I drove by this poor, misguided witch on several occasions on my way to San Jose and thought she would make the perfect photo to share for Halloween, so one afternoon, on the way home, I stopped and captured her plight in pixels.
This red barn is on the same road as the witch. I've had my eye on it for awhile also. With the bright blue sky in the background, this seemed like the perfect day to photograph it.
Which photo do you like better?
Are you wondering how I got these photos?
Please! That would not have been safe.
Early Wednesday morning I took a drive to check out the damage. The water at most of the flooded intersections had substantially subsided. The ground was so dry before the storm that the water soaked in quickly, but anyone could tell that a major storm had passed through. Downtown merchants still had a huge clean-up job.
I love the rain.
As I was lying on the ground among the leaves and vines,
I set out to find and photograph wine grapes. This is a bit late in the season and most of the vineyards have already been harvested. Fortunately, Clos Le Chance Winery, which is only a few miles from my house, had a couple of varieties still on the vines, and I found one vineyard that was not surrounded by a fence.
The grapes were plentiful.
The sun was very bright and caused a lot of bright spots and shadows. I used a diffuser to even out the light, sometimes stretching away from the camera with the diffuser held up in one hand and the cable release in the other. 
I parked right next to the vines,
and could change the lens as I needed.
The day was so pretty, I hated to leave.
I'll come back when the leaves have turned red and gold.
My aunt no longer lives on the farm we visited as children.
Pretty, isn't it?
This is the view off my aunt's back porch.
Doniphan County has its own water tower.
It's fall and the harvest has started. The main crop around Troy is corn, which will be used to produce corn products (like Fritos), feed for livestock, and bio-fuel. I walked into this corn field and thought,
This year has produced a bumper crop and farmers will be putting in long hours of harvesting right up to Thanksgiving. The harvesting is done on a combine, a HUGE machine that cuts the stalks, plucks the cobs, shucks the husks, and isolates the kernels,
which are then transferred to a HUGE trailer
From the trailer, the corn is transferred to a container on a semi-truck, driven to storage bins, and using a conveyor like escalator, dumped in. Farming is BIG business. Did I mention that everything is HUGE? Last year I climbed about one third of the way up this tower. I'd like to get all the way to the top. Maybe next year. 
Most of my childhood days in Kansas were in the summer when it is hot and humid. (I am so glad my father found California.) But the weather on this trip, just at the start of fall, was perfect. I saw skies like this every day. 
A view of the resort
A place for morning breakfast & tea
After arriving and checking in, I relaxed in the
and watched the sun set.
On Monday I drove all the way around the lake looking for scenic vistas, checking out places that had been recommended, and deciding where I wanted to return and spend more time.
On Tuesday I returned to Sand Harbor,
The beaches are pretty deserted after Labor Day,
On Wednesday, I drove to Tahoe City on the west side of the Lake, had lunch, and took an afternoon scenic cruise to Emerald Bay. The weather was warm, the water calm, the sky blue.
On Thursday I was tired of driving and photographing, so I spent the day at the resort, walking the beach, wading in the clear water, reading, and enjoying the warm sun & cool breeze.
I was suppose to float over the lake in a hot air balloon on Friday, but the launch was canceled due to high winds. Total Bummer. I was already packed to leave Kings Beach, so I left and drove home. Most of my previous visits to Tahoe had been in the winter for skiing. This was the first time I spent any time there in the summer.
Every month I try to photograph the full Moon. As the date approaches, I scout around for a suitable landscape and note exactly where the moon will first appear. A full Moon rises within minutes of sunset. This is not good for photography because by the time the Moon clears the hills, the sky is too dark and the Moon is too bright. But on the evening before the full Moon, the moonrise is thirty minutes before sunset. This is perfect. There is still enough light to capture detail in the landscape and the sky turns a magical blue.
I took these photos while standing in one of Guglielmo's vineyards off Main. I used a 400m lens on a Nikon D300 camera. In Elements and LightRoom, I did a some sharpening and color correction, but other than that, this is how it looked.
Maybe I'm a lunatic,
