Le désert

This photo reminds me of California deserts. It's right here outside our garden gate. Not a desert at all, but part of a stone wall where a small plant has taken hold.

Taken with the nifty fifty lens. 50mm, f/8.0, 1/160s, ISO 100.

It's a little weird to learn of the death of Prince, or the artist formerly known as Prince, now the late artist formerly known as Prince. I was not a big fan, but I liked some of his stuff. And he was my age, another reminder of what awaits us all not too far down the road.

Friday fifites

Most of the wine that Ken and I drink is very local to where we live. Some of it is grown right outside our back gate. A lot comes from within a few kilometers of our town, grown on the heights on either side of the Cher River. But we also drink wine from farther afield. I've gotten into the habit of buying Chablis at a local event where wine producers from other regions come to show and sell their products. We visited that particular winery in Chablis in 2014. Chablis is made from chardonnay and it makes a nice change from the local sauvignon blanc. Every now and then we enjoy wines from Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Rhône Valley, Languedoc, and, of course, Champagne. Most of those come from the supermarket.

Welcome to Limeray, 50mm, f/8.0, 1/100s, ISO 320.

Those other places are too far away to drive to on a regular basis; even Chablis is a three hour drive from here. Still, there are wine areas closer by, like Vouvray, Valençay, Chinon, Bourgueil, and Saumur, all part of the larger Loire Valley wine region, as we are, and each with its own special characteristics. On Wednesday, we drove up to Limeray which is in the Touraine Amboise AOC area. We stopped at one individual winery and a cooperative winery and came back with a trunk full of good stuff: over 50 liters of wine, including gamay, sweet and dry sauvignon, and some dry chenin. A nice haul!

Friday fifties

Sorry, more sticks. With droplets. I always feel as though my photography is uninspired this time of year. Unless there's snow. Callie and I trudge through the muddy vineyard as the sun is rising or setting, often behind gray skies or in the rain. When it's wet, I don't take the camera at all. Oh well, lighter days are coming.

Drippy branch, 50mm, f/1.4, 1/100s, ISO 200.

I tossed and turned most of the night, feeling like I didn't sleep. I know I slept some, because I had weird dreams. At one point I found myself listening to the washing machine go through its spin cycle, two floors below. Then I heard the heat kick on. Must have been the beans we ate for lunch. Today we're having veal.

Friday fifties

The last march of the Ents. This makes me think of the tree-herder characters from The Lord of the Rings marching off to war. In miniature, as these are grape vine trunks and not tall trees.

Maybe they're Entings? 50mm, f/8.0, 1/100s, ISO 640.

It's just about freezing this morning and light snow showers are predicted this morning. I can see on the internet that it's snowing already in Le Mans, about 150km to our northwest, and it's moving this way. The ground is too warm for anything to stick, so if it does snow here, it will be pretty but inconsequential. I'm not holding my breath.  **UPDATE 09h00: It's snowing!

Friday fifties

Here is a winter scene from this past week. Doesn't look very wintry, does it? But it's what winter looks like around here most of the time. We've had snow in years past, but it never really amounts to much and it doesn't last long. In one exceptional year we got close to a foot of snow and it stayed on the the ground for more than a week. Otherwise, when we get snow, it's between a dusting and maybe an inch or two, and it melts away quickly.

Vineyards in winter, 50mm, f/8.0, 1/125s, ISO 500.

For today's lunch Ken's making chicken Kiev. I don't think I've ever had it and I know Ken hasn't eaten it in decades. We saw Jamie Oliver make it on television and thought it looked good. It's one of those dishes that was in fashion back in the seventies but has pretty much gone away. If it works out, there might be photos. Even if it doesn't work out, there might be photos.

A reminder: Friday fifties refers to photos taken with my 50mm prime (fixed) lens. It's an exercise to get myself to use it more and to rely less on the zoom lens.

Friday fifties

Bonne année 2016 !

The dawn of a new year, 50mm, f/8.0, 1/125, ISO 125.

Live long, and prosper.

Friday fifties

Joyeux Noël !

Friday fifties

Someday we'll find it,
The reindeer collection,
The Comets, the Cupids, and me.

Three little reindeer, 50mm, f/5.0, 1/8s, ISO 200.

With apologies to Kermit the Frog. I have three little reindeer. One, the littlest, stays out all year. The other two only come out at Christmas time. And no, I haven't named them.

Friday fifties

Out among the vines behind our house is a line of acacia trees. In spring, the white flowers are fragrant and their petals carpet the ground as they fall. At this time of year, their seed pods fall and split open, exposing the little bean-like seeds.

One of hundreds of acacia seed pods on the vineyard road, 50mm, f/3.2, 1/125s, ISO 250.

Thursday was a chilly day. Our high temperature was around 5ºC (around 40ºF), but the lows were close to freezing. I spent the morning screwing little hooks into the rafter beams on the front side of the house. Then I strung up some holiday lights. Up until now, I've been wrapping the light string on the deck railing. But this year I decided to string the lights up along the roof line. I worry about teetering on ladders, but this wasn't too precarious a job and I survived to tell the tale. I'll try to take photos of it at some point.

Friday fifties

The bloom is off the rose. At least this one. Its petals still cling to the stem, but they have shriveled and turned brown. It's still kind of pretty, though.

A rose was a rose, 50mm, f/3.5, 1/160s, ISO 200.

The predicted weather system is moving through. We're are on the southern edge, but the wind is whipping through and we're having rain squalls. Then we're expecting a serious drop in temperatures to near freezing by Saturday morning. Brrr!

Friday fifties

Not all the leaves have fallen yet. There are still plenty of hangers-on. I saw these in the woods where a path leads me and Callie down into the river valley, our normal evening walk. They're in a spot that was cleared for firewood last year. Since then, saplings and other growth have sprung up in the newly sunlit bare patch. It won't be bare for long.

Saplings in the woods. 50mm, f/7.1, 1/125s, ISO 6400.

In a burst of unplanned ambition, I got the lawnmower out yesterday afternoon and cut a portion of the yard. My intent in the sunny afternoon was to trim the strip outside the fence that runs along the north side of the property, something that takes less than five minutes. But then I thought, while I've got the mower out, I might as well cut the grass outside the hedges, too, and the strip along the road while I'm at it. Then I thought, it's silly to cut the grass outside our property and not do any inside, so I cut a section of the lawn. I didn't do it all because there are mole hills to clear in the other section first. I wasn't feeling that ambitious.

Friday fifties

Two ways! Way one: today's 50mm photo. Way two: the temperature this morning is 59ºF (15ºC). That's pretty darned mild for a November morning. And our high temperatures over the weekend are expected to reach 70ºF (low 20sC).

Home on the range, 50mm f/8.0, 1/125s, ISO 1600.

I took advantage of yesterday's sunny day to wash the windows in the living room, meaning the big sliding glass doors that open onto the deck. That also meant taking down the curtains and washing them. I told you that I'm in a fall cleaning mood. Little by little, I'm working through the projects on my list. I really should go out today and rake the leaves out of the driveway. We shall see.

Friday fifties

A shortcut to mushrooms? This image might have worked better with the macro lens, but I wasn't carrying it at the time. Still, it's not bad with the 50mm. There is a particular path that Callie and I like to take on our afternoon walks that runs down the hill through some woods. It's very shaded and often damp this time of year, and there are many fallen trees and stumps where mosses grow and mushrooms proliferate.

Very small fungus in the moss, 50mm f/6.3, 1/80s, ISO 6400.

These are certainly not edible mushrooms, at least I don't think they are. I will not attempt to find out. They are very tiny. But, as I read somewhere at sometime, all mushrooms are edible. Once.

Friday fifties

Morning fog has been the rule this week, along with some light rain. It's normal weather for this time of year and on through November. When we have high atmospheric pressure, the low clouds and fog get trapped in a temperature inversion. They may or may not dissipate. When we have low atmospheric pressure, we get clouds and rain off the Atlantic. Film at eleven.

Callie pauses on our way back home from a foggy morning walk, 50mm f/6.3, 1/100s, ISO 400.

I wonder if younger people know that expression, "film at eleven." When I was a teenager, the late news on television in the US came on at eleven o'clock pm, so when stations did a teaser for late breaking news, they'd often say something like, "...such and such happened earlier today, film at eleven." Notice the word "film." Videotape was not yet widespread back then, and digital video didn't even exist. And since those days, a lot of local news programming moved up to ten o'clock. That and 24-hour news stations essentially killed off the eleven o'clock news programs around the US. So "film at eleven" has become a completely obsolete expression. We'll have more on that story after the break.

Friday fifties and a blogiversary

Today is the tenth anniversary of my blog! It's hard to believe that it's been going on for ten years now. And this is the 3,369th post. That's not too far from one post per day for ten years. I never thought it would go this long. And I have no plans to stop in the foreseeable future.

Today's 50mm photo: potimarrons (red kuri squash) in our garden, 50mm f/7.1, 1/160s, ISO 6400.

The blog quickly became an outlet for my amateur photography habit as well as a record of our daily life here in the center of France. Ken's been writing his blog just as long (his blogiversary is next week), so between the two of us we have a sort of daily journal of the last ten years on line. By the way, we don't consult on the subjects of our daily posts. Today, I noticed that we each put up a very similar photo. That happens every now and then.

Blogs were very cool when we first started, but these days more quick and mobile social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram seem to be dominant. I once said that blogs had become the eight-track tapes of social media. That may have been premature; there are still plenty of blogs around and many that I read daily, along with others that I look at less frequently, but regularly.

Thanks to all of you, past and present, who visit the blogs!

Friday fifties

This week I started Monday Macros with plans to share a macro image every Monday. Today I'm bookending the week with Friday Fifties, posting a photo taken with the 50mm fixed lens. When I got the camera a few years ago, I started reading about lenses that I might want. The camera came with two "kit" lenses, both zooms. I read that fixed, or "prime," lenses can give you better quality images, the trade-off being that you have to zoom with your feet, getting physically closer to or farther from your subject.

Standing about 3-4 feet above the subject, 50mm f/4.5, 1/125s, ISO 1000.

I also read good things about the 50mm prime lens with its wide maximum aperture of f / 1.4, good for low-light situations. So I got myself one. Again, I don't use it as often as I do the zoom lens and I want to get more experience with it. I'm finding that it does a really nice job within a meter or two of the camera, making it great for close shots and portraits, but that it's not any better than my zoom lenses for longer shots, landscapes and such.

I've been posting mostly macros and fifties for a little over a week now without identifying them either way. So today, being Friday, you get a 50mm shot.