Frenetic Friday

Rory and I were talking this morning about the unfolding of the holiday season and how our propensity for cramming a fairly large number of what would normally be enjoyable events into a rather compact time frame associated with "the holiday season" works at cross purposes to the relaxing camaraderie that those events should generate.  Today was a little like that, so instead of boring you with the gory details of trying to stuff too much fun into to small of a fun bag I'll let a couple of pictures tell the tale of the more enjoyable parts of the day.

Unsurprisingly, these are photos taken during two of three pedestrian periods I fit in around the baskets of holiday fun.

Anacostia Sunrise

This morning, the stillness of the air was perfect for capturing the reflection of the sunrise and the ex-USS Barry in the surface of the Anacostia River.  If you had asked me to draw or paint this scene a year ago, I strongly suspect that I would not have even noticed the reflections in the water much less been able to capture them in my rendering of the scene.  Today, though I still would struggle with representing the reflections, I definitely notice them all around me.  I attribute this "sensitivity" to observing the reflected directly to the time I"ve spent out on the trail plodding along.  I see reflections everywhere now, and not just while walking.  They are beautiful and exponentially increase the interest of any particular scene in my opinion.  If I hadn't slowed down a little,  I truly believe that in the interest of brevity my brain would have continued to filter this "excess" data being collected through my Mk 1 Mod 0 I-Ball.  I'm glad I slowed down.

Anacostia River Afternoon

On my lunch time amble, I tried to capture the same scene from this morning with afternoon lighting.  I think I did a pretty credible job of it, but I beleive the morning shot was probably taken a little (though not much) farther east than the afternoon shot.

As can be seen by the flag and the wind ripples on the water, the breeze had kicked up, and although I like the afternoon shot the muddied reflections off the water make the scene a little less interesting to me compared to the morning scene.

In spite of the drive to maximize fun to the point of fatigue, today was another enriching experience, and I look forward to another.