~~~~July Photo Contest Comment Thread~~~~

[Itchinjim]

Please post your comments on July's photo contest here:

[alfredo]

1. Thanks for putting this together.

[Mira]

2. JeffR and Robb -- now I know why I was unsure about posting my dog.

Robb - that is a glorious photo of a gorgeous animal and some of the best snow in a color photo I have ever seen.

And JeffR - this is the dog that is growing up from "Leash-Free" I bet. That photo, in my early days around here, made me so happy, and I was glad it won something, maybe even second place ??

Glad to see him again having fun in the snow, looking so trustingly and curiously happy.

[Robb]

12. Thanks Mira!

...But I have to say I'm in love with your "skwurl." It's just a great-looking, interestingly composed shot. :)

[Mira]

13. Well, I'll be ! This might be my first ever comment by you. Thanks Robb.

I have really studied your dog and the snow. Simply beautiful.

[Robb]

15. Well, I'm a man of few (useful) words.

Love that shot tho'. Nice work! :hi:

[Mira]

16. Just for that, do you want me to make you a bumpersticker like your

sig line? that's what I do, you know. And it cracks me up.

[Robb]

17. LOL Very kind

...but I can't remember where I ripped it off. :D

[Mira]

3. Gotta comment once more before I put DU to rest for a while..

These are coming in to be as interesting as I had suspected. Hope it continues in that vein.
I have favorites mounting up, and Hippywife:
WTF - that is awesome. It should win for utter curiosity sake and making a great catch of a shot, and then it's really fascinatingly beautiful as well.
I'm laughing, AND i'm tickled.

Is this your first entry, or am I just uninformed?

[hippywife]

4. LOL! That turtle has been with us now for

a couple of years. It comes over from the west side of the driveway once or twice a day to pilfer a piece of dog food. If the bowl is empty, I come in the house and get it one. One time it was stuck in the bowl and I had to remove it so it could go on its merry way. I wonder if I should use this one instead?



I almost entered this one. This is a new batch of babies we had just brought home and they were looking around their new home before venturing out.



I did enter one from our garden from last year.

Glad you enjoyed it. :hi:

[Mira]

5. You are making my evening, I'm laughing so. Actually I think the photo

inside the feeding dish is even more hysterical, so I can't advise you.
I myself wish I had cropped my photo a little differently, or maybe it was the wrong one to enter....it's all for fun, and a crap shoot, I learned to decide, post it, and let it be.
But I think in all the times we might post photos of little friends in our environs, yours takes the cake in frivolity.

And that is true for either shot.

Love the chicks, they are adorable.
We used to have them, in my childhood home.
But they are not "special" like your thief visitor.

[hippywife]

6. I think the one you entered is perfect.

I like the way the squirrel's tail is curled the opposite direction of the crest on the "bird" feeder.

I think I'll stick with the one I posted. It's a better photograph than the one in the bowl, I think.

Glad I could give you a laugh before bedtime. :hug:

[alfredo]

7. I'm glad she picked that one.

[Tindalos]

8. I like the one you entered

The title is perfect too. The turtle looks like he/she is trying to sneak off with the loot.

[hippywife]

19. Thanx, Tin.

No sneakin' necessary. The dog just stands there and watches her/him. When we had our younger lab, she would just run circles around it barking as if to say "Hey! Drop that!" :rofl:

[hippywife]

20. Wow!

I just went over to see if there are any more entries and saw your blue jay feather. That is a really gorgeous photo! I love the way the blue carries down into the gravel. Great catch! :hi:

[Tindalos]

33. Thanks, hippywife

I was worried it was too abstract and "artsy-fartsy". Then I saw the other entries and realized I had no hope of winning (not that I ever had delusions of that). So, I entered the one I liked and hoped someone else liked it too. :hi:

[Mira]

35. Message to Itchinjim...

I'm happy to see you do such a calm and unrattled job of running the contest, much in contrast to the last person to do so (myself) when I sweated my insecurities all over the place.

Now that this filled up in less than 24 hours, you have all the time in the world to prepare the 3 preliminary threads, and I will not have to spring for a case of champagne, though, if you run, I will still vote for you for President.

May I ask you to replace my entry with the same photo, cropped a bit differently?
I don't know what I was thinking with the other crop.
Let me thank you in advance and post it here

[Tindalos]

36. I'm not Itchinjim, but

the submissions thread isn't locked yet, so you could still post there. Or you could pm him to be certain.

[dixiegrrrrl]

37. Very nice photo, Mira.

Lots going on it it, I like the repeat of the colors, and the "tail" of the metal vs. squirrel.
Hard to catch squirrels being still, too.

[hippywife]

43. That's great, Mira.

Have you Pm'd Itchinjim?

I still love this squirrel, cropped properly or not. :rofl:

[Mira]

44. I did, last night. Will see if he got it. Thanks for the reminder

and you can't like my photo any more than I like yours, it's one of funniest things I have seen in a long time.
Utterly unexpected, I think you will do really well with it in the contest.

[hippywife]

41. Oh...

I'm predicting lots of votes for that blue jay feather. I'm personally not worried about winning...you have to work next month if you win. LOL I think you have the right attitude about posting something you yourself really like. Heck! I was just thrilled to have something that fit the category. :rofl:

I'm sure many people are going to love that feather! :hi:

[Mira]

42. Here's one who loves that feather, and its placement. N/T

[Tindalos]

51. Thanks Mira nt

[Tindalos]

45. Love that smilie

Pish posh! :rofl:


The prevailing advice throughout this contest so far has been "pick the one you like". Sounds good to me too.

[Mz Pip]

9. All wonderful entries

I meandered around my yard today and may have something other than wet lemons or puddles to enter. Gotta work on the cropping.

[Mira]

10. Yeah! It is amazing, isn't it, how the contests and the themes stretch us.

It is proven by your original concerns, then your tentative posts, and now your apparently new photo journey around a yard that you did not know you had.
I love it.
BTW how is your show doing?

[Mz Pip]

11. Thanks!

The show is going well. I sold a print and the show will be up until the end of August. Had a good turn out for the reception. It's good exposure and will motivate me to get moving on the next big thing that is coming up in October.

[Mira]

14. Richard D - that is so intrigueing. It does not look like lake Titicaca, no mountains

are visible. Where are you, and what are you doing there? I'm ever curious, and I like your photo very much, it is vibrant.

[alfredo]

18. His image didn't show on my monitor. I got a Photo Bucket placeholder.

OK, it works in Firefox, but not in Safari 4. Nice image

[hippywife]

21. It really is beautiful.

Makes me want to leave work right this minute and hop a plane. Do you think they will understand? :rofl:

[Richard D]

26. I highly recommend it.

Jobs are overrated. When I turned the big 50, i realized that I could survive for little money and travel a lot. So far so good. Of course I'm single with grown up kids, which is a disadvantage in some ways, but the freedom is nice.

[hippywife]

30. I just read your description.

It does sound so lovely. You're doing what I often thought I would like to do, had I remained single. Enjoy life, friend. :hi:

[Richard D]

25. It's in Iquitos . . .

. . . a city in the northern part of the Peruvian Amazon. The river is the Itaya just a mile or so before it joins the Amazon. My back porch is overlooking that amazing view. Sadly a few blocks away is the heart of the city and 17,000 moto-taxis - three wheel motorcycles with a covered seat in back for two. Often there are 4-5 people crammed in there. The noise level is astounding as the drivers remove their mufflers in a false belief that it will save gas. A few miles away though is jungle, where I like to spend most of my time when I'm here. It's a fascinating and vibrant city and culture here, unique in the world. Any time Iquitos is mentioned in guide books or other media, there is a nearly required phrase that "it's the largest city in the world with no roads attaching it to the rest of the world". Only can get here via boat or by plane.

On edit:

Few more interesting things. The area you see in the picture that is water will in a few weeks be mostly dry land. There are two seasons here, high water and low water. We're at the beginning of low water now. There can be 20-30 feet change in water level over the course of a year. Where I am, the elevation is 360 feet above sea level. It's about 3000 river miles to the Atlantic ocean, so there is only a drop of a foot every 10 miles, yet the Amazon flows between 8-10 miles an hours.

There are more species of fish in the Amazon than in the Atlantic Ocean.

There are many more women born in Iquitos than men. Some people say 7 to 1. No one knows exactly why that is so, but some people believe it's due to the consumption of a jungle fruit called Aguje, which is very high in estrogen like compounds. And no, that's really not why I'm here . . .

Iquitos was a rubber boom town. There was once so much money here that some of the barons sent their laundry to France. The movie Fitzcaraldo is loosely based on a real character who lived here during that time. Many of the older buildings here are covered in very beautiful Portuguese tile, most over a hundred years old. The rubber boom ended almost literally overnight when rubber was synthesized from oil. Many of the inhabitants of Iquitos are left over from being near slave laborers from that time. There was also a large Chinese population here at one time which has mostly mixed in with the native and spanish population. Many people here still retain their facial characteristics.

One of the largest fresh water fish in the world comes from this area. It's called Paiche and it's scales are so thick and tough that they are used as nail files. It's also quite delicious and endangered so is now being grown in numerous aquaculture farms around the city.

I've heard that all of the mosquitoes in the Amazon could fill up the Grand Canyon.

There are so many unique species of plants and animals here. One hectare of virgin jungle - which is getting increasingly rare - has more species of trees on it than there are in North America. An insect that lands on your arm could easily be a species that no one has ever seen before.

Water comes here in two ways, from glacier melt in the Andes and from the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantic water that gets this far east has already fallen and been absorbed by the trees and released into the atmosphere to fall as rain again a few miles east many many times. That's one of the reasons why the clear cutting of the jungle is so bad. It will eventually stop this cycle.

The floating building in front is a hostal. The one further away is the remnant of what was going to be a 7 story tall floating pyramid. It was all framed out when a storm blew it over, totally destroying most of the structure. What is left was only a temporary part of it where it person building it lived.

There is so much more.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

22. Thanks, hummingbird

I don't have a very photogenic backyard, so I was pleasantly surprised to have a hummingbird show up last Thursday. It's not a winner, but it should keep me from embarrassing myself too badly in the contest. Murphy's Law dictates that I'll walk outside in 5 minutes and get a spectacular shot of a hummingbird, too late for the contest. But I was submission #27 or 28, so I thought I'd better get something submitted. Thanks for running the contest, Itchinjim, it looks like it can be something of a hassle.

[Blue_In_AK]

23. DyedInTheWool, can you make your picture bigger? n/t

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

29. I trying to figure out how to do that

I have it on a Flicker account. I'm not sure how I can post the original from my PC to DU. If I take too long, don't worry, keep going! :)

[Tindalos]

32. Can you post the original on Flicker and then repost it here?

I don't think you can post directly from your PC onto DU. You have to host it at another site first. If you need help, just let me know.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

38. Thats what I did.

I have a Flickr account and copied the url from there. I didn't compress the pic or anything when I uploaded it. I'm at a loss.......... :shrug:
Are there other hosting sites I should try?

[Celebration]

39. try Photobucket

Then, post it under your original entry. Photobucket gives you the option of different sizes. You'll want the one with 800 on one side. When you post it, be sure to look at the preview first.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

40. there are different sizes at flickr

I think you uploaded one of the small ones

[Tindalos]

46. I can host it on my site if you want

If you want to send it to me, I can PM my email address to you. Maybe I can figure out how to resize it and post it on my Photobucket account.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

47. I am going to try the Photobucket route

amd see if that works any better. But thanks for the offer! :)

[hippywife]

48. Do you have Irfanview?

http://irfanview.com

:hi:

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

52. HI

Thanks for that. I've saved it to my favorites and will check it out!
John

[Mz Pip]

24. Wow, this filled up fast!

Must be a record!

THere were only a couple of slots open when I logged on this morning, so I made a quick decision and posted something entirely different from what I had previously considered.

Love all the entries. There is such variety. A terrific challenge!

Mz Pip

[hippywife]

28. There are some really great

entries. It will be interesting to see how everyone votes. I think it's going to be very difficult to choose. :hi:

[Celebration]

27. My prediction:

GD is going to LOVE this contest. I know I do. I can feel everyone's emotional attachment to the subject matter. This might get some new folks looking at their own backyards in a different light, and even picking up their cameras and snapping some pics.

[bluedigger]

31. Well, I just looked at all the entrants.

I think this is the strongest field I have ever seen.

[Tindalos]

34. drmeow, that is the most despondant Anna's Hummingbird ever

She looks so sad.

*gives Poor Anna a tiny, delicate hug*

[drmeow]

49. He seems to be our resident

Anna - he sits on a branch next to that feeder most of the day and chases off all the other hummingbirds.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

50. May I also re-submit....retouch