The Holmes Lake Calendar – 2022
Now that the pandemic has evolved into an evolutionary biology lesson, with variants cropping up in various places around the world and mutant, as well as competing, wacko treatment ideas also cropping up, and I’m not only fully vaccinated but also boosted, I figured it was okay to go back to Walgreens, masked, of course, and six feet away from the other people, and have the regular calendar pictures printed. So this year instead of the Samathon type 2021 calendar, you get a real one, although because a couple of you appreciated last year’s comments about the monthly photos, you’ll get a narrative accompaniment to the 2022 edition, too.
Trust me, there is a connection between this year’s calendar and the Chagrin Valley Camera Club whose members live generally south of Cleveland, Ohio. My sister Teresa, who lives in the area, is not only a member of that club, she’s also the newsletter editor, and sometime in the past couple of years, she suggested that I join CVCC because at the time it was free and I seemed to take a lot of pictures. So I did. Well, CVCC has a Monday morning critique and review session, with about a dozen or so hard-core photographers, and like an unsuspecting newbie, I dropped in. To make a long story short, these Monday morning folks are good, and sophisticated, but ultimately helpful. Thus I ended up needing to take some pictures, and Holmes Lake seemed like a logical place to use for that purpose, especially because I have a kayak and on calm days in summer and early fall I sometimes go over there, with, of course, a Canon SX700 in tow (not a major disaster if it falls in the water). But then, needing material for those Monday mornings, I started going over there with all the rest of my equipment and trying to actually take nice pictures. Of course when it comes to photographs, “nice” is a relative term. Oh, and Holmes Lake is only about a mile from our house, which makes it a nice lake.
There’s no guarantee that the calendar pics for 2022 are fine art, but they do represent an attempt to show the various faces of an urban park lake in the upper Great Plains. The park surrounding Holmes Lake has a lot of dramatic native vegetation and the lake has a nice population of waterfowl, sometimes a heron, and in the fall, migrating sandpipers. Some of these images were taken from the kayak, but others from the shore, using my other cameras: Nikon P900, Nikon D610, and Nikon Z7-2, and lenses including the Sigma 150-600mm telephoto. My camera purchase history might be of interest, mainly because it’s a study in causality and awareness, or maybe awareness as causality. When I went on that Searcher whale watch trip to the Gulf of California, in 2004, I borrowed a digital camera from the lab. After watching other folks on that boat use their high-end cameras, I bought a Nikon D70 the day I got back from that trip (my version of “high end” at the time). When we went to Africa in 2013, I borrowed a Canon S3 from the lab, and the day we got back from that trip, I bought a Canon SX50. A day or two after we got back from the 2015 trip to Tanzania, I bought a Nikon D610 because it seemed like I needed a full-frame machine. And eventually I bought the Z7-2 because everyone else seemed to be getting mirrorless cameras with high megapixel sensors. As one of the really astute members of CVCC told everyone one day, on the subject of new cameras (he’d just bought a really high end one): “You’ll still take the same pictures you’ve always taken.” He was correct. So you can think of this year’s calendar as a study in technology.
Eleven of these photos were taken in the months in (on?) which they appear; I didn’t have any from April so I picked one from early May. Ten of the photos were taken in 2021; November and December are from 2020.
(See my monthly Facebook posts for the monthly write-ups and pics.)
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