Hazy ole Atlanta

The hazy Atlanta skyline taken while descending Kennesaw Mountain, 15 miles or so north of Atlanta. Kennesaw was one of my favorite hikes back when I lived in Georgia. It was great to walk along the shady trails once more. I can't say I miss Atlanta though. Too much damn traffic.

purple flowers

These are some flowers off of the deck. I took the picture after a brief sprinkle before the raindrops evaporated. I'm using the picture as my computer wallpaper since the left side is blank which is perfect for having icons and the right looks so pretty.

3 mushrooms on a log

The title tells pretty much the whole story, folks. Three mushrooms on a log. I took the picture a week ago up in the mountains north of Asheville, NC, on a hiking trail just off of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

It was a bitterly cold morning with the wind scouring the skin every time I stood up. So I started taking pictures way down low... like this one of the three mushrooms.

Blue Ridge Highway

These two pictures were taken from the same spot a few seconds apart. I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway when I took the pictures, a little north of Asheville, NC.

They illustrate how just a little zooming can subtly change the feel of a picture. In the picture above there's the slight marring of the jet contrail as well as the framing effect of the tree branch in the upper left and the tall pines on the right. The picture below has a somewhat flat appearance due to the mountains creating a line across the midpoint of the picture.

The location was quite pretty but framing the original picture well, or cropping later on can make a big difference in the "feel" of a shot.

Fish Story

...you should have seen the one that got away!

Feet in Nature

For some reason, I'm not sure why, every so often I'll take a picture of my feet in betwixt other types of pictures. Here's two of those shots from a hike a week ago. It's an odd habit.

A Walk Down

I walked down this trail the other day to take some water pictures. I was hoping some rain we had recently would have given the stream enough omph to make it photogenic. Unfortunately the drought is still in full force and the picture below was the best I could find. Maybe in a few more weeks there'll be more water...

A fungus among us

Here's a fungus on a tree. I was amazed at its appearance--and slightly disgusted. Something about growing on dead things, I guess. The setting was really nice. As you can see above, the log the fungus is growing on has a nice settled appearance, filled with rich browns and greens. Very photogenic. And there's the greenery framing the shot--but look at that closeup below. That's just nasty! But it was just too interesting to ignore...

Green river and Julie

The picture above was taken in Eno River Park and to no surprise then, the subject is Eno River itself. I took the picture on Saturday and immediately after, Julie took a similar picture with her camera. And since two people wrote to ask me about Julie, below is a picture of her taking a picture of the scene in the picture above. That's a lot of uses of the word "picture".


To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a picture of a human has graced this website. I'm quite certain there's never been a picture of me on here! I think of this as my anti-human blog so it'll probably be a long, long time before you see the human form on here again.

Saturday was a really good day for picture taking. It'd rained the day before and everything was greener than it'd been in several weeks.

All coiled up and hissin'

Isn't that fellow a beauty? He was on the Cox Mountain trail when Julie and I were trudging our way slowly up the mountain. We both took a well appreciated breather and made friends with the handsome guy. I don't know much about snakes, but I'm assuming it's a Black Snake.


Fortunately Julie isn't skittish around snakes 'cause as you can tell better here, this guy is big. The trees and such make it easier to judge scale. I think it was 6 feet long but it's more than possible that I'm exaggerating. The length of a snake is as subject to exaggeration as the size of fish--and the end of the story is invariably "but he got away". Besides, guys are notoriously bad judges of length.


Here's what the cutie looked like when I'd followed him a little ways in the woods. I think this was his way of saying that he wanted some alone time. As you can probably guess, at this point I became quite willing to give him more privacy!

Mushroom Tree

Yeah, yeah. I know. Mushrooms don't grow in trees--but they do grow on trees and there's a freakin' bunch of them on this tree. Of course the attraction of this picture, taken earlier today at Eno Park, owes a lot to the green backdrop. We finally received some rain on Friday and while it was only a quarter inch or so, it greened up the leaves quite a bit.

Sunny Day in Eno

I took this picture last weekend at Eno River park. I'm planning on going hiking there again this Saturday so I'll get more pictures. Oh, joy.

This time I'm going to try to drag my sorry ass out of bed early so I can get better light. Late afternoon light is pretty filtered through a tree like in the picture above--but it's too unrelenting to make for the pictures I prefer. For those, getting early morning--before dawn is best--light really helps. I just wish I wasn't allergic to mornings!

Meditation on the river

The picture above is a spot on Buckquarter Creek in the Eno River Park. To me it looks like a perfect place to meditate. It's beautiful there, even with the water so low due to our drought, and the sound of the water moving over the rocks is quite calming.

Here's a map of the trails near the creek if you're curious.

Below is a closeup of one of the rocks that you see in the picture above. These rocks are normally under a foot or two of water and they're so smooth and hard that they resemble the old iron you see in civil war era cannons. The rock even feels like metal and is perfect for sitting on or laying against. The cool rock felt wonderful in the hot sun of this late September day.

Eno River

I was hiking in Eno River park on Sunday and took bunches of pictures. Over 130 in all. The day was warm but pleasant and absolutely sun drenched. Here's one of the pictures: