Long time - no pics.

[sister_luck]

Today I took the first pictures of 2009. I've been missing that, but with being stuck in the house most of the time, there wasn't much opportunity for my hobby especially as still life photography isn't really my forte. Today's attempts turned out pretty dismal.

But I discovered the last batch of 2008 pictures on my camera and here are two that I took on Christmas Day in Smalltown on a walk with my family:








A related question for you: Photobucket keeps annoying me, any idea where I should move my pics? Flickr seems a lot less cluttered.

Comments

[comava.livejournal.com]

It's nice to see pictures again! Strange how familiar these two look, it looks like landscapes here.. except much less gray than it is at the moment!

I found Flickr pretty unpractical because the upload space is limited and you can't easily link to your pictures nor have them full-sized. But it's been awhile since I stopped using it so maybe they've changed things since then.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

It's still greyish-white here, but I can spot some blue sky peeking through the cloud cover and - most importantly - the rain has stopped.

As to the picture storage space: Funnily enough, I got a survey by email yesterday from photobucket asking me what they can do to improve my customer satisfaction. I haven't done it yet.

[lijability.livejournal.com]

Ok... I'm going to ask you what kind of trees most of those are. 'Cause they don't look much like any tree here, unless they might be what we call an "ash."

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Good question. The angle of the picture makes them look different, I suppose, but I think these are run-of-the-mill 100-year-old beech trees. But I can't be sure - what with the bareness of them. I'll ask my parents or have a look myself next time I'm there.

[lijability.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... they have the end-limbs of our beech trees but they don't exactly look like our beech trees we have here. They look more 'spindly.' We have two beech trees in the side/backyard and the are sorta stocky, robust trees.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

The red beech trees are stocky here, too, but the others (sylvatica I believe) can grow very tall: without leaves (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fagus_sylvatica_003.jpg) or with leaves (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beechforest062005.jpg).

[lijability.livejournal.com]

Ahh... I forget that Europe has several species of Beech. We just have the one, American Beech - Fagus grandifolia. This bonsai (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Beech,_1979-2007.jpg) even reminds me of the trees in our back yard.

We don't have many forests which are reproducing beech trees around here any more. The head forester from Purdue University told me a few years ago that the woods on my mother's farm (about 170 acres) is one of the few in the state of Indiana that is producing young beech trees naturally. We have a forest in the southern part of our county called the Beech Hills but even that is not reproducing many beech now. Probably because the 3 or 4 people who owned the land in the Beech hills subdivided it and sold it off to people who started building houses down there. People can ruin a good thing sometimes; the Beech Hills were good mushrooming grounds too.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

We've got lots of beech trees in our forests here, but they're mostly cultivated forests anyway, so all trees form straight lines. (Which made me totally angry when I watched Gladiator because back then our forests of course didn't look like that.)

But I've been wrong with the terminology - we call sylvatica red beech (Rotbuche) because of its slightly reddish wood. What I meant when I was talking about red beeches are actually sylvatica f. purpurea and they're usually called Blutbuche, i.e. blood beech.