Merry Christmas!

Red squirrel north of Beaver Marsh, Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

RussianTeacakes for Christmas

This recipe is from my Grandma Zdenka Kucera. She made them every Christmas, along with dozens of other delicious cookies and pastries. 

Ingredients

1 cup softened butter

½ cup sifted powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 ¼ cups sifted flour

¼ teaspoon salt

¾ cup ground walnuts

Directions

Cream the butter, powdered sugar and vanilla, using an electric mixer. Stir the salt into the flour. Add the flour mixture into the butter mixture, using a slow setting on the electric mixer. Mix in the ground walnuts. Chill dough.

 

Roll dough into 1” balls and arrange on a cookie sheet. Bake at 350° for 9 – 11 minutes, until set, but not brown. Cool on the cookie sheet for 1 -2 minutes, then allow to finish cooling on a rack.

When completely cool, roll twice in powdered sugar.

 

Makes about 4 dozen.

 

Notes:

Soften refrigerated butter for about 15 seconds in the microwave. It should be soft, but not melted. Don’t use margarine or light margarine.

Fluff the powdered sugar and flour with a fork before measuring. Level contents of the measuring cup with the straight side of a knife.

Pulse walnuts in a food processor to grind. The results should look like a nut meal, rather than chunks.

Cookies can be placed about 1 ½” apart as they do not spread very much in the oven.

Cookies are fragile when hot. Give them a minute or two to cool before transferring them to a rack.

Recipe can be double or tripled.

Use a sturdy stand mixer since the dough is quite stiff.

Raptors!

Had a wonderful shoot at the Medina Raptor Center on December 8. The Center rehabs injured raptors as well as other animals. Only one of the birds we had the good fortune to photograph is likely to be able to return to the wild, and that was a juvenile osprey.  Josh Clark, an excellent nature photographer and coordinator for MPEG, made the arrangements for 15 photographers. The weather was frigid, which was good, because that meant the snowy owl could come out. Here are a few of the photos. I hope to post more soon, including the snowy owl.

This is a red-tailed hawk. His name is Owati, which means Mischief,

 

Victory, ruffling his feathers at the crowd of photographers, is an adult osprey. I saw one of his kin flying over the Snake River when Chuck and I were on our death-defying off-road expedition in Grand Teton National Park.

Cloud is a luecistic red-tailed hawk, not quite an albino because they have pigmented eyes and legs. This guy lived in an area with a lot of limestone, so his coloring didn't make him a target for larger predators.

And finally, the bald eagle Migisi. He looks all fierce and noble here - and he is a gorgeous bird - but he was basically checking out his handler for more snacks.

 

More information on the Medina Raptor Center can be found here: http://medinaraptorcenter.org/.

Everett Road Covered Bridge

Spent a happy hour shooting the Everett Road covered bridge today, while there was still some snow left. Lost the light before I could get to the downstream side.

 

Played around with some black and white conversions. I think they look better with a little bit more contrast and grain added.

 

 

 

The bridge crosses Furnace Run. Must be glacier rocks, they're different colors and kinds. Every once in a while, tiny ice floes crunched into the rocks - it was so quiet, even that little noise was startling. 

 

November's muted color palette is austerely beautiful. I love trees pencil-sketched against textured clouds and snowy stubble-fields showing the contour of the land.

The bridge is in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, just off Riverview Road.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Lanterman's Mill

Lanterman's Mill is in Youngstown's Mill Creek Park. I went on the 19th of October, and the leaves were just starting to turn. Not perfect conditions for shooting - a little late in the day and breezy - but I was determined to get there before going out of town. Wish I'd had a little more time to explore. The park looks pretty big and has a nice gorge running through it. Might be good for ice photography later in winter.

This first one has some texture layers:

Looking downstream, under the bridge:

 

Taken from a little farther down the walkway:

 

And one black and white, from the covered bridge:

High Bridge Glen

Hoping to get a little fall color, I went to High Bridge Glen Park in Cuyahoga Falls last Monday. It was still quite green, with just a hint of yellow and orange. It's a great place to shoot, with a nice, clear view of the cascade.

The remnants of the Sheraton dam are barely visible. By next year, the raw bank where the heavy equipment stood will start showing green, erode a bit, and gradually blend into the rest of the gorge.

 

I'm not sure the trees on the side of the gorge are helping the composition. Looks a little better slightly off-center, below.

 

 

Closer, more dramatic, lots of texture in the water:

The water is so pretty rushing down the cascade - this looks almost like a Japanese woodcut, dark rock contrasting against the silky water:

 

So pretty and so dangerous...

Sagebrush Hell or The Day I Nearly Died and Chuck Laughed at Me

We decided to take a day off during our Grand Teton photo tour - Slept in, had breakfast instead of granola bars, and did a little wildflower shooting on the outwash plain. Then Chuck and I made the fateful decision to off-road on the badly-named River Road. It should have been called the sagebrush-engulfed, cliff-clinging, two-track, endless, dust ball trek through hell.  Chuck, who has no fear of heights or of being lost, enjoyed driving along knife-edge cliffs, in the literal middle of nowhere, looking down into watery death in the Snake River.

 

It started mildly enough, with a light-hearted drive down a rough track onto the upper river plain. We stopped at a little parking area, looking down over the Snake and a little bit of a ranch, pretty and isolated.

Some rafters in the river:

 

 

A panorama of the Tetons, just before we became lost forever. Note the Citadel in the far right side of the photo - giant SUV, you could've bowled in the back.

 

 

We decided to follow the track farther north – it was on the GPS, so we weren’t going to get lost. Hah! Hours of driving, sometimes on the crumbling edge of the enormous cliff dropping down to the Snake, with the passenger side wheels riding half on air.

No landmarks, no idea of how long before we reached pavement, much less civilization and with only granola bars and 4 bottles of water to sustain us.

 

Endless, sunbaked miles of sagebrush hell. Craven coward that I am, I actually got out of the truck and walked in couple of spots that were entirely too close to a crashing plummet ending with the Citadel crumpled and us crushed at the bottom of the river.

 

 

Chuck, my best beloved, had the decency not to start laughing until the track veered away from the river. But laugh he did, the rat.

 

 

When we finally got back to pavement, we were about a mile and a half from where we started and ten minutes from refreshing beverages at Signal Lodge.

I would have sucked at being a pioneer…

Grand Teton Outwash Plain

Just what it sounds like - rocks, dirt, water washed off the mountain and out onto the Snake River plain.

The earth is gravely and poor, but in June, when we visited, covered with wildflowers. The silvery grey shrub is sage brush and the brilliant yellow flowers are yellow balsamroot. There are plenty of smaller flowers hidden in the sage.

This is a panorama of the Tetons from one of the pull outs, ten shots stitched together. The file was roughly 48 inches wide after processing. 

The sky is incredibly blue, even in the middle of the day. Underneath the snow, the mountains look raw and new. Gorgeous, huge, wild, very unlike the sweet rolling hills of Ohio.

Back to the Tetons

The National Park Service built a turnout on the place where Ansel Adams made his iconic photographic of Mt. Moran. I stood in the same spot overlooking the Snake River's Oxbow bend, fired off 400 shots, and didn't come close. Nor did any one else there. I hope wherever his spirit is, he understands we were there to honor him, however poor our efforts.

Anyway, I'm posting all of these because I like them, I loved the view and I love the Snake River. When I hit the lottery, I will be back in the Tetons, camera in hand, in every season.

Couple of Cute Bugs

From the Cuyahoga Valley Photographic Society photowalk at the Pine Valley trailhead in Kendall Hills. Sometimes I forget how lucky it is to have a National Park right in my own back yard.

Anyway, this shiny little bug is a dogbane beetle. Round, polished, and rainbow metallic.

 

And a katydid on ironweed. There's more antennae there than bug.

The Pine Hollow trailhead is nothing much to look at during the day or evening, but on the right kind of morning, the sun catches the mist rising from Kendall Lake, and the puffy popcorn clouds, and transform the hills. Now if only I could catch that in the camera...

Mormon Row, Grand Teton National Park

We crawled out of bed at 3:30 am so we could be in place for the 5:09 sunrise. Thank you, Hampton Inn, for having a coffee maker in the room. And thank you, Chuck for being a total trooper on this trip!

Love the way the sun caught this cottage's façade.

Same cottage, the evening before the sunrise shoot - 20 seconds later, it was pouring rain and we dove for the car.

Lonely buildings, just at the edge of Mormon Row.

Must've taken a thousand shots of this barn...

This, above, might be my favorite.

The mountains change color as the sun rises.

And across the way, down a little dirt road, the iconic Moulton barn, echoing the shape of the peaks in the distance.

And, finally, the unloved, rarely shot barn on the other side of Mormon Row. I like the way the light catches and outlines the porch.

June 3, 2013