Clouds over Steptoe Butte from Scott Wood on Vimeo.

We spent the long Memorial Day weekend with my family in Northern Idaho.  It was my niece and nephews high school graduation and a great time to simply relax and unwind with people who are very important to me.  We weren’t able to spend as much time as we would have liked to since we had to get home for work on Tuesday morning, but I did take a pit stop at Steptoe Butte to make a short time lapse video of the really great looking skies.

I have more images from the weekend that I will be sharing here, as well as a blog post about something that I think was really cool about the weekend over on my non-photo blog, that I will be sharing as soon as I return back home from a week long work trip to Arizona.

In the meantime, I will be making a #WayBackMachine post or two.

I made this image exactly 1 minute and 10 seconds before I made the Doggie Bliss image that I shared yesterday.  Not a bad “hit” rate for just a few minutes of walking around my back-back yard.  While it is pretty much impossible to tell from the image, these geese, at least I think they are geese, are heading south to a pond on a neighbors property where they pretty much live.

When I first imported this image I thought it was a nice silhouette of the birds, but after looking at it a little more it was clear that there was actually a good amount of detail in the birds, especially along the trailing edges of their wings and along the far side of their breasts.  That alone made this image a winner for me.  I regularly ask you to click through for the larger version and I am going to ask again for you to view this one on the largest your screen will allow, it really helps bring the detail out.

I will admit though, this image really is unlike pretty much anything I would normally go out looking to shoot, and was caught more “on the fly” while out grabbing shots of my dog.  I am so glad that I decided to aim the camera at the sky.  As for processing, this is pretty much out of camera with the exception of upping the contrast in the sky to help pull some detail out of the clouds and adding a fairly heavy vignette.

I thought I would finish off the week here on the blog by simply sharing, with very little comment, images I captured from the 2013 Olympia Procession of the Species.  Please click on any image to see a larger version.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed both creating them and the procession itself.

In my very humble opinion, the poor dandelion really has an unfair reputation.  Somewhere along the line it was declared a weed which I think is really unfair.  When it is in full bloom you will not find a more magnificent yellow color in nature, of course it doesn’t hurt that yellow is my favorite color, and when it goes to seed, it really is a marvel to behold.  It almost looks like an engineered dome.  But sadly, it has been declared a weed which means that countless people go out of their way to kill each and every one that they see.

When I came across this specimen in my back yard yesterday I had to grab a camera and a macro lens.  I also thought it would be a great subject to hone my focus stacking skills on, and after 11 shots at different focal points, this image is the final result.  I don’t normally do square crops, but in this case it seems to work for me.

Oh yeah, if you think I am the only one who loves the dandelion, I thought I would share this image from the recent Procession of the Species during the 2013 Olympia Spring Arts Walk.

Speaking of the Procession of the Species, I have quite a few images in my events gallery and will be sharing more of them here on the blog very soon.