Our first challenge, before even starting the month, was to take a self portrait with our crappiest cameras in the shot. Taking a leaf out of the book of Miss Aniela, I created a composite inside my home office space. Now all I need is an alter-ego name…
Great Pyranees puppies (yes, those huge dogs are actually puppies) and a photography helper. How much better can a day get?
Last week I had the opportunity to do some shooting at the Lava Lake Ranch outside of Carey, Idaho. I will be sharing many more images from this shoot, but for now, here’s a shot from the evening. I couldn’t resist those contrasty, low hanging clouds against the bright blue sky.
Two images in one day! Well that just won’t do. But I couldn’t resist.
Franconia, light painted.
Image copyright/Sara Sheehy
It was brought to my attention today that I haven’t posted in quite some time. Oh boy, do I know. Here’s an image that I captured today of the Hemingway House in Ketchum, ID. This image is an HDR composite of three exposures. One capture was for the house and pine trees, another for the foliage and mountains, and the third for the sky. The image was taken with the sun high overhead, making a composite like this necessary for proper exposure. The Hemingway House is on private property, I was asked to make this capture for an upcoming event.
I bet you hear about Stanley, Idaho a lot more often you think. Why, you ask? Because on any given day Stanley is the coldest place in the continental US. Weather-people love to say “The hottest place in the nation today is Death Valley California at 101 degrees, and the coldest place in the nation today is Stanley Idaho at 11 degrees.” Sound familiar? Between 1995 and 2005 Stanley had the most days of the lowest temperature in the US, a whopping 398 days of being the chilly-chills. Brr.
Apart from this awesome distinction Stanley is a stunning place to be (as most of you know I’m a bit predisposed to the cold, so Stanley stole my heart anyway). Stanley is called “The Gateway to the Sawtooths” and has both soaring peaks and the bottomlands of the Salmon River. Hiking, rafting, climbing, fly-fishing, they’ve got it all. All this in a town with a year-round population of 100 people. You really have to love your neighbors.
If you ever head to Stanley, a few places that cannot be missed:
And to just add to the greatness of Stanley, it has the Braun Brothers. Reckless Kelly, Micky and the Motorcars, and Muzzie and Joann. Enough said.
Sundays are now officially called “Adventure Sundays.” It seems that no matter what we try to do on a Sunday it turns into an epic journey.
Today Mike and I headed into the Pioneer Mountains to find a trail to mountain bike. We drove in through Muldoon Canyon outside of Bellevue. The goal was to find Baugh Creek and make a loop of old Forest Service roads. For the first time in a really long time we were stopped by private land boundaries. It’s been awhile! But we were already an hour into dirt roads, and it turned into a chance to have a true adventure…one where we got on our mountain bikes and just rode. We ended up taking a dirt track up and over a set of foothills with a fantastic view of the Little Wood River bottomlands. I saw a few creatures (mostly mule deer) and Mike took a fantastically dusty tumble when his back tire skidded on some unstable soil. The whole ride was dusty – really dusty. We didn’t see another human being the entire time, and it was fantastic.
Hooray for Adventure Sundays!
I recently read a fantastic book called In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore. The book was an incisive look at the cult of speed in our current cultural society, and ways that people are slowing it down. Honore talks about all different facets of life for slowness – work, raising a child, exercise, sex. He also talked about a growing movement named Slow Food. Slow Food has banded together as an organization dedicated to the pleasure and protection of food heritage. Yum. They have over 100,000 members worldwide, and are based in Bra, Italy.
Inspired by this great book I decided to make an effort to engage in Slow Food more often. I am not a stellar cook by any stretch of the imagination but I can follow directions relatively well. Assuming I actually read them, of course. My first sojourn into Slow Food was to pull out the pasta press and make some homemade, slow, pasta.
Fresh Pasta (dough recipe from The Joy of Cooking)
Beat the eggs inside this mount lightly with a fork. Using your fingers, start to gradually pull flour from the sides into the eggs in the middle. This stop confused me slightly, I tried to do as the recipe said until I just gave up and mashed it all together. Pasta still came out fine! Once it’s mixed knead the dough until it’s satiny and elastic, approximately 10 minutes. Divide the dough into 4 pieces and cover with an inverted bowl. Let the dough rest at room temperature for one hour.
This is the fun part – the pasta press! If you don’t have a pasta press you can roll out the dough into 1/8 inch thick and slice by hand. Cutting the dough into smaller sections I run it through the flat pasta press until it’s the right thickness, then crank the thing through the pasta cutter. It’s a wonderfully satisfying activity.
Once the cut pasta is created lay it on a flat surface until you determine your next course of action. In our case we cooked some of it right away, the rest we curled into loose bundles and put in the freezer uncovered for two hours. After two hours the curls can be put together in a freezer bag and will keep for 1 month.
We threw some pasta directly into boiling water to make some dinner. Fresh pasta takes less time than commercial pasta to cook and has a thick, wholesome taste.
Our finished dinner! Fresh whole wheat pasta with kalamata olives, basil from the garden, tomatoes from the garden, chard from the farmers market, and Parmesan cheese. So good!
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