Five More Miles

Yesterday, I rode 25 miles, slowly, because these days I'm slow.

Today, I rode 30 miles, also slowly.

I feel those extra five miles a lot right now.  It doesn't seem like I should, right?  An extra 25 minutes or so?

On the other hand, it's also an additional 20% over what I rode the previous day, so I guess that makes sense.

And that's how things are around here.  I'm reading and working on classes and a student's thesis.  I'm gardening and weed whacking.  I'm biking a bit.  And I'm hanging out with friends, which is probably the very best part of summer.

On my ride today, I saw a Sandhill Crane, a number of Eastern Kingbirds, and, I'm pretty sure, my first Ruffed Grouse.  It was standing along the road on a curve, near some woods, and barely bothered to look at me when I rode by maybe five feet away.

I've also taken a few photographs.  I have a friend from college who takes fantastic photos.  Then he uses photoshop on them to enhance colors and such.  But often, they look unreal somehow.  Not in the, hey, I made it black and white way, but in a really weird way.  And then, of course, I wanted to try some of that.  So I did.


Here are some pictures after a storm passed the other day.

Unretouched.  I was trying to get at the way the sun comes through, near the upper right.

And this one is made black and white.
 




Unretouched
 

Cooked by photoshop's automatic fixer
 

So, the move to black and white seems fine.  The sky was really orangy, as it is at sunset sometimes, and the black and white makes it a bit dramatic, but not weird.

 

But the other one looks too, I don't know.  It's interesting how it picked up the contrast so that you can see through the tree a lot more clearly than you can in the original.  But the sky looks way more pink than it did.  The cloud looks way less ominous and dark than it really was.

 

Clearly, I need to play with more pictures!