A Winter Solstice Epitaph For Humans From The Year 2110?

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Christmas photo, text, & composite image © 2010 jim otterstrom

The Kuwaiti Oil Fires background photograph was borrowed from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

How many more holiday shopping seasons can the earth endure?
My heart reaches out to the other living species of planet Earth during this orgy of consumerism we call Christmas.

Sunrise ~ Elwood, Utah ~ December 11, 2010

Click on photo to enlarge © 2010 jim otterstrom

Clouds pour off the Wasatch Front while the sun peaks over the mountains this morning as Dallas and I took our walk. The view is to the southeast and my mother's house is in the far lower left of the photo, just beneath the sun flare. You can see smoke rising from our neighbor's chimney on the horizon to the right of the sun flare, the temperature was about 32 degrees.

Dragonfly After A Rainstorm...

Click on photo to enlarge © 2010 jim otterstrom

A showy thunderstorm rolled across the Bear River Valley here in Utah last evening providing us with a magnificent light show out the dining room windows at dinner time. Rain came and went through the night and we awoke to a brief downpour about six this morning. Wandering around the yard just before breakfast I came across this dragonfly lying in the grass. I picked it up and placed it on an old piece of wood for this photo. It was still alive but I'm not sure it will survive its drenching.

~postscript~

The above dragonfly dried out warmed up and flew away...

Innocent Dragonfly is Crucified on the Grille of a Jeep Cherokee!

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All photos © 2010 jim otterstrom

Sacrificed to a machine, the haunting corpse of a dragonfly hangs by its wings from the crossbar of a 1995 Jeep Cherokee grille on August 6th, 2010.

I was quite taken aback when I discovered this unfortunate victim of an automobile suspended from a plastic cross---it's fragile body perfectly preserved in graceful form---too reminiscent of familiar images of a more well-known crucifixion.

Most bugs splat unceremoniously into oblivion when they're hit by several thousand pounds of machinery speeding down a highway, leaving us not much to think about except cleaning up the mess, but somehow this magnificent little creature, even after death, has managed to tell us something about the beauty of its existence, and the tragedy of its passing.

Yes, it's just another bug, one of billions lost each day to the unintentional recklessness of human activity.

Yet, perhaps this tiny innocent member of earth's living community has also died for our sins, by our hands, so that we might once again be patiently reminded by Mother Nature of the destructiveness of our way of life.

How many messengers does Nature's Creation need to send us before we finally get the message?

We have already wiped out 98% of our old growth forests, 99% of our native prairies are gone, 80% of the rivers in China no longer support fish life, and 90% of the large fish in the worlds oceans are gone.

Earth is currently losing between 150 & 200 species every single day, and I can only wonder at the bountiful diversity that once graced this planet before our species came stumbling along into fossil fuels, industrialism, and the age of the infernal combustion machine, which may well render the planet uninhabitable for oxygen breathers.

I'm certainly not religious in any traditional sense of the word, but take another close-up look at this dragonfly, it has a message for us, and, it even looks as if it might have been praying when it died...

...praying, possibly, for the rest of us.

So, just in case, I'm keeping it in a box until Easter.

~

Photographed on a cloudy afternoon with a Canon SX10IS on a tripod; manual function, super macro setting, ISO 80, f/8.0, at 3 tenths of a second. Contrast & brightness slightly modified in Photoshop CS3. Some images cropped to show detail.

St. John's Wort Relative?

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

This flower is blooming in a gas station planter next to the sidewalk we use to get into town. The plant is a low growing perennial shrub which appears to me to be some sort of commercial hybrid related to St. John's Wort.

The light was just perfect last Friday morning when I saw this beauty just begging to be photographed. I added watercolor brush effects in Photoshop.

A Mother With Her Nine Ducklings At Sunrise

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Last Friday, shortly after sunrise, Peggy, Dallas, and I came across this family of Mallard Ducks gliding along beside the footbridge at Stanfield Marsh.

The dim early morning light required me to use a fast & rather grainy ISO setting of 400 to capture this moment which I later softened with a light touch of watercolor effects in Photoshop.

The results are beautiful to my eye, portraying the scene with an artful interpretation beyond what the photograph captured.

Vanishing Landscapes...

Old Mojave Homestead - March 11, 2010

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy watches the sun set from a crumbling Mojave Desert homestead along the Palmdale Road near Victorville, California during one of our rare road trips.

The picturesque old stone houses and wide open vistas in this part of the Mojave are disappearing quickly now as huge shopping centers and sprawling residential subdivisions creep across the landscape, burying the living desert, and it's history, beneath an unsightly scourge of human excess.

However, even the profound ugliness of rapacious growth and the grotesque spectacle of modern commerce are only temporary aberrations along the timeless course of life's evolution.

The light of the sun warms us with optimism at each dawn, and provides the opportunity for thoughtful introspection at the end of every rare and precious day, when the fireball of our solar system rolls beyond the horizon, often spreading a blazing display of color across this most beautiful of planets.

Death & destruction are cyclical and constant, yet life is a self-renewing resource, and time is on its side...

...as long as billions of stars continue shining their warm magic into the far corners of the universe.

Brief moments out of the vastness of time and space are all I have to share with you, miniscule observations from a tiny speck of the cosmos, but what a wondrous little speck it is.

No wonder it's currently overpopulated with almost seven billion consumers...

...this too shall pass.

THE WOLF MOON

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

The Wolf Moon, the largest, brightest moon of 2010, 14% bigger in diameter and 30% brighter than our lesser full moons (see why here).

The Wolf Moon was named by Native Americans for the wolves howling during cold winter nights. It is also known as The Old Moon, or the After Yule Moon.

The photo was taken from our deck last night at 9:19.

Canon S10IS---Hand held, full zoom (560mm), 1/500th second, f/5.7, ISO 80---cropped.

My Best Eagle Photograph, or...

...what I did yesterday Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

This magnificent American Bald Eagle is a resident of the Moonridge Animal Park here in Big Bear. The eagle has been injured, is blind in its right eye, and can no longer survive in the wild.

My original photo has the plywood ceiling of the eagle enclosure as a background. I replaced that background with the actual color of a Big Bear sky from one of my other photos because I couldn't bear to continually look at such a gorgeous creature in captivity. So, I set the eagle free, at least in the Spirit of a Photograph.

It took me more than 5 hours of working in Photoshop, pixel by pixel, to redefine the feathered edges of the bird to my satisfaction, a chilly afternoon well spent if you ask me.

The original photo was made on the same August day in 2007 as the Turkey Vulture photo below, these birds are next door neighbors. The sky color was taken from the Red-Tailed Hawk photo below the Turkey Vulture.

A Drizzly Fall Morning...

...brings beauty to the eyes of beholders

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Our morning trek began later than usual today because we needed to go to the bank and Post Office after they opened at 9 A.M. It rained lightly yesterday afternoon, and all through the night, letting up this morning as we made our way into town under a sky of broken clouds and rainbows.

As we walked along the sidewalk, approaching the signal light at the entrance to the Interlaken Shopping Center, where the bank, the Post Office, and Von's Supermarket are located, I happened to notice this leaf lying on the concrete.

Yes, it's just one fallen leaf clothed in raindrops, but it's the one, of thousands, that caught my eye and the diffused light made for a very nice image.

Shot with our Canon S10IS in Manual/SuperMacro mode, ISO 80, f 8, at 125th second. As recorded by the camera - not cropped.

Misted Poppy

Eschscholzia californica

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

After watering some recent transplants in the rock garden this morning I accidently turned the hose nozzle to mist and oversprayed a nearby poppy plant which left the poppies decorated with tiny jewels of H2O.

Red-Shafted Flicker

Click on image to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Red-Shafted Flickers are the most common woodpecker in our area, and, to me, one of the most gracefully formed & beautifully marked birds of all. They are year 'round residents here.

I took the photo this image is made from back in mid-December, re-discovering it last night while Peggy and I were going through some photo files.

I played with it in Photoshop a bit to come up with this etching-like image.

This male Flicker is on a branch in a small Jeffrey Pine just above the naturally formed bird-bath in our giant boulder.

March Marsh Majesty

Bald Eagle 3-7-09 Click on photo to enlarge -© 2009 jim otterstrom

Peggy and I encountered this gorgeous bird perched at the east end of Stanfield Marsh last Saturday at the beginning of our 10 mile walk. I moved in as close as I dared for a decent full-zoom shot (560mm) and then backed away when the eagle gave me 'the look', not wanting to further disturb its morning fishing expedition. The bird was still perched there when we came back through several hours later.

The Full Worm Moon

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

The last full moon of winter hangs over Big Bear at 8:50 last evening.

Robins are seen during the day searching for worms which are again moving up through the warming earth.

The picture was shot from our deck on March 10, 2009 at 8:50 P.M. with a Canon Powershot SX10IS.

Manual mode, full optical zoom/560mm, 1/100th sec, f /5.7, ISO 80, hand held.

Today's Sunset Over Big Bear Lake

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

The First Dawn Of Winter

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2008 jim otterstrom

This fleeting moment was captured at 6:52 this morning along Highway 18 between Big Bear and Lucerne Valley.

A couple of minutes later the sun disappeared behind the clouds leaving us with this golden memory to warm a gray and drizzly day.

A perfect beginning for winter.

Peggy is falling asleep...

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2008 jim otterstrom

...goodnight all

December 1st, 2008

Stanfield Marsh - 7:42 A.M.

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2008 jim otterstrom

7:30 A.M. - Stanfield Marsh

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2008 jim otterstrom

No Photoshop here. This is just how the picture came out of the camera with the early light filtering through the trees and reflecting back onto the pelican.

Botanical Scans From The Garden...

Please Click On The Following 'Botanical

Prints' To Enlarge For Viewing

© 2008 jim otterstrom


I was looking at some old botanical prints this morning and decided it would be fun to try and re-create something similar by scanning native plants into the computer.

So I picked a few fading flowers from the late summer garden and scanned them with our HP Photosmart C7180 All-In-One printer.

Even though we had some pretty substantial thunderstorms here today, I managed to keep the computer up & running long enough, between lightning strikes, to make some rather nice looking botanical art out of them.

Scanning flowers can give very nice results but it's a bit of a messy process.

As careful as you might try to be, it's inevitable that pollen, bugs, and plant detritus will get all over the scanner screen, becoming part of the image, so considerable time is required in cleaning up the pictures in Photoshop, or some similar program.

Scanning gives three dimensional objects an almost painted quality, the subdued lighting and shadowy details creating life-like impressions.

I spent most of the rainy day working on the pictures, time well spent if you ask me. They are rather large images so you'll need to scroll down to view them in their entirety.