldn’t have gotten a better blue than this at any other time, though it might have been nice to get a little sunlight on the trees and not have them silhouetted in this way. Never happy…
Okay, back to the grind. The nice part is, eventually I’ll put together the video clips I’ve been stalling on all summer, and have a feature here.