Sunday Drive

After having worked so much the last little while and this past week in particular, I took Sunday off.  The girls were busy with a bunch of stuff of their own so I set out on an afternoon drive.  It has been a long time since I did any photography.  The last time I exposed a sheet of film was in early June, when Margarit and I met up with Chris and Connie in Viking.  I'm rusty and out of practice, not only with the equipment but also with my eye for seeing compositions.

I slept in on Sunday, and then set out around lunch time.  As has been my routine in the past, I traveled east of the city, through Elk Island National Park, and up into Lamont County.  My first stop was along Limestone Creek and a set up to photograph an old abandoned house.  It was nothing spectacular, just a chance to get back into practice.

I was standing on the side of the road, with my camera on the tripod.  I was fiddling around with a couple of filters... a red one for contrast, and a graduated filter to try and hold down the sky.  Suddenly there was a distant hum that quickly became louder and louder.  I found myself swarmed by thousands of honey bees.  They weren't aggressive, and weren't attempting to even land on me, but there were literally thousands of them flying around me and my truck and the hum in the air was very loud.  Eventually they moved on and congregated around a clump of willows that were a short distance up the road.  I didn't want to aggravate them so I left them alone but perhaps they had a hive somewhere nearby.  I attempted to get a couple photographs of the swarm with my digital camera but what I got didn't really do justice to the spectacle I had just witnessed.

I spent the rest of the afternoon driving around the county and made several stops at various other abandoned buildings.  I did a total of five setups with my big camera and exposed about a dozen sheets of film.  It was very refreshing to put work out of my mind and focus, no pun intended, on something completely different.  Hopefully the situation at work will continue to be resolved and I can find a little more time for myself.
As I headed back into the city in the early evening there was a big thunderstorm developing in the west.  Lots of lightning, and the storm from was pretty impressive, but fortunately it didn't amount to anything more than heavy rain.  I tried to take a snapshot out the front windshield of the truck as I was driving but it really doesn't do it justice.