I find this fitting…

So I saw a post from Oleg today and I saw the post before I saw his email. Considering I saw the image before anything else I had to do a double take for a second. bro_I594_5034web

Joe has some comments on it. I largely agree. Rights are rights, they are natural. However in the grand scheme we all did lose something because of 594. It makes education, competition, hunting, and recreational shooting all perilously difficult. It isn’t a joke or off the wall either, these fears are being confirmed. It has chilled the rights to the point where we have lost parts of them for fear of exercising them.

So why do I find this fitting… Well my expression nails the statement above oh so well. Most significantly is that rifle in my hands. That is my baby. If you don’t understand, go read it will make sense. It ties me to how I entered the frey.

Thanks for the pic Oleg!

What a View

Last weekend on our way home from Spokane the wife and I stopped by Steptoe Butte on the way back home.  I took hundreds of pictures for panoramic as well as pictures for use in calendars etc.

It’s going to take some time but eventually I’ll get them all done.  In the mean time here’s the one panoramic I’ve done as well as some of the other solo pics.

This is only a thumbnail of about half the panoramic.

Greening Hills

Spring Dusting

Begging for a caption…

Was browsing through raw images to play with in Photoshop and came across this picture of Snowflake… It’s begging for a caption, let’s hear them!

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I would like to remind everyone this is free for non-commercial use.  AKA, if you post some place else it in an effort to make money off of it, you need to contact me and send some scratch my way.  I won’t say no, but like most working American’s, I don’t like people coming in and stealing my stuff.  Those who do that I feel are no better than the occupy hippies!

In Which I Become A Professional Photographer

So I recently got a check in the mail from a company, that shall remain nameless, for services rendered.

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You see, said company has a company calendar that is sent to customers and given to employees.  Well they needed pictures to use with the calendar and they selected two I took in 2011 for inclusion in the calendar.  Evidently they needed more winter photographs.

Cold Winter Day

Ice Tranquility

I really was hoping they wanted to use this one though:

Lone Prints

The prints across the field are Joe‘s, he was at the Taj as this picture was taken.  Who cares, I’m getting paid cash money for snapping a picture, that’s AWESOME!  Now to master the art of using Photoshop.

Yet Another Person Exposing Secrets

*Updated* For some reason it embedded the wrong video.
Remember folks, this is all fake.  Washington looks nothing like this and all the animals you see are in the zoo.  You do not need to come to Washington to see this, you will be totally disappointed.

All you have to remember is it is cloudy in those “beautiful areas” 226 days out of the year.  Remember, that gloomy weather is linked to depression.  So if you do come, please just visit, we’ve already got an influx from California we’re dealing with.

That’s not fog…

So lately around fort freedom the environment has been less hospital than usual.  So first, here’s a view I regularly see on my drive home:

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Lately however the view has been quite different.

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Since the picture off Google maps isn’t that great, here’s another set from in front of my house:

Cold Winter Day

That’s from winter 2010, here’s what it was when I got home Friday:

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Here’s the thing though folks.  That isn’t fog, it isn’t overcast, it’s smoke, and it smells like I’m sitting next to a BBQ smoker.  Seriously I went to CD’s Smoke pit Saturday for a Bacon Explosion Breakfast and there was no difference in smell there or when I got home. 

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I love that smell but it does get tiring.

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Above is a snippet of an image via NASA, what you see is a fire hose of smoke pointed in my direction.  You can just make out the Idaho Washington border, find where the border meets the Snake River (where the border starts following the river) and that is just south of my AO.

Day to day the smoke varies too.  Here’s what it was like driving home from Moscow Saturday.

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What I should have seen:

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We need rain out here in the Pacific North West.  We need it bad.  Currently a lot of the regular stomping grounds for hunting will probably be shutdown specifically because of the fire danger.

I Hate It When People Post Stuff Like This….

It lets everyone else in on the secret, then more of those monkey’s from back east keep move out here.  Do as Ry said and play it full screen. (If you’re using RSS, click through to this post or to the video itself on Vimeo, you need it in HD. The RSS strips that.)

And for those of you out of the area, it’s a giant scam, it looks nothing like that, it’s all Photoshopped, and you do not need to come out here and verify my statement as being true or false. 😀

Purely Pacific Northwest from John Eklund on Vimeo.

I highly recommend clicking over and reading his description of the project.

h/t to Ry.