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In August, we visited Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons National Parks. I used the time while hiking as a photograph adventure - wildlife, landscapes, waterfalls, hot springs, geysers and more. To highlight some of these images on our website, I've created a new album that is specifically focused on Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons with some of the best images from our trip. Check back by January as I have a few more that I'd like post at some point.
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| Featured Book
Rock Prints by Greg Epperson I've enjoyed looking through this several times -- amazed at the grace and power of the climbers themselves and the incredible difficulty of the rock faces that they are climbing. |
In addition to the featured book by Greg Epperson, I've completely reworked my book review pages for mountaineering and rock climbing books in order to provide a better way to link to other related books for each review. Check out the new page.
It was the third year of vines in our backyard vineyard. It was an interesting summer; no grapes but good development of the vines and their root systems. There are three primary things that I learned this year:
| Water. There were early reports this year that there was going to be a water shortage in Seattle. I made the decision early on that I was going to sacrifice fruit this year in favor of encouraging development of the vines' root systems. By only watering once or twice in the summer, the vines were forced to send their roots as deep as they could go -- the end result is that the leaves stayed green through the summer indicating that they were getting enough water from somewhere. However, the grape clusters looked like little clumps of raisins which means that they didn't get enough water to be able to ripen. |
| I really need to spend more time doing some pruning and leaf-pulling in June and July. We had a really good set of clusters in the spring and the vines grew vigorously, almost too much so. A little more effort in the vineyard will help ensure that the grapes ripen. Of course, if I had watered more, the grapes would have been plumper. |
| It is essential to get netting up over the vines by the first week in September in order to save some of the grapes from backyard critters. What little fruit had ripened was pretty much gone by the second week. Hard to tell if it was birds, raccoons, or something else. I'll also selectively drop a couple of traps under the vines. |
Lessons learned. I'm looking forward to next year!!!
For the last 18 months, I've been selling the occasional photograph from my website. In the last two months, I've decided to split my photographs into those that I consider to be fine art photographs and those that could be used in stock photography. Consequently, I've posted forty or so photographs on several microstock agencies. After a few months go by, I'll provide an update of whether this is an interesting way to monetize some of the photographs that I've taken over the last 2-3 years. If you're interested in seeing some of this work or are looking for stock photography to purchase, here are the microstock agencies that I've been starting to work with:
| iStockPhoto |
| Shutterstock |
| Dreamstime |
| Fotolia |
| CanStock |
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TheRagens.com is a family website that highlights our family history in addition to wildlife and nature photos, wine tasting notes, favorite book lists, and other interests. We are happy to share this with you and you may pass on this newsletter to friends as long as you don't change the content. If you are receiving this newsletter from a friend, you may sign up to receive it by by email by visiting our registration page. If you wish to be removed from the distribution list, simply reply to this message and replace the words in the subject line with REMOVE. We keep an index of our back issues on our site.
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