lake effect

I met Olivia while on assignment at a horse farm this weekend in South Range. Olivia was the most relaxed cat among the large horses, she has a real lovable personality.

A little hole of blue sky suddenly appeared in the clouds over Duluth today. It was a dark cloudy day with beautiful light lake effect snow showers that did not amount to much. This hole in the clouds led my eye to a patch of glowing blue sky. As soon as the glimpse of blue sky appeared it was gone. It was like mother nature was playing a trick on me. Who knows this may be the last blue sky I see for the next week.

I was at the Lake Superior Zoo in Duluth the other day and I stopped to look at the polar bear for a while. I felt sorry for this majestic animal stuck in its zoo habitat. As I watched the bear walk back and forth I was reminded that one of my dreams is to go to the arctic and photograph wild polar bears. I feel that I need to do this in the next five years otherwise it may be increasingly difficult to find wild bears due to habitat losses as a result of climate change. I hope that the people of the earth can come together to fight global warming so that polar bears and other arctic life does not just become reflections in our minds.

I tried to post something fresh everyday in the month of January. For me it was quite challenging. I was able to make photographs everyday but getting them posted same day proved to be difficult at times. We had the driest January ever. This is the third time this has happened in the past five years. Several times we had springlike temperatures only to wake up to dangerously cold winds 12 hours later. I have been on the road everyday for over the last two weeks. I feel exhausted right now, yet I am still hungry to get outside and make my own work. I would love to have a whole day to myself where I could focus on my photography and not worry about other things. I want to post something everyday in February, but the days will dictate what happens.

I saw a large amount of Common Goldeneye ducks in the shipping canal. I walked down the south pier of the canal with a long telephoto lens. The canal wall is about chest high and I was trying to be quiet so I did not disturb the birds. I did not know that there was a large group next to the wall underneath me that I could not see. When I leaned over the wall to compose a photo of the distant birds, I accidentally spooked about 60 birds that where right under me. I think that they startled me as much as I startled them. Most of them swam rapidly away but a few choose to walk on the water for a quicker escape.

I like blue shadows. They probably happen all year but I think the contrast of the white snow and the ultra low-angle of the sun makes them more noticeable. The reason I like blue shadows is that they look as cold as they feel. It feels so good to step back into the sun out of the shadows even if it is below zero.

Here is an aerial view of the Walter J. McCarthy Jr. the 1000-foot laker that hit an underwater object, flooded it’s engine room, and settled on the bottom of it’s slip in 20 feet of water. The ship has been de-ballasted and is now floating and undergoing repairs.

I thought all the ship traffic was done for the season and as we were leaving for the cities this laker was navigating the waters on this very cold morning. The vapor rising from the lake seems like it is helping keep the ship afloat.