Our last partial day in Wisconsin was also the first “official” day of Winter.

Before we left, we went, with our daughter, son-in-law and grandkids, to the Adolph C. and Eugenie Mayer Bolz Conservatory, which is in the Orbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison.

It was a really interesting place and I’ll be posting more of the photos that I took there on my photo blog over time.

I posted all of the photos from the Conservatory on Flickr yesterday. Shortly after I posted, I received an invitation to add the photo on the right to a group called First Day of Winter 2007, which, of course, I did. As of right now, there are 187 pictures from many different countries around the world.

The conservatory is an interesting place to visit. Of course, I was trying to get good photos and the light is kind of tricky sometimes inside. It was a cloudy, foggy kind of day, which meant that it was darker than normal inside and I was trying to shoot without using flash. I was successful at getting a few good images, though I think I may have resorted to flash on some of them.

Of course, concentrating on the photos, I was lagging behind everyone else. Karen and our daughter talked about the weather and the suggestion was made that we leave early to avoid the storm predicted for the next day, which I had thought a little bit about, and we ended up doing: see We got FED UP and LEFT Wisconsin EARLY!

Canoing On Lake Bailey (not us!)

We got to Petit Jean State Park, which is south of Morrilton, Arkansas, yesterday afternoon. It’s not a very long drive from where we live, so it didn’t take long to get here. We’ll be here one more night and head back home after lunch.

One of the things I wanted to do this weekend was to see if I could do a travel journal and process photos on a near daily basis. The last thing I did last night before going to bed was post a travel journal article to Haw Creek Out ‘n About. I had posted some images to flikr earlier. It looks like it’ll be a successful process. I’ll just need to keep on top of it on our longer trips.

I also posted some of the images to my photo blog for the weekly Photo Hunt. The topic is I love ____ (participants fill in the blank, so it’s kind of an open category week.) For more Photo Hunt submissions see the Technorati photo hunt tag page.

I’ve been a bit behind on my photo blog. My intent is to have picture for each day, not to necessarily post a new image each day. That’s kind of a picky point, but to meet the intent, if I get behind, I’ll be posting the missing images to catch up. A better way to do if I can’t post each day would be to post in advance. That way, I won’t be behind.

We’ll be going on a hike or two today and I’ll be taking more photos, some of which I hope to post this evening.

Day before yesterday, we went to Woolly Hollow State Park, which is north of Conway, Arkansas, for a hike.

We had never been there before and my intent was to use the visit as the focus for a new approach to presenting travel related images and information on-line. I didn’t have a firm concept of what I wanted it to be at that point. I just knew that I needed something different. What I had just wasn’t working.

My old approach was to have a web page for each place that we had visited, with a few photos on it, and another page set up as a photo gallery index with each photo having it’s own web page and site navigation. Every one of the pages had advertising on it, of course. Though I had built some templates to streamline the process, it was still quite a bit of work. For the Woolly Hollow material there would have been a content page, a photo gallery index page, and 24 photo pages.

With the new approach, there is only one page. Space for content, photo gallery, and advertising is provided, with links to the individual images on flikr and a link to the flikr slide show for the “set” of photos. Over the last couple of days, I edited the photos that I wanted to use for the Woolly Hollow page and uploaded them to flikr and developed a new web layout I’m calling “Places and Images.”

With this, I should be able to publish new material a lot sooner after I’ve shot the images for whatever location we’ve visited. Of course, I’ve lot a pretty good backlog of material from places we visited this year, but this new approach should also be very, very helpful for that.

My whole concept for this is to publish “photos from places we’ve visited combined with relevant information and links.”

Now to catch up on some other stuff that have been neglected over the last several days……

We’ve been back home for 4 weeks now and I still haven’t gotten around to dealing with all of the photos that I took and finishing my incomplete travel journal. I’ve taken a step back, looked at what I’ve got, and developed a plan — of sorts.

The first thing that I’ve done is lay out the route of our travels on a map.

The next part of this will be to tackle the trip in small bites. For instance, the first part will be the trip from home to Spring Lake Campground outside Halstead, Kansas, with the pictures that I took along the way and in Kansas.

For each part of the trip I’ll publish a travel article on my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog as well as build a photo gallery on Haw Creek Outdoors.

I’m going to treat this as a project. My hope is that once I’m done with it, I’ll have a model that I can use for future trips — and that I’ll be able to use it while traveling so that it’ll fairly current.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time assembling and publishing historical articles related to Yellowstone National Park. It’s interesting to read first hand accounts of a place I’ve been to quite a few times and will likely visit several times again in the future.

I had heard — or read — anecdotal stories about people cooking fish in some of the hot springs in the park. Today, I came across the following account from the first expedition into the Yellowstone region, the Washburn Expedition of 1870:

Several springs were in the solid rock, within a few feet of the lake-shore. Some of them extended far out underneath the lake; with which, however, they had no connection. The lake water was quite cold, and that of these springs exceedingly hot. They were remarkably clear, and the eye could penetrate a hundred feet into their depths, which to the human vision appeared bottomless. A gentleman was fishing from one of the narrow isthmuses, or shelves of rock, which divided one of these hot springs from the lake, when, in swinging a trout ashore, it accidentally got off the hook and fell into the spring. For a moment it darted about with wonderful rapidity, as if seeking an outlet. Then it came to the top, dead, and literally boiled. It died within a minute of the time it fell into the spring.

The Washburn Yellowstone Expedition, No. 2 by Walter Trumbull; Overland Monthly; June 1871

The hike to the bottom of the Tower Creek canyon and the base of Tower Falls in Yellowstone National Park has always been one of our favorite hikes. It’s been a fascinating place for people to visit for many, many years. It was named by the Washburn Yellowstone Expedition in August 1870 and Nathaniel P. Langford described it in The Wonders of the Yellowstone. (I’ve published part of that description at Haw Creek Out n’ About.)

Unfortunately, this year, we were not able to make it to the base of the falls. We had gone most of the way down when we came to a sign that said that the trail was closed. Apparently there had been a slide in 2006 or before and the trail was blocked. We were a little upset about hiking all of that distance only to find that the trail was closed. There should have been a sign at the top saying that it was closed or the trail should have been closed higher up. There are a lot of people who have used the trail over the years and many probably remember it fondly — though climbing back up can be rough, especially if it’s hot, you didn’t bring water, and you’re wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

I send a complaint to the park service about the lack of posting higher up, but, of course, there’s been no response.

That was just part of a day that didn’t go the way we intended which I posted about in Today sure didn’t go as planned, and I didn’t get some of the photos I thought I had — but that’s okay!

I had always assumed the Old Faithful got it’s name because it was faithful in it’s eruptions over a long period of time. Not so. If you’re interested, I’ve published a small narrative by one of the men involved in naming the geyser. It’s over at my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog.

I was going through some of the photos of the trip and came across this. It was taken a couple of weeks ago at Canyonlands National Park.

One of the things I really like about my digital camera is the ability to shoot multiple pictures rapidly. I sometimes use this capability to “paint” or “sweep” a composite image. I sweep from side to side and up and down, capturing as many as 20 or 30 images in a short period of time, which I can later assemble using Autostitch.

This photo was a bit of serendipity. I’ve had a few composite “sweeps” where there was something or someone moving. Sometimes this results in a person or thing being stitched out of the image. Sometimes, there will be a ghost image. On my first attempt with the green VW, I ended up with this image.

To get the final result, I cropped each of the original images so that the background behind the car was unique in each cropped image. Thus, when the four images were merged, the portion of the image where the car didn’t get blended into a common background.

A larger version of the image is scheduled to be published on my photo blog on October 21st

I took this photo on May 12th in the Clinton Library in Little Rock. With the light background, it appeared that all I had of the fellow I was taking a picture of was a silhouette.

I was taking photos and so was this gentleman, except that I noticed that he was using film. After every shot, he would roll the film to the next position. Wit the number of photos that I’ve taken over the last several month, I certainly do not miss that — or changing the film out when I get to the end of a roll — or the expenses of the film and getting it developed.

It’s taking a bit of trial and error practice, but I am learning to be more effective with my digital image editing software. Without a darkroom, there’s no way that I could have salvaged the above picture other than as a silhouette. However, with with the software, I was able to obtain this image — without losing any of the background. That is just so cool!