Category: fishing

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Toys for the Holidays

Even the rod tube is a thing of beauty.
Winter’s chill brings ice even on a river.

This post marks the beginning of BlackDogHair’s fifth season blogging from Central Oregon. As always the intent is to post a short, image-filled review of our week, each Sunday morning (best intentions).

Hope you’ll keep coming back to see what happens. If so inclined, you can leave a comment in the space provided. Regardless, thanks for reading!

A narrow channel of the Crooked River remains un-frozen.

The weeks after Christmas in Central Oregon were bitter cold . . . which prevented us from venturing out to play with the toys Santa brought.

A gallery of macro photography

A warming trend moved in a week or so after New Years, so that is when we actually got started on our 2023 adventures. Of course, we headed over to the Crooked River for an initial testing of holiday gifts.

Jack got a new fly rod, the Winston five weight that has been on his wish list since … forever. While no fish were caught, there was noted improvement in his casting.

Assembling a new rod.

JQ has been playing with macro photography for a couple of years now, using an adaptor on her iPhone. That small chunk of glass was replaced with a lens dedicated to the art of close up photography. Armed with this new optical marvel,  you’ll be seeing a lot more of nature’s tiny wonders on this blog.

And with that we begin the journey . . .

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Thoughts from Quarantine

 

Deadly spikes in Covid19 cases have placed many counties in Oregon on a “stay at home” list.

So this week we didn’t do much exploring … unless you count our Kindle Unlimited reading lists.

There are bookcases in our home stuffed with traditional print books.

However, our current reading platform of choice is a 3 ½ by 5 inch screen in a ½ inch thick case.

The e-Reader in our case, a Kindle Paperwhite, can be filled and refilled. We have yet to reach its capacity with stories of adventure, mystery, sci fi and fantasy.

If you read genre fiction of any kind, a Kindle Unlimited membership is critical in these pandemic times.

There are hundreds of titles to choose from. They are quickly transferred to the e-reader for transport to riverside camp or just from bedroom to living room.

The beauty of a Kindle Unlimited membership is how easy it is to explore a wide variety of authors and story types.

You can purchase, often at reduced price, those titles you like to re-read. In many cases, there are how-to books loaded on the reader.

It will also store PDF manuals for software, and hardware we are working with.

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Looking through a new lens

 

This week, unlike the last few, was filled with ‘doing’. The air quality improved and the sun was out.

We took day trips three different days.

Hit the Crooked River on a perfect fall day … caught no fish but had a great picnic.

 

We love areas like this … that said, we never travel unprepared, even on short trips.

The other two days we headed east toward Fort Rock and the high desert.

Came across a few road obstacles … nothing we couldn’t manage.

If you’ve spent any time on this blog it’s clear we are iPhone photographers. We subscribe to the adage ‘the best camera is the one you have in hand’.

However, the types of images we are attempting to capture require telephoto lenses that just aren’t available on an iPhone.

This week we took delivery on a new Sony camera and lenses. Similar to the system we rented in June and posted about in issue #38 on birding.

Storm front moving across the Summer Lake Wildlife Area.

Of course Summer Lake was one of the places we headed for. Unfortunately it’s hunting season and there was some obvious restrictions on where you can go if you’re shooting but not ‘killing’.

 

We stuck to the western edge, Anna Reservoir area of the refuge, and managed to get a ton of really great weather shots.

The Summer Lake valley presents lots of image possibilities … rain clouds, sunny sky and thunder heads simply by turning around.

 

There will still be iPhone pictures in the blog but this new system is going to bring a new level of photos, hope you enjoy.

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Summer Gear Up

We had some grand plans for summer gear options and then Covid wrenched the works. So now it seems like a good idea would be to share a list of “gear” we discovered during lockdown.

Hand sanitizer should be at the top of this list. This stuff has been as rare as hen’s teeth in most stores since March.

There are a number of online recipes to make your own, but even the basic ingredients for this DIY project are difficult to find, well except for vodka.

More recently the stuff is showing up in stores again, but in using this stuff we’ve found that spray is far better than that gelatinous goo we’re used to. The other aspect of the ‘sanitizing’ process is boxes, countertops and general grocery wipe down. for this we are using bleach based sprays.

Masks, perhaps the hottest fashion accessory of 2020, have gone through a  number of iterations over the past few months. What was nearly impossible to find in March, has become standard crowd-funded projects and Target checkout counter fare.

We’ve moved through a couple of versions, starting with no-sew cotton t-shirt squares, a Buff, and the classic bandana. These were soon upgraded to basic black sewn cotton, then evolved into our current shaped silicon with replaceable filter. It seems that the face mask is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, so I’m sure that this collection will be expanded yet again.

The quarantine has made us better food shoppers. Infrequent trips to a grocery store mean you need to devise methods to make what you find last longer.

The tool proving most useful in this process is the “food saver.” Breaking down quantities of any purchase into meal sized portions and then freezing them has made a big difference in getting the most out of our groceries.

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Story and picture

It wasn’t that long ago you needed to carry a camera if you wanted pictures. Of course, this was not always conducive to the spontaneous capture of life’s simple events … all possible with phone and app.

This blog has always been an excuse to post pictures the way we want them to be seen. To that end, we’ve pushed the limits of our iPhone cameras.

Simple lenses offer a fraction of the image detail,  but it does get a boost from some very clever software and offers some pretty good pictures.

 

We enjoy exploring remote landscapes, so naturally wildlife photography is one of our interests.  iPhones, unfortunately, are not great tools for this type of image taking.

We’re not advocating abandonment of smart phones, it’s just time to up our game a bit.

This week we spent nearly every day working with a Sony mirrorless system and super telephoto lens. There were some successes and plenty of learning opportunities.

Kudos to Jack for getting this beautiful shot of an American White Pelican!

We made good use of the rental. By the end of the week we had completed 9 separate shoots and taken nearly 10,000 images. It was a great experience … and we are hooked!