• flowers,  People/Portraits

    Moral Compass

    “Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.” Barack Obama

  • musings,  window

    My Mind Can Wander

    A refreshing rain began falling yesterday morning just as I was leaving a local coffee shop. When I pulled up in my condo it was pouring, so I sat in my car to wait out the rain. I found it peaceful for the next 10 minutes. As I sat there my mind wandered back to the coffee shop I had just left and to one of the regular customers there. 

    He sits at the same table almost 6 days a week from 7:00-10:00 am, reading one of the larger national newspapers, from front to back, and sipping on a large iced tea. Of course he is known by both the baristas and the customers. The other regulars will keep the table reserved for him in case he’s late and he has conversations with other customers on a regular basis. My wandering mind was thinking about how differently we spend our time in the coffee shop, and I imagine that’s true outside the coffee shop. I prefer spending my coffee shop time visiting with a friend, reading an uplifting book, writing in my journal,  and fighting the battle to spend as little time on the internet as possible but I almost never read the newspaper. I would rather fill my mind with positive images and thoughts, which is an unreachable ideal. A smile came across my face and I laughed at myself because my idea of coffee shop time would bore him, and probably many others, into a glazed-over-stupor. As I thought about it more, he’d also be bored sitting in my car listening and watching the rain. Sheesh, can my mind wander and not just when it’s raining! 🙂

  • lake,  landscape,  sunsets

    Enjoying the Sunset

    This was taken in 2005 at a local pond with my friends while having a picnic, plenty of food and games. It is scenes like this that I wish I could know what people were thinking about. I wonder if my friend was having an awareness of her part in the universe, or was she remembering a choice made in the past she would like to change or was she dreaming of a future moment yet to come.

    “I could have. What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have happened but, didn’t. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.” Paulo Coelho.

  • landscape,  mountains,  Smoky Mountains National Park,  sunrises

    Something from the Past

    This is another HDR image from a trip back in 2003 to the Great Smoky Mountains. It is a sunset image taken on the Foothills Parkway. This image is a merging of three images exposed plus and minus 2/3 stop. I took it prior to any knowledge of HDR. My reason for the multiple exposures was to make sure I had a good exposure. It was taken with my first DSLR, a Nikon D100 and the Nikon 80-400mm lens. It wasn’t a day or two later that I dropped that lens and destroyed it. I pretty much bent it in the middle. Lesson learned was to make sure the camera and lens are securely fastened to your tripod before picking up your tripod. I ended up shooting the rest of the trip with one lens, a Sigma 24-85mm f2.8-4.0 lens.