We got up by alarm so we'd be ready to go photograph with D. I did my exercises, showered to get rid of the funny-hair feeling from getting it cut yesterday, and had my normal breakfast. There was solid overcast and it was on the dark side. D knocked on the RV around 7:30 because there was a medium-sized bull moose right across the road. By the time I got my boots on, the moose was gone, so I went back to getting ready. J left in the Jeep to go look for the moose and found it around the block. She called me to let me know she had found the moose, and I went in to tell D, then D and I left in his truck to go photograph the moose. On our way to where J had found it, J called me again to let me know that the moose had walked behind a house and into the woods. By the time D and I got there, the moose, and J, were long gone. D and I went back to the house, and J was pulling in too, having gone back a different way than we had gone. J finished up a few things to get ready, then J and I left in the Jeep following D and Tootie in his truck.

J and I pulled through the McDonald's drive-through in Palmer so J could get a breakfast burrito.

We got to the Palmer Visitor Center at 8:45 and started to photograph the flowers in their wonderful gardens. The intermittent light breeze moved the flowers occasionally, so extreme patience was required to photograph in the low light. Lupine are one of my favorite flowers to photograph, and while looking at the flowers that were in bloom, I stumbled across this top-down view that was spectacular! I was fascinated by the alpine sea holly, a flower I don't remember ever seeing before. The shallow depth of field for this image created an etherial effect. The dark low cloud layer broke up while we were there revealing an almost-solid layer of high clouds that provided some wonderful flower light. The time really flew, and we left at 11:25.D took us to a spot near Mud Lake so we could photograph some flitty birds. I photographed fox sparrow and yellow warbler.

Then we went to nearby Jim Lake to photograph more flitty birds. A baby song sparrow was in the bushes when we arrived. A cooperative morning cloak butterfly landed on a nice perch, and I was able to get some nice images. After moving to a different area, I was finally able to get a great photograph of a yellow warbler (see left). We left around 3:00.

I was exhausted!

We returned to the RV around 3:45, and I took a power nap. After about 35 minutes, I was nice and refreshed.

We went into the house around 5:10 to visit with D & RA, and of course Tootie, and to have a wonderful dinner of ham, mushroom, and corn quiche and a salad. After we ate, I gave D some Photoshop pointers, and J returned to the RV.

I went back out to the RV around 7:30. Did a quick edit of the images I took yesterday, then did the first-pass edit of them in Capture One. I do my quick editing in iView Media Pro because it's a fast way to go through images to determine which images are definitely soft, and do my critical editing in Capture One because I can tell which images are sharp. I had a Nanaimo Bar for a late dessert. After working up a blog entry, I did some file management to make some space on my internal hard drive.