Monday morning Photoblogging, again

Friday night, Dogger and decided that we didn't just need a walk, we needed an adventure.

Once upon a time I lived next door to Lake Johnson. Literally, it was on the other side of my parking lot. It's a really nice city lake and it's mostly unknown by the city - Which is both a shame and blessing. But Dogger and I weren't going to the lake. Dogger and I were going to the stream.

When I lived in the apartments it didn't take me long to discover this really nice path that ran behind the complex and along the stream. In the spring it was like Disney's greenroom. Rabbits, song birds, deer families, the odd beaver - Not to mention the veritable forest of blooming trees that hid anything less lovely from sight and thickets of pink and yellow and white honeysuckle varieties that made the air smell heavenly and thanks to the burbling stream, the street noise is very effectivly camouflaged. It's gorgeous and no one was ever there.

There is still no one there. Dogger and I were along the stream and on the path for two hours and I saw only five other people and one other dog. If you were walking at Lake Johnson there would have been dozens of other people and twice that number of dogs. The only people in Raleigh who take advantage of Lake Johnson seem to be the a select number of in-the-know dog people and a handful of college kids who live in the student ghetto that surrounds the lake. Damn nice ghetto.

Before I left the house I had a last minute thought that I should take my camera with me. The light was great, but when we left the house we only had about a half hour of viability left. It also reminded me of the weakness of digital cameras. There is no such thing as high speed film in digital photography. When the light fades so does the quality of the images. You can mess with the settings all you want, you can not magically make the camera think it's using 1400 speed film.

But I preserved.

Sadly, most of what I saw looked absolutely gorgeous in situ, I mean stunningly beautiful, like not even real, didn't read the same after I got the images home. Sigh. You have to trust me, it was really beautiful. This is what it looked like after I got those images home.