Congratulations to Carolyn Schlueter

Friday, January 25th, was the reception for Framations Art Gallery’s annual Beyond the Lens competition. Our very dear friend, Carolyn Schlueter, was awarded 2nd place in the competition for her excellent black & white image “Pensive Moment”. Carolyn also had 2 other images accepted into the exhibition.

We had other friends who had their work accepted into the gallery exhibition and will note them in another blog post soon.Molly and I are blessed with being surrounded with wonderful friends that are very creative.

It is our pleasure to try and showcase them to our subscribers.

Here is an image of Carolyn with her prize winning image

(sorry, I do not know who took the image to do a credit caption).

Congrats to Carolyn

Carolyn Schlueter and her prize winning image “Pensive Moment”

Mistaken Identity

I recently entered this image in a local competition (didn’t make the cut for any points) and had titled it Bosque Snow Goose At Dawn.

Not sure what I was thinking, but it is a Ross’s Goose. They are a ‘cousin’ to the Snow Goose but lack the size (RossĀ  is about the size of a mallard) and also the ‘grin patch of a Snow. Beak length is different at well.

Ross Goose

Snow Goose

Just goes to show that even after chasing waterfowl for more years than I care to admit, I still make mistakes.

 

Bosque del Apache and Cranes

For years I’ve wanted to photograph Sandhill Cranes. Even looked into the blinds you can rent from an organization in Nebraska when the cranes headĀ to their breeding grounds. The drill for these blinds is the organization people take you into the blind after sundown and they come get you the next day after sundown. From accounts, you can’t leave the blind unless it is an emergency. The blinds are reported to be very cold and cramped. A couple of folks I asked said the openings to photograph out of were not real conducive to longish lens.

So when I read some of Arthur Morris’s articles and saw his images from Bosque years ago, I decided that some day I would go there and photograph cranes. As most of you know, Paul Fisher and I made the journey and tried to wear out our cameras photographing cranes,snow geese, ducks, harriers,javelina and Rio Grande turkeys.

A photographer by the name of Jim Palmer (https://www.jimpalmerphotography.com/) gave us some information of where the cranes would be and some places we could set up to capture them feeding and flying. Paul and I found a place along the flight line and it became our go to place. We nick named it “The Beach” due to the sandy soil where we pulled off the main road. From this vantage point we photographed cranes until we thought we were “craned” out. Looking back on the images as I work through them, it just makes me want to go back and try some different settings and different vantage points etc.

Here is a small sample.