Took this photo last week. Still no snow to speak of. Looks more like Fall than Winter!

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“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know but it felt as if something that grew in the ground — asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”
—The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

I thought this bare tree/vine with the twisting limbs reaching out in every direction looked sort of like a giant spider hanging on this brick wall!

Also as this is my first post of 2011 I want to wish you all a great New Year!!

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I tried several processing ideas but finally I decided I liked this sepia toned processing the best. I think the aged looked works for this. Maybe I will post the color version later to compare it to this one.

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Lots of exciting developments in the owl family! First of all the first baby owl has left its hole and is now in another tree! The parents still seem to take care of it and it cant really fly yet.  I will post a photo of him later in the week. This is the second owl baby. I took this photo yesterday afternoon with my Tamron 70-300 lens combined with my Tamron 1.4x TC.  As you can see he is getting big!  Soon after this photo he left the hole as well and is now high up in this tree on the branches! He often stretches and flaps his wings to practice flying. And I thought that was all of them but nope soon I saw a third baby owl head in the hole! So there is still another baby owl in there.  I also got some great shots of the mother owl.  I will post one of her this week too! So this is Owl week on Fotoblography.com!

I caught this Black Capped Chickadee making himself look nice for the other Chickadees!

Here is another photo from the ice storm that we had last week.

Here is another of the large trees at Salem Willows park in Salem, MA. I thought the roots to this huge tree looked almost like feet. Who knows maybe its Treebeard from the “Lord of the Rings”!

I went to Salem Willows Park in Salem, MA yesterday and in the park they have a good number of very large, very old trees. Here is a shot looking up one of them.

I took this photo from that same overlook that I took the photo of the Castle in the Clouds that I posted earlier in the week.

There is something a bit sad to me about seeing a dead tree that is surrounded on all sides by a sea of life.

While hiking last fall I came upon some wild apple trees in the woods. Someone had put this apple on the tree like this and I found it interesting. It almost looked like the tree was holding the apple and offering it to passer byers. I decided to only leave the apple in color since I wanted that to be the focus of the photo.

As promised here is another shot I took today with my new lens the Tamron 70-300 Di LD Macro. I barely saw this little squirrel in the tree he blended in so well with it. He looks pretty comfortable laying on that branch. I am pretty happy with this lens so far it. The lens was at the full 300mm and the image is still very sharp. I could never have gotten in this close with my old lenses. You can see some minor purple fringing on the small twig in front of the squirrel but that is something I knew this lens sometimes has trouble with when I purchased it. I took a whole bunch more photos today with my Tamron lens. I will be posting some of them tomorrow along with my mini review of the Tamron 70-300!

This tree was alone and above all the others overlooking Lake Winnipesaukee. I really like how the black and white conversion came out on this one.