Eclipse day

 The eclipse was almost a non event in this corner of the world- unless you had a telescope like my sister and her husband have. They watched through it and sent me this photo, which is rather cool as the sun looks like the moon but the moon is the dark shadow. 

Photo credit to Frank!

I sat outside in the sun during the eclipse and the coolest thing happened- right at noon, when the eclipse was getting underway, 4 swans flew directly above me, about 30 feet up, with the sun shining through their wings- huge wings at that! I felt very blessed and thankful for such a beautiful moment. I didn't have my phone camera on but a few minutes later did get a snapshot of a pair of  them flying by but a little further away. 

I knew they were in the area as we saw a bunch of them, along with ducks and geese in a field on the way to town. Again, just a cell phone photo. 

While on the subject of wildlife.....

One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not quite the same...

It's rare to see white tail deer and muleys together. This doe seemed curious, and the muleys were rather suspicious of her. She eventually went back to her little herd .

The river was interesting today. This morning, it was all calm and smooth flowing- worthy of trying for a reflection shot. 

Or two

Late this afternoon it was completely different. 

Velvet is still hanging in there, and my rules are that anyone whose guess has passed can put in a new guess. So far, that is Frank and Leslie. 

I'm still thinking of names....

The eclipse

It was only a partial eclipse here, kind of felt like a bit of cloud cover for a bit and then back to full sunshine. I set up my Nikon camera and also used my cellphone camera and my little pocket camera. First, the cell- it's interesting that although the sun looks blazing in it, there is always a secondary image of the actual eclipse in the photos.

Very odd.  Next, my pocket camera- not much better at all. In fact the images are not worth posting.
I did get some more interesting stuff with my Nikon D3100, but when I look at all the images that the real photographers got, I am quite humbled- there were some amazing captures of the full eclipse posted all over social media. This one was my best effort:

I played around a lot with the settings and this one was at ISO 100, shutter speed 1/4000, f 29. There was a bit of jet stream cloud that was dissipating that gave the neat cloud effect. There are also 3 purple refractions of the sun in there.

None of the animals seemed bothered by the celestial events taking place, it was all business as usual.
I didn't ride but managed to get some horse stuff done- trimmed Rosalee's front feet and got a rough trim (nippers only) on Mesa's other front foot.