Willow River State Park {Water Falls}

Yesterday I met with my photography group at Willow River State Park in Wisconsin. The meet up was focused on shooting waterfalls.  The forecast was actually calling for rain, but we lucked out and remained dry. AND as far as I know, no one fell in :-)

We started with a little discussion about shooting waterfalls and our leader (Don) talked about the history of the park. We then went over to the damn to get a little bit of practice before hiking out to the falls.

And of course I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get some photos of benches, I'm just so drawn to them
:-P  heehee




After some time at the damn area, we hopped in our cars and drove a little ways to the entrance of the falls trail. We had to hike a ways down to get to the waterfalls. Going down was a breeze, coming back up - well that's another story.  They were beautiful! I don't really have much narrating to do for the pictures so I'll just let them speak for themselves.












Another girl and myself climbed a TON of stairs, to check out the over look spot. Nothing too spectacular, but it gave us a nice birds eye view of everything.




One thing I love about these Meet Ups is that I am surrounded by people doing what I love. Kyle would have loved to have gone, but I know after about 10 or 15 minutes he would have been bored out of his mind. Only photographers can spend 2-3 hours in the same location and not get bored, LOL.




After the trip down from the overview spot, my legs were shaking. I am SOOO out of shape. I got a few more pictures and then we headed BACK up toward the parking lot. I love being able to get an afternoon of photographing in AND get a work out :-)




Happy Spring!

Monday Walk

Wow I am a little behind on updating my blog. I guess I've just been busy lately. Doing what, I'm not really sure. Last weekend we went to an 'office' party and now I am finally watching the episodes! We are starting from the beginning and so far are mid-second-season. It's hilarious!!

So Monday I took Harpo on a little stroll. I probably should have went for a run, but I didn't. I wanted to get some pictures for my 365 364 project so the walk won.

There were a lot of planes out and I got a LOT of pictures of them. Too bad they all look the same and instead of boring you with a ton, I'll just show you this one.


We walked over to this little park a few blocks from us, called Bronx Park. All the neighborhoods in our area have little 'neighborhood names' ours is Bronx Neighborhood. Funny how we saw this shoe hanging in the tree in the park.


We (as in Harpo and I) also saw a bald eagle! It was flying pretty far from us, so I didn't really get a close up, sorry for the blur.


On our way back home I got a few more pictures, this little windmill gave this yard a little 'country' feel.


And then we made a complete circle.


Happy Spring!

Sunday Walk to the Park

Yesterday we took Harpo for a walk to the dog park!


He was SOOO excited to be outside, he just kept running and running.




You can see him in this next one, he's at the back of the line:


And making new friends.


He is so funny when he's excited. He kept doing his 'stance' I dunno if he was showing off or just posing, but it was too cute!


On the way home we got to enjoy the trees budding and I even caught sight of my bulbs popping up in my front flower bed!




Happy Spring!

Sunrise Photo Walk

As you know my husband is in grad school, which means long weekends of studying for him... and me trying to find things to do to keep me busy. I knew if I went out on a photo walk this morning I'd have a blog to post today, thus biding a little time that I won't be pestering my husband :-P

I got out of bed this morning!!!! Well that's not a surprise I was going to eventually. But I got out of bed in time to watch the sunrise. It's amazing how photography can get me out of bed like ::that:: where as during the week I do good to get out of bed before 7:25. As I stumbled down the stairs to let Harpo out at 6:10am I noticed out the window that the sun was already making it's appearance. So it was a mad dash out the door to drive down the road a few miles to my infamous lakes (I gotta scout out some other sunrise locations. You all are going to get so bored of these soon, hee hee) to catch the amazing colors before they vanished. My goal was to get there 30 minute before the 'official' sunrise time. I think next time I need to make it an hour. Problem is as summer approaches that time gets earlier and earlier.

Beside the fact that I was really hoping for some clouds, it was otherwise a beautiful morning.

The fun thing about Minnesota this time of year is everywhere you walk is a land mine. You never know when you're going to sink through. It's so fun to watch Harpo, poor guy, cuz when he falls through the snow is up to his neck. You can see here I was being very careful not to fall through :-)

After a few minutes at Lake Calhoun, I headed on over to Lake Harriet which has a better angle to the sun. I had fun playing with my aperture setting to get the sun beam effect!

The lake was so pretty glistening in the sun.

Then my butt was frozen from sitting on the frosty bench :-P

Warm Wishes!

The Eagles of Wabasha

I recently stumbled upon a Twin Cities Photography group through MeetUp.com I went to my first social gathering the other night at a local bar/bowling alley down the road from me. And they happen to have another activity today that I joined in on. Today's meetup was "The Eagles of Red Wing". Red Wing is about an hour and a half from my house and the meet up time was set for 6:45am. Which is why I waited til the last minute to decide if I was going to go or not... that meant I needed to get up at 4:45, which I have a hard enough time making it to work by 8am. But I knew I would be kicking myself if I didn't, and getting up in the morning for something you're excited for isn't that bad. I remember as a kid and having to get drug out of bed for family vacations. Even though I'd be stumbling down the hallway with my pillow in tow, bumping into my zombie brothers, it was still fun knowing we were going on a trip. And that's how this morning was, my alarm went off and I had the familiar feel of "no not again, just a little bit longer" then looked at my alarm and had a weird feeling of "why is my alarm going off at 4:45am?!?" then a happy feeling of "AH yes, I'm going to shoot eagles today" and that got me up real quick. Even though I set all my camera stuff out ready to go the night before, I still managed to take forever and pulled out of the garage at 5:22am, that's twenty two minutes AFTER I was wanting to. But it ended up being perfect timing.

Driving to a photo spot, is much like hunting. I got up before the sun, to be in place before the sun, to 'shoot' these creatures. I changed my mind about wearing my snow pants because I didn't want to be too noisy. It's the excitement of the 'hunt' but unlike hunting my shooting doesn't kill them, but helps preserve their beautiful being :-)

We met at Colvill park in Red Wing.

It was a beautiful calm morning, but the sun never really came out. I actually started to get discouraged because we saw maybe two eagles fly overhead. And they were flying too fast for me to get one and it was too dark for my pictures to turn out.

After a little wait time, about four of us decided to we travel 40 minutes south to another spot called Read's Landing which is just north of Wabasha. We had heard before hand that Colvill Park hasn't had much turn out, but since it was our designated meet spot, we met up there anyway.

Read's Landing was much more successful. (look in the trees)

Granted they were on the other side of the river and my camera lens only reaches so far (it was zoom out in the photo above to give you perspective)... it was still a super fun experience.

They were EVERYWHERE! It was awesome!

The eagles come to Wabasha to eat. When winter comes they head south looking for food and Wabasha is one of the first places they come to with open water. They don't like to go farther than they need to which is why they usually stop here. It is the connection of two rivers which causes the water to remain open. read more

There was a little spot in the water that they kept landing on, probably hunting for fish.

A little later in our watch a crow stole the spot while one was out fishing. I don't think the eagles like this because they kept swarming around it waiting for the crow to leave, it was funny. The crow would not budge.

I call this one FG Eagle, because it reminds me of the Fair Grove Eagles signs all through my high school :-P

After my face was frozen and my index finger went numb, a few of us headed back to our cars and decided to migrate even farther south.

Not much farther, we just went the four miles into the town of Wabasha, near the National Eagle Center. Hoping to get to a narrower spot in the river and get us closer to the eagles.

We saw a few more here

Nearly 100 bald eagles live in the town of Wabasha and can be seen year round.

All adult eagles (both males and females) have white heads and white tales, that they get in their fourth or fifth year of life. read more

It began to snow on us and after over 200 pictures we figured we'd had enough eagle time.

So me and two others walked back into the little town and decided to stop and get some coffee at a little cafe.

We had a nice chat and warmed up. Then we headed our separate directions. I had a 2 hour drive ahead of me so I moseyed on out of Wabasha. I kept my eye to the east looking for birds in the trees and happened upon a few flying near a pull off area, right near where we stopped in Reads Landing.

There he was on the west side of the river just perched up in a tree.

I got closer and closer, I was actually hoping he'd fly away so I could get some close shots of one flying.

But he just sat there, posing for me :-)

Warm Wishes!