FRUSTRATIONS!

This morning was an ideal autumn morning, with sun above fog and leaves at their brightest. So, I left early for errands in order to go slowly through Snoqualmie with my camera. I have been watching this particular curb as colorful leaves piled up to more than a foot, so I was anxious to get a photo. As I stood there, getting my camera ready, around this corner came the street sweeper! Slowly, agonizingly, he took away that lovely bank of color right in front of my eyes! I felt like a kid who just dropped a double-decker ice cream cone! Wah! The sweeper's wet path is visible here:


I first went past the mill pond, and here the fog was too thick for a photo of the reflected colors across the water! Wah, again.

By the time I got to the old trains, the fog was lifting, so the effect I wanted was gone - again, right before my eyes!
All these photos are straight from the camera, without color enhancement. I LOVE autumn!
I really wanted the fog, but oh well:

FROST ON THE PUMPKIN!

Well, the frost WAS on the pumpkin, but I didn't get to it before the sun did! This weekend we had our first heavy frost. This photo is of !/2-inch-thick ice on the birdbath. I purposely placed a pumkin nearby so I could try to get some refracted color:

These were ice drops a few minutes before I got there:

And here too, the drops are just starting to melt:

BACKROADS THROUGH WESTERN CANADA, PART 1

We have been on backroads now for 10 days. Our first few days were in the northern interior of British Columbia. We always choose the most "back" of backroads and we are never disappointed with the treasures they yield. The high country on a gravel road pass between Pavilion and Clinton gave us this large black bear and her cub:

And lots of marshes. In this, the solo duck was a mirror reflection:
And one of my favorite subjects is tumble-down aged farm structures. The autumn colors enhance the weathered wood:
From the pass, the atmosphere made these ridges so blue, all in a fading line:
This was actually taken much later, at Maligne Lake in Jasper National Park, Alberta. It had started to snow!

From Dawn To Dusk

Autumn mornings are refreshing! Our last day at home before our trip, I walked across the street to catch the fog spread over the pasture:

Then, back to the house, this was the scene from our driveway as the moon "set":
The same day's sunset over the elk field:
And now we are on our road trip to northern Canada! I was especially looking for red barns yesterday. This one was prime (I don't stop for barns with tin roofs!):

SCRIPTURE/PHOTO CHALLENGE

Someone in the Two Peas group started a challenge of combining a personal favorite scripture with a photo of our own. I did not see the original rules or perameters, but I was so uplifted by the photos I saw posted that I tried one of my own. I chose this scripture because I love it from the point of view of a photographer or anyone who is sensitive to nature's beauty. The photo was taken near Mt. Rainier.

DANCE OF THE SEED SPORES

Yesterday I was sitting here at my computer, enjoying the perfect autumn, breezy weather. I saw, in the flower box in front of me, this seed spore, twisting and swinging around and back while stuck to a stem of ornamental grass. I could hardly believe my eyes that such a delicate whisp of a thing was surviving the wind! I held my breath that it would still be there when I got outside with my camera.

Up and around it danced, with the whim of the breezes:
Still, it hung on, swinging and dipping like a fairy athlete on an exercize bar:
I could have watched this miniscule flora performance for ever!

DANCE OF THE SEED SPORES, CLOSE

It was much too breezy to get a good macro this close, but I still wanted to see how those delicate, feathery tips were able to hang on so tenaciously to the grass, no matter which direction the wind blew.