Always up for a challenge I grabbed a couple of snow shovels I keep in my truck for when the fun gets out of hand. I laid one shovel over each of the spotlights, did my photography, and used the shovels to clear additional snow away from the lights so they could do their thing.
Happy New Year!
If not, you may be wondering why I think so. Simple: this is probably the single most frequently used setting for portrait photography in all of Bismarck-Mandan! Sit out on the lawn some Saturday and have a picnic, and you’ll likely see numerous wedding parties come and go to have their photos taken on the steps in front of these doors. You may also see family or senior portraits taken directly in front of them. They’re rather noteworthy, and as such make a great photo background.
I have several friends who are portrait photographers, and they get a lot of demand for this location. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a great setting for your special photos! I just find it noteworthy and mildly amusing to watch the groups come and go as they take their turn in front of a popular local landmark.
I usually enter the library by the circulation desk downstairs, but from now on, I’m going to make it a point to enter through these big, well-known doors!
After a great dinner we went wandering around a little bit and took a dam walk. As the temperatures were dropping and the wind increasing, I noticed this guy out fishing near the boat landing. With many of the trees already leafless, it’s things like this that grab my eye. It looks like we’re not the only ones trying to avail ourselves of every warm weather opportunity before the cold sets in for the season.
The window of opportunity for North Dakotans to enjoy fall colors can be very narrow. Last year the leaves fell pretty much without changing color at all! It looks like we’re going to be more fortunate this year, but don’t let it pass you by. Sadly those leaves are going to be on the ground sooner than we think.
This is the view from a minimum-maintenance road east of Crown Butte. There’s a pond in the little valley on this road. It’s a fantastic place to chill and happens to be a perfect sunset viewing spot in the middle of summer. Well, we’re not in the middle of summer anymore. I had to venture down the road a little further since the sun sets further south nowadays. Yesterday brought a lot of rain, so the road was composed of gooey mud in spots.
Some of the tourists there looked amused as I rolled up in the Monster Truck™, grabbed my tripod and camera bag, and ran out into the middle of the forts to get the right angle. Later, as I was wrapping up, a couple walked by and asked how the sunset turned out. Thankfully, as you can see for yourself, it turned out just fine.
A friend of mine once told me that there are three things that concrete does: it gets hard, it turns gray, and it cracks. Well, wood carvings do a couple of those things. As the wood ages it often develops cracks in inconvenient places. This carving of Clyde appears to have done so. I don’t think it detracts from the statue or its tribute at all, but it did make an opportunity for a “splitting headache” joke!
This statue really is quite large, as was the real Clyde. To get this shot I had my camera on a monopod, with the foot wedged into my collarbone, and the camera fired by remote as I held it aloft. Oh yeah…I was standing on a stump at the time, too. Here’s to you, Clyde!
This isn’t the only remarkable tribute to Clyde, although it’s far more permanent than my other favorite. Right after Clyde’s passing, someone made an enormous sand sculpture of Clyde lying on his back on the sandbar beneath the original Liberty Memorial Bridge. It was quite plainly visible while driving over the bridge until nature took its course and slowly whittled away at it. I wish I had been a photographer back then! I’m sure pictures of it are floating around somewhere…just not in my collection.
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