Tag Archives: Woodward Park

Shadow Shot Sunday – Saint Francis Edition

Our Health Club is part of Saint Francis Hospital here in Tulsa. The hospital has tons and tons of Francis imagery everywhere including going into the gym. I keep wanting to get a photo of him with Dallas Cowboys cap but I don’t want to trample the garden to get to him and my wife works there so I don’t to do any CLMs on her behalf (“Career Limiting Moves”)

Nothing makes better shadows than wrought iron. This example is at Woodward Park.

Oklahoma has lots of cool stories. In my opinion, one of the coolest is of the Five Moons. Five Indian Ballerinas from Oklahoma who achieved international acclaim for their dancing. Read more about them here. Above is Moscelyne Larkin.

So that is my Shadowy doings today. Check out Shadow Shot Sunday 2

Adventure Lab Geocaching at Tulsa’s Woodward Park

Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I am into geocaching where I search for hidden “caches” hidden by other people (and I have hidden a bunch also.) It’s a worldwide game with millions of caches in almost ever country. (Check out geocaching.com for more information.) An essential feature is that there is a container that is hidden. Well, that is not appropriate in a lot of places. Geocaching.com has added a new twist to the game that doesn’t require a hidden physical object to find.

They have started something called “Adventure Labs” where one goes to particular places learns something about the place and answers a question. It is on a smartphone app that uses the GPS functionality of the phone to make sure that you are at the right place. Learn more Adventure Labs by clicking the hyperlink.

There are several Adventure Lab geocaches in Tulsa right now. The first one I attempted was at Woodward Park. A very old and very beautiful park in mid-Town Tulsa loaded with features such as gardens, ponds, a rose garden, Tulsa Garden Center, and so on. There are five steps to completing the cache. None of which are shown here lest I spoil someone’s experience. Attempting the lab cache I got to see all these sights though.

Woodward Park was built back in the 20’s I love the stone steps. I am sure that each violate hundreds of safety rules. I will tell you when they are wet they are as slippery as ice.

It took about an hour to complete the five steps. I could have done it quicker but it’s not a race, and I was in it for the experience. You have to be within a certain distance before it will let you see what the question is for a given area and your answer has to be exact. It was fun. I already knew the answers to most of the question and I learned some new stuff as well. There are conventional caches and this Adventure Lab cache both at the park now.

So this is my nerd finding for the week. I was just glad to get out of the house after baby sitting contractors for two weeks!!

I am linking up with Our World Tuesday.

Our World – Tulsa’s Woodward Park

Saturday, my wife Heather and I went to Tulsa’s Woodward Park. I wanted to check out the Azaleas. That’s Heather above with her hands on her hips like she is ready to do something. She is always ready to pitch in!

The Azaleas were nice but not like last year but we loved it anyway. Above is a photo using my lensball. It is a spherical piece of glass that I keep in my car. It sure makes for nice photos, once I learned how to use it. One trick is that most of my photos with are inverted since it inverts the scene in front of it.

2019-04-27 Woodward Azaleas Topaz Studio Impressions

Here is a two tone photo of Azaleas in the shade. I have learned how to do manual exposure and blah, blah, blah with my camera but I forgot to set the white balance to shade and it is hard (for me) to correct for that after the fact. Oh well, I’ll take it anyway.

The Linnaeus Demonstration Gardens at Woodward Park had a butterfly garden. Heather had her notebook out and was making notes. I think we might have one in the near future.

Woodward Park had some iris’s also. I love them!!

We saw lots of flowers, and stopped and chatted with a couple from out of town who asked about what to see in Tulsa. A great time was had by all!!

I am linking with with Our World Tuesday

Skywatch Friday – Mid May 2018 Edition

Well May is well on its way and it has certainly warmed up around here and it is about time.

I apologize but I am going to bombard you yet again with a barrage of action cam shots from my bicycle rides. I have ridden over 200 miles this Spring. I do it every chance I can. I love it and it is a lot easier on the knees than running was. It is not near as good for cardiovascularwise. It is hard to get your heart rate up.

Heather has joined me a lot also. She teaches Zumba and other exercise classes so often times she rides after teaching two or three classes and she is still ready to ride a bunch of miles.

On one of my rides, I got to the literal “End of the Trail.” Most trails end a little more gracefully than this. The end at a road or something. Oh well.

Lets get out of the sun for a little bit and head to Tulsa’s beautiful Woodward Park. The azaleas were in bloom recently. The park’s shrubs got freeze damaged a few years ago so they are re-establishing the vegetation and doing a very good job of it in my opinion. It is not up to what it used to be but it is on its way.

I know nothing about flowers, and blooms but I know what I like. It was opportunity for me to practice what I learned about depth of field and making have a “soft” background.

More practice!

The season doesn’t seem to last too long and the strong winds that we have been very hard on the blooms.

What have you been up to lately?

I’m linking with Skywatch Friday!

Our World Tuesday – Nature Photography Class – Spring 2018 – Chapter One

I am all excited!! I did a one day Nature Photography class by Tulsa Community College. We met early in the morning and then headed off to several venues, the Linnaeus Gardens, Tulsa Garden Center, Tulsa Botanic Gardens, and Oxley Nature Center.

So the over a dozen of us, clicked and snapped away and we walked, and walked. My little garmin wrist device tells me that I walked 7.76 miles today. I believe it. My dogs are barking, you know what I mean. I do trail running, and this was about the same except I had a camera and was clicking happily away.

This is at Wooward Park, before the class really even started. So what do you like best, pink tulips in front, with yellow in back?

Or the other way around? Without cars in the background. Ignore the cars in the background.

Or how about the Redbud Trees.

How about some ancient stone steps.

At Oxley, do you like the little snake my fellow students found?

Or do you like the bigger snake a few hundred yards away. They said, don’t worry, no triangular head, and the eyes are round so it is not venomous. Like I even cared. Who is going to get close enough to snakes to figure out the roundness of its eyes?

I forget where this is from. It is pretty is all I know.

I love this also. No idea what it is.

Anyway, the more I learn about this photography thing, the more ignorant I get. I am firmy entrenched into manual mode, and metering the photos and all that but the complicated things get me. Like the above. Sunny on one side, shady on the other, overeposed on one side, under on the other. Who you going to call? Nobody, suck it up big guy, figure it out.

Or focus on the blossoms. The yin and the yang. Big picture, small picture. I am so confused.

Here is a redbud up close.

Linnaeus Gardens

How about a flag reflection. The reflection looks okay, but the sky is blown out. No editing done anywhere on this post by the way. Haha you say, we could tell that.

That is all for now. I took over 200 photos and I store them all in cloud and it is painfully slow to get them there. I used to store them on an external hard drive. Big, huge mistake. It cratered.

I really enjoyed the class. Kudos to my fellow students who really got into it, the various venues, who welcomed us with welcome arms and the instructors, Larry and Natalie who spent a considerable amount of time scheduling us into the various places, and led us around making sure that everybody had a fun time. I’ll be taking more classes from them again.

I am calling this Chapter One because I have so many photos to upload and don’t want to wait until they are all uploaded before I post something. Call me impatient.

I am linking with Our World Tuesday

Outdoor Wednesday – The Flowers are Blooming at Woodward Park

I took my “good camera” to work Tuesday just do I could check out Tulsa’s Woodward Park at lunch. The tulips and azaleas and other plants are blooming right now and the old park was putting on a show.

There were hardly any people there and I had the place pretty much to myself. I ended up taking 72 photos. Makes me glad for digital photography. I love film and have several film cameras but it is an expensive habit to get into.

It is such a beautiful time of year.

Even the hula hoopers were out.

I’m linking with Outdoor Wednesday

Woodward Park Sky

Tulsa’s Woodward Park on a windy, sunny, cool, beautiful Spring Day.

I’m linking with Skywatch Friday

Happy Easter Everybody

Easter is time of rebirth, new beginnings and hope.

The flowers symbolize all that for me.

Not an especially good shot but that is my boy blurred out in the background

They are just so beautiful

Happy Easter to you!

Today’s Flowers – Daffodil Mania

Here is the conventional view

I don’t mind Winter too much here in Oklahoma where it generally is not too severe and given my trailrunning and geocaching hobbies late Fall and Winter is really, really nice because I don’t have to worry about the many vipers we have here and the ticks, chiggers, bees, hornets, spiders, and wasps which have each sent me to the doctor before. Anyways Winter isn’t too bad but Spring is just great. It is great for baseball coming back and wonderful for the flowers especially the daffodils. I just love daffodils.

How about we get down to the ground and look up?

Tulsa’s best spot for daffodils is Woodward Park. This years “crop” seems a little sparse compared to previous years but still just spectacular.

How about zooming up the iso, and reducing the fstop to get narrow depth of focus. I know it is not much but I love this shot.

I went at lunch one day last week and the light was hazy. I thought it made for a nice effect.

Woodward Park is almost as good as the State Fair for people watching. We Tulsan’s love Woodward Park

I saw this lady get out of her car and she sat in the middle of a daffodil patch and brushed her hair really good and put a blue ribbon in and made a bunch of selfies. I thought it was really sweet. A couple years ago a guy and his girl were there and he set up a tripod low to the ground and he filmed he and his girl rolling around kissing and groping each other in the daffodils. That wasn’t too sweet.

On this past Wednesday during our Spring Break staycation the family indulged me by going to Philbrook Museum to take pics of the daffodils. They seemed kind of sparse there also. Still beautiful.

They had some of these very pretty blueish purple flowers also. That’s not the latin name for them, it is the Okie name.

And the purple flowers falling over the ledge is great also.

The best daffodils at Philbrook were in the front of the museum. They don’t charge you to look at these. We are members at Philbrook so its all the same to us. I love flowers in abundance. I’m greedy that way.

I know I am posting way too many pics of them. I promise not to post any more. I might change my mind though. Can you tell that I am a potential politician?

Here I found the abundance I was looking for. I fixed the focus about one third of the way down which left the flowers in the back kind of mushed (that is a very technical photographic term) in an effect that I kind of liked.

So this is my daffodil mania post. No filters, not even any cropping!

So, did I post too many photos? I’m trying to figure out what blogging means in this day of Instagram, twitter, and facebook. I love Instagram and post two or three pics a day with minimal text. Twitter I use mainly during breaking news plus it is a best way to keep abreast of industry news. Facebook is for friends. So I am trying to figure out where blogger fits in. I like getting to know people in blogging and it is kind of hard in Instagram and Twitter. With facebook I already know you. At least I thought I did until you started posting the My Little Pony videos. (hah)

So, how are the flowers where you are?

I’m linking with Today’s Flowers.

Poems and Promises by Rosalind Cook in Honor of EG Camera Girl and Birdman

Friday at lunch I hauled the Nikon over to Tulsa’s Woodward Park to take some pics of stuff. You know Spring type stuff, daffodils and such. I got those pics and I got this one. Actually, this sculpture is hard to photograph decently because it is dark and the shadows and all that so I bracketed it with three photos in succession each about 2 fstops different; under exposed, right exposed, and over exposed. I then combined the three pics with some software I had and I got something halfway decent.

At least we can see her face and the background isn’t blown out. If I were a photographer instead of picture taker I could monkey around a little more but this what I get. This sculpture is named Poems and Promises and it was gifted to the City of Tulsa back in 2010 by the Sculptor, Rosalind Cook, and her husband. I think it is incredibly beautiful!!

I got to thinking that I had posted this art before and sure enough I posted some film photos back in 2012 so I went back and checked it out and and what stunned me were the first two commenters: EG CameraGirl and Birdman. EG CameraGirl was a Canadian blogger whopassed away at the end of February as a result of car accident where her husband died and Birdman was from Maine and died of a heart attack just after retiring from a long career as a high school teacher.

They were both full of life and had unique blogs and were lively, interesting, and humorous comments and both very encouraging. I never met either one in real life but I feel that I knew them. I know that I miss them both. So this post is dedicated to them.

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