Coming home to roost

A number of chickens are coming home to roost for me, as the saying goes. All the vague promises and less vague show commitments of various sorts, made months ago when it seemed there was all the time in the world, are now getting a bit demanding in their need for my time and attention. As a result of the ever closer impending deadlines, I've been spending some time rooting through my photo files to generate some new images for my upcoming shows and displays. Since I have a vast assortment of file folders, most with large numbers of sub-folders, and all containing a *lot* of shots, this is a considerable task. These are mostly on the old computer which is slow and tedious to work with, and also none have keywords to make my search process easier. I'll take the time to rave about keywords (a concept that has been out there,  just not on my radar until I got the new computer and new Photoshop and actually read some instructions) on another occasion. Short version is keywords help hugely to pull up the subject matter one wants/needs, and I don't have them here so am doing my usual wandering around amongst the collection and getting distracted way too easily.

The first serious commitment that I need a lot of work done for is the Western Art Gallery at the Canadian Finals Rodeo show in Edmonton, the first week in November. It has come to my attention that this isn't that far off, and a five day show needs a fair amount of product. Since this will be my first time out to this show with photos ( I attended it with my stained glass work many years back), I have pretty well no idea how much I should have on hand to last the five days, but am optimistically thinking I'd better have quite a bit. So with this ranch/rodeo venue in mind, I started searching for my working cowboy shots. Somehow (don't ask) I ended up in the chicken part of my birds folder. I have a bit of an obsession with doing chicken photography, as I believe I have mentioned before in this blog. As anyone who has looked at more than a couple of my posts will have noticed, I have a bit of an obsession with a lot of things, at least as far as taking pictures goes. I'm kind of a visual magpie (and of course magpies, crows and ravens are part of the obsession) when it comes to gathering images, and chicken images are no exception to the rule. So before I moved on to the shots I was actually after, I had to take a bit of time to play with a few of my many chicken shots.

From chickens, I moved on to the farrier folder (at least I had worked into the right species here), had a brief fling with some carousel horse shots, then eventually got stuck into the Clearwater ranch and PFRA cattle sorting shots that were my original goal. By this time I was shuffling back and forth between two different computers and systems, since these photos are distributed throughout both computers. No point in having any of this be simple. I should really take the time to figure out how to make my computers speak to each other, but I have a deep and abiding conviction/fear that they won't (Hal here being what he is) and as long as I don't try to make it happen I can still pretend that it's possible.

The other metaphorical chickens coming home to roost are my local daughter and her family, who have been off in England, France and Belgium for the past couple of weeks. They were due to arrive just before six this evening, but missed their connecting flight in Toronto so won't be arriving until later this evening. I've had their younger dog (Arrow) here for the duration, but Margaret's Australian Shepherd, Brodie, doesn't get along with my Mickey so Brodie went to "camp" at Happy Dog Acres for the two weeks. This was a big deal for all of us as Brodie is what could diplomatically be called a "special" dog, if by special you mean a very needy Velcro dog who melts down if he can't keep Margaret in his line of sight at all times. If he's outside and she's at home to be stared at, he runs from window to window to peer in at her if she moves from one room to another, so some anxiety on how he would do in a boarding situation wasn't unreasonable.

I didn't phone to inquire how he was doing in case he had gone over the edge mentally, since there wasn't going to be anything I could do about it, but I was the one delegated to head out there today to pick him up and deliver him to his home. I was happy and mildly astonished to hear that he had done well, behaved nicely, wasn't weird, and all in all was a good boarder. I have no reason to think the young woman working there would lie to me, so I have to believe that this turned out way better than anyone expected. So now Brodie has been restored to his home environment (possibly a better or at least less neurotic dog for the experience), and in a couple of hours Arrow and I will head off to the airport to gather up the rest of the wandering clan.

First shot is one of the cattle sorting ones, featuring Dale Clearwater's working apprentice, Amanda, on her attractive horse. It's been a while since I got to play with Photoshop so I had to mess with most of these shots to a greater or lesser extent.

Shot number two is of my friend Pearl's flock, or part of it, merged with a photo of oak leaves which show through a bit at the top.

Shot three is from my "dust" series of a year back, when we had a very dry summer. This one was at my friend Sharon's place, showing her in silhouette turning the horses out to the pasture, ably assisted by one of her dogs.

Shot four is a grand rooster, which is an older shot that I took at the local zoo a few years back. Strangely, I have almost total recall for where all the chicken photos I have were taken and can generally remember what the lighting and weather conditions were, and who was with me. This is a bit odd given all the important stuff I need to remember that doesn't make any impression on me at all.

Final shot is back at the cattle sorting, showing Dale Clearwater in the midst of the herd. I desaturated the cattle, left some colour in Dale, and enhanced the sky which was pretty blown out in the original shot.

Note for Saskatoon and area readers. I am a juror for the photo competition part of the "Reflections of Nature" wildlife art show at the exhibition grounds this coming weekend, and as such I get to display a few of my own photos, if I understand correctly. So if you are heading out to view the wildlife art, check to see if I have some work on display as well.