Tag Archives: Instagram

If You Show Me Yours, I Will Show You Mine!

I have an instagram account with yogiab as my handle. I generally post only one or two images per day. Many of the images migrate either to or from this blog. I follow several hundred accounts. If you have an instagram account please give me a follow, I’ll follow you back. I am really into interaction and appreciate others who interact as well. If you follow me and don’t like what you see, just unfollow or mute me. I’m a big boy and will survive. I already follow several fellow bloggers.

There’s an App called “Top Nine” which will find your nine most popular images on instagram for 2019. Here’s mine!

So starting on the top left and working like a book, left to right, and down to the next row..

First is crane from one of the many construction projects going on in Tulsa these days. My most popular post. I have no idea why.

Next, is a sunset over the Arkansas River. I took the photo from my office building. I have taken hundreds of such photos. I will miss the vantage point when I retire at the end of April 2020.

Third, is a photo of the Arkansas River underneath the 22nd street bridge during our flooding last summer. It was toward the end of the day and so the golden light along with the very muddy water created some nice lighting. The flooding caused some misery for thousands of people in Oklahoma and elsewhere.

The next photo, middle row on the left, is from me and Heather’s thirty year anniversary trip to southeast Oklahoma at Beaver’s Bend State Park. Southeast Oklahoma is one of the best kept secrets around. If you are thinking of flat land and cows, you will be surprised at the mountains, clear running rivers, deep forests, and lakes in what is called “Little Dixie.”

Next is Mount Moran as seen over the Snake River in the Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming. A magical place that I have been seeing all my life and never get tired of. Heather and I went there this past October.

The third photo on the middle row is the famous Moulton Barn on Mormon Row, also on the Grand Teton National Park. This may be the most famous barn in the world.

The next photo, the leftmost on the third row is from a business outing I took to northwest Oklahoma. I stopped and snapped a photo of it and posted it several years ago. The yellow plants are a canola field. Canola is a lot more popular since they changed the name from rapeseed several years ago. I posted the photo again this year as part of Jason Lee show at the Philbrook museum. This photo was selected for exhibition in the exhibit and you can see it until the end of next week at the downtown Philbrook here in Tulsa. It is hanging right next to another entry of mine also. Just bragging on myself I know.

The next photo is Tulsa’s beautiful Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. An art deco masterpiece designed by Bruce Goff. It may be the most beautiful building I have ever seen. I probably have hundreds of photos that I have taken of it.

And lastly is a moon shot. I have a Canon SuperZoom camera that I use for the moon. I hold it in my hand and shoot on auto. I had messed with fstops, tripods, and such for years and then I saw a youtube video where they said to just fill the viewfinder with the moon and let the camera’s auto settings figure out the rest. And you know, it works.

Anyways, try out instagram and give me a follow. I love viewing other people’s images.

Springtime Skywatching

After a long winter of short days and featureless skies we are having lots of skywatchable skies these days. The longer warmer days means that I am outside more and we are having a little weather and unfortunately the many grass fires in western Oklahoma adds a tinge to the air here in northeast Oklahoma.

On the advice of my doctor I have quit running and am riding my bike a lot. So far over 200 miles this year. (I am not bragging, I know several bikers who more than that on a weekend.) Most of the time when I am riding I have my Go Pro clone camera working. I alternate rides between video and stills.

It is very low fidelity with medioce specs but I don’t mind.

Another bicycle selfie. I always try and save one from each ride.

Anyway I am sure enjoying being outside in the fresh air. And some of the trails allow me see some rural Oklahoma scenes. I posted this photo in Instagram. Speaking of which, if you are an instagrammer consider following me. I’ll follow back. My handle is @yogiab. You can see a little of my feed in the right sidebar.

I took this with my cell phone. I spent some time trying to make it look better but you sometimes you just have to go with the plain version. Not that it is a great or even good photograph, I just like the contrast during the golden hour between the building and darker sky.

I even had a geocaching opportunity on one of my rides. I didn’t find it but I found this cool “Posted, Keep Out Signs. I don’t know why the sign is so high in the air. I have a feeling that if I could figure out how to get up to the sign, that is where the cache might be. I know the guy that hid it and he is evil. I didn’t spend too much time looking for it I needed to get back to my car before dark.

How about you, is the weather changing good or bad for your Skywatching?

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

Online Life – Closer to Home

The photos in this post have nothing to do with the subject. I like breaking things up a little bit.

You know I really enjoy the internet. I love facebook, even the political posts. I adore Instagram. I live on Instagram. I have my own account (@yogiab) and I post on two other accounts administered by the Tulsa RiverParks Authority (@riverparks and @turkeymountain). I have a twitter account (@alanbbates) and linked in and so on. Of course I have this blog and I administer the Skywatch Friday photo meme and I just love it all. Maybe too much. I have looked at it as a addition to instead of replacement of a social life. Of course I don’t really have a social life so I may be just fooling myself.

Things though are changing with the internet. We have a President who loves to tweet without too much thought about what he says. He just types it out and lets it fly. We have the new gizmos like Amazon Electra devices that are always on and can supposedly help you out with all sorts of things. I wonder just where things are going. It seems that blogs are getting phased out by twitter and Instagram. I get a lot more people “liking” my Instagram posts than read my blog posts. (I do love it when people read my blog posts and love it even more when they comment on them.)

The internet has intruded on my life (or maybe its the other way around) in new ways this week. I have had a bad hay fever bout the last week and a half and over the years I have figured out how to handle them but this time it progressed to a sinus infection. Okay, still no big deal and then suddenly on Wednesday it got into my ears. Time to go see a doctor. Well guess what, my doctor is on vacation this week and I was told to call the next morning, first thing to see if I could be “squeezed” in sometime the next day. Hmmm that didn’t sound good. I hate urgent care places. My employer sponsors a clinic but it was getting late in the day. So I tried our insurance company’s online providers.

They gave me the choice of two of them so I picked “Amwell” and it took about two hours as somebody somewhere was having technical issues but when I finally hooked up with the company doctor it went fairly well. She was very nice and unhurried and asked a bunch of questions that gave me confidence that she knew what she was doing. So she ended up writing me a prescription that she emailed to my pharmacy. All of that only cost me a $5 copay.

The next thing is that I needed a small job done. The privacy fence between us our and neighbor is wobbly. I got with my neighbor and I was talking to him about maybe we could reset the fence posts and all that and he looked at me and said “Alan, I am not really into manual labor any more.” Which was great news to me because I am not either. I set my share of fence posts 45 years ago working for free for my Dad on pasture in Arizona and then later, getting paid, as a summer roustabout for Mobil Oil in the Permian Basin. I knew that it was going to be a lot of work digging down to the concrete and then breaking it out and resetting the post if the post were good or putting a new post in if the old one were rotten.

My neighbor got laid off and found another job out of state and has a contract on his house and is hip deep in projects he needs done before he can close so I told him that I would find somebody to do the job. Do you know how hard that is now? Used to be everybody knew somebody who could do odd jobs at a fair price. I lived in a town north of Houston and I needed my house painted. Somebody told me to call this guy. The guy turned out to be an undocumented (cuz I don’t like calling people illegal) and he said he would do it for $400 plus the cost of the paint. I asked him how long it would take him and he said one day. So I said okay. Turned out he was an Assembly of God preacher and he and a bunch of guys from his church painted the exterior of my house in one day and did a great job.

So where are these guys? I looked at the online services such as Angie’s list and was a little leary and when I checked further I got really leary. They charge the handyman a stiff price for the “lead” whether I hire the dude or not. So they are not really into estimates. They want hired to do the job and I don’t blame them. I wanted an estimate though since I was representing both me and my neighbor and I don’t mind paying for somebody’s labor. I just want to know what I am getting into. So I found a guy and he came out and made all the right noises and is going to get back with me and so we will see.

This online world is going to go on whether I like it or not and I can tell you that I have been around long enough to know that fighting change is futile. I am not a gung hoe embrace change kind of guy but I am a “choose how you deal with it” kind of guy. It just seems like we are losing the personal touch now days. The glue that binds us together. Things are so contentious and snarky and in your face.

So I’ll go along with these changes but I am going to do my best to make them on my terms and maintain my humanity and concern for others.

Alrighty, I’ll get off my soap box for now.

Weekend Reflections – City Hall

I like to get out at lunch and walk around downtown Tulsa. Generally I walk around two miles or so and I always take my little point and shoot Nikon AW110 and take lots of pics. Most of whom don’t see the light of day as my Flickr account has ballooned out to over 57,000 photographs. So this past week I walked by our City Hall which is covered in glass and I thought the reflections of the big fat clouds against the blue sky we had that day looked pretty nice. The above photo is the result. I did run the photo through my ipod app Snapseed just to give it a little oomph. (You are not going to bedgrudge me some oomph are you?)

So I thought I would upload the photo on Instagram but I wanted even more oomph so I ran it through the various editing apps I have on my Ipod and I just went crazy. I used ToonCamera, Prisma, and DistressedFX and generated these in a matter of minutes. I like them all to one degree or another. And the winner is …..

This generated with DistressedFX. I liked the gradient in colors that it produced from top to bottom.

So do you use Apps in editing your photos, or Photoshop, Corel, Picmonkey or something else?

Are you on Instagram? We should be Instagram buds!! My account is @yogiab. Recently I have been asked by the Tulsa River Parks Authority to post under their accounts @TurkeyMountain for the Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Park and @riverparks. I’m just one of several people who post under those accounts but check them out anyway.

So everybody have a great weekend out there and I can’t wait to look at other reflections posts later this afternoon.

Linking with Weekend Reflections

My First Gallery Showing

As some of you know I am pretty active on Instagram (@yogiab, see the sidebar, and just why are we not instagram friends?) The local Tulsa newspaper, the Tulsa World, has a hashtag, #MyTulsaWorld, that can be used if one wants use it for Tulsa area photos and they publish in the paper (like on real paper) once or twice a week photos with that used the hashtag. They ended up publishing four of my photos and I got to know, via Intagram, anyway a whole lot of talented photographers in the Tulsa area.

So I got an email from the Tulsa World inviting me to submit two photographs to an exhibit of Instagram photographers in the Tulsa area. So me and 17 others sent out photographs in and then we got invitations to a private reception for the an Invitational Exhibition at Mayfest, Tulsa’s annual arts festival in May. So anyways I was pretty excited. I’ve never had my photographs shown before. You know, except for my Mother in Law.

Heather couldn’t make it because of a previous engagement with our son so after work I headed down to the venue all by myself. I was pretty nervous.

There were all sorts of people who were mainly looking for the art featured in the gallery. Lots of good stuff there.

I scooped up some free food and drink and found the Instagrammer section. It was very disconcerting to see my photos on display along with other peoples. I would look at it and then circulate around and then come back to you. It was a great feeling but humbling also.

I picked two photographs that showed two sides. One a peaceful scene at Post Oak Lodge in the Osage Hills north of town and the other action frozen during Tulsa’s riotous Tulsa Tough bicycle races.

They asked for a bio so I asked my good friend Mr. Google about bios.They have to be written in the third person and really have to get to the nut of the matter and leave out extraneous words but have a humorous part also. I left out the humorous part. If I had to do it over again I would add Heather and Logan to it.

So anyways it was all kind of fun, and flattering, and humbling. From the faces of the my fellow Instagrammers they were pretty pleased with the thing themselves.

So, thank you Tulsa World for a great opportunity and experience. And thank you dear readers who provide so much support.

And why are we are not Instagram friends again?

Christmas Critters

We have four critters at the house these days. I mean not counting the squirrels in the back yard. Three dogs and a cat. The last couple days I posted pictures of them on Instagram in a kind of popularity contest to see who could get the most likes. The contestants and the votes so far?

This is Ginger, our sweet Dachsund mix rescue dog. As of Monday night she had 26 likes.

This is Rascal, our sweet lovable Pomeranian mix who just showed up at our house. We tried really hard for about a half hour to find his owner. He is the leader as of Monday night at 30 likes.

This is Abigail our sweet Shi-Tzu Maltese mix who was given to us by a breeder. She loves to eat and also likes a pillow when she sleeps. She is at 25 likes.

This is LJ, Logan’s cat (LJ is short of “Logan Junior”) he has 14 likes but I didn’t post his pic until a day after the others.

We are keeping all four the critters regardless of what happens.

What about you? Tell us about your critters.

Instagram Love

I’m addicted to Instagram. I like creating and uploading pictures and I like looking at photographs of the people I follow. It is crazy the number of photos out there. Every once in a while a company will repost a picture of mine. (After asking permission of course.) That is great because they typically have a lot more followers than I do and the pics get more recognition. Below are two such examples.

Quik Trip is a Tulsa based convenience store chain that IMHO beats the crap out of any other convenience store I have ever seen. One rainy morning I was filling my car with gas and thought that the store with the wet parking lot and ominous clouds might make a decent pic. It did and I got a few dozen “likes” (Likes are like crack to us Instagram addicts). Quik Trip asked permission a couple months later to repost it and it got a pretty good response.

This pic is kind of grainy. I was downtown yesterday morning and noticed that the colored drunk-driver-proof fountain and the blue Christmas lights make a decent pic. So I went up there and tried to get an interesting pic somehow. These guys came walking by headed off I think to the Iron Gate ministry to get some breakfast and I took a pic of them walking by the fountain and then cropped it close. (That is why it is so grainy. NewsOK, the online arm of the Daily Oklahoman reposted the pic

I have about two thousand pics on Instagram, some good, many bad, and a whole bunch in the muddling middle. I find it a lot of fun.

Skywatch Friday – Neighborhood Sky

The family went out to eat this weekend. When we got home the sky was ablaze.

And I cheated a little bit. The free generic android phone I use has an in-camera HDR function and I amped it up a little more with my favorite camera app Snapseed. Plus a car turned down the street at just the right time to add an exclamation mark to the whole thing. And then I posted it to Instagram and Facebook. So I’m a multiple non-repentant cheater.

Have you ever cheated? Tell me about it. I promise not to tell anybody but my closest thousand friends. Confession is good for you.

Skywatch Friday

Snapseed For iOS Gets New HDR Scape Filter And Shadows Slider

Foto Friday Fun – 918 Edition

This is an office building in downtown Tulsa. I like to wander around town during my lunch hour taking photographs of what I see. I use a variety of cameras. I took this one with my Apple Ipod Touch using the Hipstamatic App. I love using different filters and effects and Hipstamatic has quite a few to play with. I’m not much of a purist when it comes to “SOOC” and I don’t think that the term has any meaning any more with all the various things that can be done “in camera” with images. I also love posting images on Instagram. Check the sidebar for my latest Instagram photos.

I’m participating with Gaelyn’s “Foto Friday Fun” meme. Go check it out, come up with a number and she’ll match the number with a photo from her archives. And her archives contain tens of thousands of great photographs.

YogisDen.us

Welcome to my world

Tag Archives: Instagram

If You Show Me Yours, I Will Show You Mine!

Springtime Skywatching

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

Online Life – Closer to Home

Weekend Reflections – City Hall

Linking with Weekend Reflections

My First Gallery Showing

Christmas Critters

Instagram Love

Skywatch Friday – Neighborhood Sky

Foto Friday Fun – 918 Edition

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

Linking with Weekend Reflections

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