Safety Orange is not a common color in nature, and for trees it’s the mark of the saw.
This willow stands on the Northwest corner of Lake Calhoun (for now) and caught my eye because of the interplay of light and shadow. The hanging branches and the shadows create and vortex composition. Also, shorelines are the coin of the relm in Minnesota and provide a literal and figurative compositional line. I placed the tree dead-center because it is the divide between the bike path and the lake.
Someone has been making Cairns in my neighborhood, there were several on the Northwest point of Lake of the Isles a few weeks ago and I found this one on Cedar’s Hidden Beach last weekend. I wonder if it’s the same person that was making labrynths around here. If you are the cairn-maker or know who it is, I’d like to meet. Whoever it is sure seems to be having fun.
I did some research on cairns last year when I found a bunch of them at Afton State Park, you can read that article here. I think what makes a carin so intersting is that it is so simple in design, yet completely unseen in nature. Animals (lacking thumbs) don’t stack rocks, so it’s a purely human behavior and the skill required is pretty impressive, seriously, take a look at how complex this one is!
The last of the winter blues are on the run. This spring, the renovations around Lake of the Isles are almost complete. The shoreline fences are gone, the waterplants are doing well, the paths are all in place and they are currently cleaning and regrouting the bridges. Next on the schedule is the roads. They will be repaving the parkway which is in terrible shape. The dump trucks used to landscape the lake really beat up the road, so they waited to fix the roads after they were done, so sense in damaging a new road.
Bob Kupbens and I were out walking around the canoe racks the other night looking at the sculptures being built for the City of Lakes Cross Country Ski Luminary Loppet. It started to snow and the skyline lit up from all the reflected street lights. I had my trusty f1/1.4 lens and was able to catch a few images.
The Luminary Loppet is a great photo opportunity, here are some of my photos from last year.
Speaking of the Luminary Loppet, it’s this weekend. I set up a photo contest for anyone that wants to come down and take photos of the event, there’s two $50 prizes! Here’s the rules:
1. The contest is open to everyone!
2. Entries must be submitted by uploading them to Flickr.com and adding them to the “2009 City of Lakes Loppet Photo Contest” group by Feb 28, 2009.
Flickr.com provides free accounts.
3. Entries must be submitted by the original photographer. Do not submit a photo taken by someone other than yourself. You must be the sole owner of the copyright of any image submitted. Your submission of the photo is your guarantee that you are the author and copyright holder of the photo.
4. No identification may appear on the image.
5. All submissions must be made from images recorded during the 2009 City of Lakes Luminary Loppet.
6. Each entrant may submit up to five (5) images. Submission of more than five (5) will disqualify all entries. Images must be at least 4
megapixel.
7. The deadline for submission is February 28, 2009.
8. Two $50 Prizes, one for each category. Please tag your photos with the category.
“Capturing the Spirit of the Event” photos of the community enjoying the event.
“Capturing the Beauty of the Ice Structures” photos of the ice sculptures and luminaries.
9. Judging will be conducted by a panel selected by critics chosen by the organizers of the Luminary Loppet
10. The winning photos will be published, and may be displayed at the next years City of Lakes Loppet and at other appropriate locations including the City of Lakes Loppet web page.
11. By entering the Contest, all entrants grant an irrevocable perpetual non-exclusive license to City of Lakes Loppet, to reproduce, distribute,
display and create derivative works of the entries in connection with the Contest, City of Lakes Loppet in any media now or hereafter known.
You must register for the Loppet to ski the course, you may walk on the lake and take pictures, but please stay off the ski tracks and out of the way of skiers.
Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow’s daily photos of Minneapolis and the Twin Cities.
Just got back from visiting my parents in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I’m running behind today, so you get to enjoy a backup photo of my lagoon. One block from my home is this lagoon between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. I think the lillypads are new this year.
Stay tuned! I came back through the Wisconsin Dells area and took photos of the great missing Lake Delton; I even walked on the bottom of the lake. Last week, the damn collapsed and the whole lake washed down river leaving a mucky whole in the middle of a summer resort town — very tragic for the people and businesses there.
I suggest they change the name the Delton Dry Lake, like Groom Dry Lake. It might draw a new, if interesting crowd. If you don’t know where or what Groom Dry Lake is, you probably sleep at night.
Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.
Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.
Snow can make a great projector screen — the sun was playing shadows across the park along the East shore of Lake of the Isles.
Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.
Spring is in the air, the woodpeckers are on the wing, snow is trying to melt, and mitchster.com has a new theme!
I am working on changing the look of mitchster so that I can add a lot of new stuff, like the recent comments and posts on the right, and articles about other things besides photography. I was having fun with the old look, but this one is bigger and gives me more flexibility. I have plans to bring back the glow-in-the-dark duck (that’s him in regular light above), but I needed to make this layout work first. Let me know what you think!
This Downy Woodpecker was singing and fluttering around Lake of The Isles with a friend of a feather. Can’t tell if they are mates, I haven’t figured out the difference between the males and females. Good thing I’m not a Downy Woodpecker eh? I found a neat factoid on WhatBird.com — A group of woodpeckers has many collective nouns, including “a descent of woodpeckers”, “a drumming of woodpeckers”, and a “gatling of woodpeckers.” I have a big list of animal group names, I’ll have to find it and post it soon.
I’m pretty excited to be working on Mitchster.com a little more now, I just completed a few websites and have some more time during the day. If you are curious, here’s the three jobs I just finished:
Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.
The most complicated exposure yet. Black crow on white snow in flight. Got it!
Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.
Time to attack the Buckthorn. The Minneapolis forestry department is setting the islands on fire this week at Lake of the Isles. Well, actually they are only burning the buckthorn, which is an invasive species that does really well here.
I enjoyed walking around watching them work and chatted with a few of the guys as well. They were really friendly and seem to enjoy their work. I heard somewhere that the guys who run wrecking cranes have the highest job satisfaction, I wonder if cutting down trees and setting them on fire has the same effect.
Note to DCPBers, the bigger your camera, the more likely people are to think you are from the news and want to talk to you. There are some perks to getting older too, when I was a kid out exploring, I’d get chased out of places, now I’m doing the same thing, but people want to talk. Maybe it’s the camera — like Rodney Dangerfield’s routine about tying a pork chop around a kid’s neck so the dog will play with it.
