I took the kiddos duck hunting a while back and stopped in the small town of Denhoff to check it out. I saw this quaint little building and thought I’d snap a quick shot. Didn’t do much else for photography that day, or much at all recently, as I’ve been so busy and the weather hasn’t exactly been great. I know there are plenty of opportunities out there, but right now I’m just so stacked I don’t know if I’ll be out there to snatch them.
I found this jug up at Arena last weekend, perched atop the fence post at the corner nearest the old abandoned church. I’m curious as to who found that lying around the place after all these years!
The old church has settled significantly, now that its supports have failed. I’ll post photos of that soon.
I spotted a Bismarck Tribune article tonight on their website (I don’t subscribe) that caught my eye. Apparently the Bismarck-Mandan CVB would like you to know that the website www.bismarck-mandancvb.org is an imposter. I looked it up on whois.net, and the registration information is private (i.e., there isn’t any information to be had). So, being the curious type, I figured I’d check the ol’ Wayback machine at archive.org to see how long this has been going on.
There are a lot of snapshots of the website, going back to 1996. You can imagine what that one looks like – or check it out yourself. By looking through the various snapshots, it looks like things went off the rails in 2004 – fourteen years ago. Between June 18th and September 7th, the website was swept up by some generic web search engine thing. My guess would be that someone forgot to renew the domain or something, and didn’t know how to get it back.
Here’s how it looked up until the end. I actually wrote a blog post about those fantastic winged buffalo. I don’t have a way of pinpointing when exactly things went sour; just that mid-2004 window. After that it apparently bounced around a bunch.
The current iteration of this site, however, seems to have popped up sometime between October 24th, 2016 and May 12th, 2017. The theme seems to have been tweaked a little in the past sixteen months, but otherwise it looks the same.
The big question is…why did it take them approximately a year and a half to notice?
It was a nice, sunny morning. I was roaming the county roads, checking out spots I’d marked in my GPS long, long ago. There were some targets of opportunity I’d marked but never had the chance to actually photograph. This was one of them: a windmill which has seen better days, yet is still standing tall.
I always find little extra bonus items on these roaming trips, and today was no exception. It’s amazing how sometimes I can spot something that I swear I must have driven past at least a handful of times, but which has obviously been there all along. That was the case with this windmill.
The moon wanted to get into the picture. I wish the angle would have been better to break out the telephoto and cheat the perspective to make the moon appear larger in this shot, but I just didn’t have physics on my side that day.
I love to roam. As things start changing for Autumn, I’m now faced with a primal urge to get out and chase stuff with my camera, investigate things I’ve mapped for future photo jaunts, and make the best of the time before the trees become barren and the landscape a dull gray. Winter has its own opportunities, but September is my favorite. Hopefully, although my schedule is absolutely stacked, I can make the most of it.
I’ve been going back through my photos and keyword tagging the ones I’ve missed or neglected over the past few…well, for a long time. I’m finding a lot of gems that I’ve never posted, good intentions and all that notwithstanding. This is one of them.
The sad part is that I’ll never be able to get this photo again. Developers have begun to carve up this landscape north of Bismarck, so those golden fields are now beginning to show homes and sheds.
I’ve run into this situation quite a bit lately, where a photo subject or setting I’ve treasured in the past has disappeared. Sometimes it’s like this, where development has encroached upon the spot and cluttered it up. Other times it’s an old farmstead or windmill that’s collapsed into history.
I could get all wistful and bemoan the fact that these subjects or spots are lost forever, but I choose to focus on the fact that the photos I did get are that much more precious.
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