For some reason (which could not possibly be laziness!), I find my backyard fascinating. Maybe it’s the animals, the colors, the textures, how close it is to my house, but it is a fine fine backyard.

We might be messy, but we are artfully messy.

Len’s Frankenkettle. He is definitely not doing anything illegal with this (but only because it didn’t work).

Picking blueberries is the worst. Because it is August, it is always too hot to do anything, and yet there we are. This year I had company which made it more pleasant (I think the only thing that kept my nephew going at all was the promise of a blueberry pie).

I am, by the way taking pictures, I just haven’t filled up a roll yet. So old pictures until I do.

I still have some photos from Detroit to process and post (as well as some miscellaneous from those rolls), but I may not have time to do that today. Instead, here are a couple of photos of some kind of mum/aster-like flowers which showed up in my garden. They do not look like something I would have planted, but it’s nice to have some color in the late fall.

I have goaded my brother into another round of posting everyday. Neither of us have been taking, much less posting photos, and I can’t speak for him, but for my part it is nothing but laziness. My proposal to him is that rather than taking a picture a day (which can lead to some really dumb pictures), focus instead on having sessions from which we can draw photos every day. After all, I use film, which doesn’t lend itself to taking a photo and posting it the next day, and he is super busy. In any case the point is to be inspired and to take pictures.

So. To that end I am going to post a number of photos I took a few months ago, but never scanned. These are from a tour of Detroit I went on which was conducted by Ren Farley, one of the researchers where I work and an expert on all things Detroit. This is the Heidleberg Project.

A few weeks ago I bought a Canon AE-1 at the local secondhand shop for $25, which included the camera, a camera bag, a flash, a power winder, and a 2x tele-converter (I can’t find a link for this, but it makes the 50mm lens into a 100mm lens). Pretty sweet, huh? I bought a new battery for it, though it may not have need it since I didn’t actually know how the internal light meter worked until after I put the new one in. The film is very basic 200 ISO Kodak color and it is much grainier than the 400 ISO Kodak Portra and generally not as nice.

This is my favorite of these photos.

I like this one, too.

My parents had a very boring version of the Duster when I was very young (it came to a very exciting end when our garage was set on fire).

This is both my dad’s and Len’s favorite version of the Mustang. I’m partial to the convertible myself, but I am a GIRL.

This 1966 red Corvette won favorite car of the show. I like this picture, but it is a bit too much red for me (which is maybe why I didn’t bother taking a picture of the whole thing).

Little white MG. My parents also had one of these (before the Duster).

This won favorite British car. Hard to argue with that decision.

A barber pole. Just because.

I have a lot more pictures (not of cars), but I don’t think I will get to them this week.