Over the Fourth of July weekend, Gina, Abby and I trekked up to Southeast Kansas to visit my parents and Grandma Dailey, whose 95th birthday was on July 9. Gina thoughtfully picked up a couple of gifts and cards before we left Little Rock.

Abby loves to participate in birthdays so she was happy to assist Grandma in opening the presents.

Then we sat down to a seriously down-home meal of ham, purple-hull peas, cheese grits and cornbread.

Share on Facebook

It snowed in Kansas on Christmas Eve and Gina and Abby wanted to see some of the white stuff. We loaded up on the day after Christmas and took off hoping the roads were passable to my parents’ place in southeast Kansas where they got 6-8 inches. The roads didn’t get dicey until we got into Kansas. We didn’t have any trouble until we turned into the driveway at Pleasant Hill Farm and promptly got stuck.

Abby had never seen snow before. (At least not that she could remember.) It would be a massive understatement to say that Abby LOVED THE SNOW in all caps. We got her into her hat and boots and she dove into the snow and rolled around and threw snowballs at everybody. She had so much fun that she didn’t notice how cold snow is. After about an hour she started crying about how her hands and feet hurt, but she still put up a fight over going inside to get warm. It was the first time she had ever gotten really, really cold.

Gramps got the snowplow stuck when he went out to free our car from the snowdrifts in the driveway.

That evening the legendary Team Jackass of geocaching fame set out on an epic sledding adventure. You may have heard about how flat it is in Kansas. Our first stop was on a gentle hill where a good pusher was needed to get the sleds going.

Then we got the idea to go out to the dam at Big Hill Lake, about 5 miles distant. The Corps of Engineers actually calls the area Kansas’ Little Ozarks, if you can believe that. Bingo! The highest spot in Labette County was sporting a deep layer of packed powder. I even got to fulfill my dream of sledding down one of those long concrete ditches you see on the sides of major roadways and dams. It wasn’t quite like the bobsled run I have imagined for many years, but it was pretty decent.

We moved on to the main run on the side of the dam. It was ingeniously designed as two levels with a short flat spot in between. That meant the chickens of the bunch (ahem, Jodie) could just go down the lower section and the brave could go to the top of the dam and cover both stretches. A giant flood light standing on top of the dam gave off just enough illumination so we could see to head in the right direction. The only danger was a couple of pipes sticking up through the ground at the bottom waiting to split a wayward sledder in half. But they were pretty spread out and Katie was the only one to get anywhere close.

It was full-on dark when we got there, so I left my camera in the car. Dumb idea. Gramps brought his camera though and caught Amy careening down the first slope onto the flat. It was pretty terrifying the first time you ran it. Think Clark Griswold and his amateur-recreational-saucer-sled-land-speed record. Abby and I made a couple of runs together down the bottom slope. On the second run she got a face full of snow when the nose of the sled dug in a little. She said she was ready to go home to Mama after that.

The next day we went out to see Grandma Dailey at the assisted living home. She gave Abby a beautiful book of Bible stories.

We worked in some Christmas activities, also. Abby got one of those wooden Thomas The Tank Engine train tracks and showed Gramps how to set it up.

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook

The state of Kansas once called itself “The Land of Ahs” in its promotional materials. Get it, Land of Ahs=Land of Oz. Yeah, I know. This church sits near my parents’ little farm near Parsons, Kansas. We visited last weekend to enjoy an early Thanksgiving feast. (Cheese grits live on!) The farm is out in the sticks, closest town is six miles away, so it’s a great place to see the stars. For this shot I stacked 97 photos, each of which had a 30 second exposure. The advantage is that when the photos are combined, you don’t get the sensor noise that shows up on a single long exposure. It was the first time I’ve tried this particular star trails technique and it didn’t turn out as I expected. To do this right, you need an intervalometer to automatically make the exposures. Higher-end cameras have the intervalometer built in and you can buy inexpensive small intervalometers that plug into the camera. I had to use some computer software that has intervalometer capabilities and shoot the frames with the camera tethered to my laptop.

It’s a cumbersome arrangement and it didn’t work quite right. I let the camera sit clicking on the tripod while I went back to the house for an hour. When I came back, the software informed me it had attempted 160 shots or so but could only process 97 of them. No idea why that happened. Then I loaded all the photos into Photoshop and ran an action I found on the Internets that combines all those exposures into one shot. Some of the star trails are kinda jaggedy and I don’t know what caused that exactly. Was it the software? Was it camera movement from the slight breeze blowing that night? Who knows. Also the trails near the North Star are really faint. I suspect that was because I had the aperture stopped down to f/8. I needed to have it a little wider for such short exposures. The stacking did work well to get the exposure on the front of the church. Several cars passed by and swept their lights across the church when they turned the corner. I’m going to get a real intervalometer and try this shot again.

Here we have a more traditional star trails shot I made later that night. I just put the camera on bulb and opened the shutter and let it sit for about 50 minutes. I had some technical difficulties on this one, too. When I came back, the camera had shut itself off. I thought maybe the batteries had run out, but there was plenty of battery left. Maybe it got too hot and tripped some kind of breaker. The metadata on the frame said the exposure was 30 minutes exactly. Maybe the shutter will only stay open for 30 minutes, but I know I’ve taken longer exposures than that a couple of times.

The thing sticking up in the middle is an old grain silo on the farm. It’s green from a big yard light shining on it about 200 yards away.

Abby and Gramps got in a little fishing. They couldn’t find any worms, so they used dog food. They didn’t catch anything.

Share on Facebook

Abby, Aunt Jodie and I headed to my Mom and Dad’s place in southeast Kansas for a little Easter frivolity. Gina was on injured reserve with a bum shoulder and didn’t make the traveling squad this time. Abby and Jodie held a traditional Easter egg dying party on Saturday.

My Dad’s sister Barbara and her husband, Sherril, came to town to visit Grandma Dailey, who now resides in an assisted living center in Parsons, Kan. Jodie, who’s working on a genealogy and oral history project, spent Saturday plumbing the depths of Grandma’s memory. At 93, Grandma’s got a lot of stuff to remember.

Barbara and Sherril, along with Rex the dog, held a rendezvous under the Keebler Elves’ tree in the front yard.

For the second year in a row, the weather on Easter Sunday precluded hunting eggs outside, so the Easter Bunny hid them in the living room.

All the eggs were at ground level, so Gramps and Abby got down low to find them.

On the way home, we found this giant Easter Bunny monument on the highway outside of Joplin, Mo. Abby didn’t like it. She told Aunt Jodie not to get too close.

Share on Facebook

Since I was at my parents’ house in the middle of nowhere Kansas this weekend, I thought it prudent to try a star trails shot with the new camera. Star trails by themselves are pretty cool, but it’s the foreground that usually makes such shots really cool. The best thing I could find nearby were some hay bales.

Though I was really pretty far out in the country, the house has a big street light in the yard and there’s a church about 300 yards from the house with its own big street light. In addition, the small town of Parsons is about five miles away. It was actually hard to find a suitably dark piece of sky without a big street light in the way. Straight up was nice with a ton of stars, but I couldn’t get anything in the foreground with the camera pointed straight up.

What I ended up with was the hay bales with the lights of town behind them and the big light from the church shining on their fronts. That’s why they are that green color. I guess the light was florescent or sodium vapor or something. I shot on daylight white balance in raw and I tweaked it a little in CS3. Exposure was f/10 for about 30 minutes.

Share on Facebook

My parents live on 40 acres west of Parsons, Kan., that used to be part of a larger working farm. There are several sheds, silos and whatnot still on the property, including this old-time chicken coop. This is the kind of coop that Foghorn Leghorn guarded in the old cartoons. The outside has great peeling paint and deteriorating wood. The kind of stuff we amateur photographers like to take pichurs of. I set up a couple of flashes inside so the ceiling and back wall of the coop would be visible.

On Saturday evening, Dad and I went to one of the ponds on the place to do a little fishing. See the Fish On! post for more on that. On the way back to the house I noticed the setting sun was making the seed heads on a big patch of grass glow like they were radioactive. I headed back down there the next night to shoot the glowing grass, but it was kind of cloudy so the sun wasn’t as bright and the grass heads didn’t glow. Or maybe my mind played tricks on me the night before. At any rate, I did find this lone wild sunflower nearby. I used the Strobist sunset-as-a-backdrop technique and lit the flower by holding my SB-26 flash out to camera left and fired it using the built-in optical slave triggered by the pop-up flash on my camera. I think the pop-up even provided a little fill from the front. Sunflower. Setting sun. Get it?

I wanted to shoot these black-eyed susans with a slow shutter speed to get them whipping blurrily in the wind. The wind wasn’t blowing that hard and I didn’t have my tripod with me, so that didn’t work out so well. I did some photoshopping to the shot to give it a more arty feel. Does it feel arty?

The farm offers plenty of room to roam for a little girl and her plastic tricycle.

After we got home on Monday, Gina, Abby and I went over to Braum’s for a little ice cream break. Abby said she wanted blue ice cream in a cup. She checked out the many ice cream containers and couldn’t find any blue so she opted for the orange … in a cone. She’s like the weather. if you don’t like what she proposes, just wait a minute and she’ll change her mind.

Share on Facebook

Labor Day weekend at my parents’ place in Kansas. They live out in the country with three farm ponds within walking distance. Dad and I hit the best of the three for a quick fishing trip. We landed four smallish bass in the span of about 10 minutes and got no other bites.

Share on Facebook