Category Archives: keywording

Animals, Flowers, keywording, Nature, Outdoors, Travel

Nature along the Way

September 5, 2022 Vicki Uthe 3 Comments

Well. Congratulations. You’ve made it to the end of this nine-week set of blogs about our epic 50-day trip around the eastern united states.

I have saved the best for last. You have traveled with me through eight of the nine preset keywords I use for quick tagging images in Lightroom. The final one is…!! (Drumroll please) NATURE!! It’s a monster one because as you can imagine it includes a LOT.

The preset keywords that fit under the Nature umbrella are as follows: plants, animals, weather, water, landscape, trail, rocks, beach, and park. I’m not married to these nine but that’s what I have so far. I then go to say…animals and further tag them with the following: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, fish, wild, and domestic. I only have eight here because I couldn’t think of a ninth.

This section goes like this: Nature>Plants>Flowers. Once the color words are attached to the image I can then add location, species if I know it, the number of petals, etc.

On this dandelion, I might add the words design, seeds, and stem.

The subcategories I’ve chosen under the Plants umbrella are as follows: flowers, wildflowers, trees, fungi, garden, leaves, green, succulent, and fruit. I literally edited this list while writing this blog. I replaced bark with fungi.

Trees are another one of my favorite subjects. These two images would be tagged with “roots”. I don’t yet have a tree subset as I can’t come up with enough keywords to make it worth the space. The above image would also include water.

I may be coming up with the tree subset as I write this. I could add bark, trunk, texture, moss, design, roots, forest, orchard…Hmm, I have eight.

I don’t consider myself a landscape photographer but I would categorize these two images as landscapes. Landscapes show up as a keyword under nature but that’s it, I don’t currently have a listing of landscapes. I suppose if one DID shoot a lot of landscapes they would be: Desert, Plain, Wetland, Mountain, Coast, Lakes, Rivers, Forest, and Grassland.

Fungi!!

Now on to animals. It’s a big one. Let’s begin with domestic vs. wild. I don’t have this yet either but one could subcategorize domestic into dog, cat, fish, bird, working, horse, mule, pig, and cow.

This horse was working the streets of New Orleans.

When we stopped to see Ellen’s sister in Mississippi, this guy was in a pen on the property.

This beautiful bird was at my cousin’s home in North Carolina and the dinosaurs below were at my brother’s home in Denver.

My cousin owns four mules and this donkey on six acres outside of Chapel Hill.

These little cuties were escorted across the street, IN the crosswalk mind you, by their Canada Geese parents in Gatlinburg, TN.

I got to watch this handsome fellow eat some Blue Heron spaghetti at our camp in Mississippi.

This Carolina Wren was feeding her babies nestled in a home camera cover at our friend’s house in Weaverville, NC.

I happened to have my long lens with me on a short hike at our camp in Tennessee when this beauty took off from a tree.

South Llano River State Park outside of Junction, TX was AMAZING in the animal department. We spent a lot of time hanging out with armadillos AND I got to watch this mama and her three babies do squirrel activities.

Not sure whose teeth these are but it’s tagged under animals.

We saw a few turtles along the way which is always a treat. These guys were on a log in a swampy area of a park we walked in near Asheville, NC.

We found this fellow on my cousin’s porch in Hillsborough, NC.

My little green friend kept me company while I used the restroom at our camp in Louisiana.

Some of the bees from our beekeeping experience in St. Paul, NE.

Catching flying insects requires a bit of patience and a lot of pixels to delete later.

Water is another of my favorite places to hang out. I’m usually playing in, on, or around it and love finding patterns in its movement. This image fits under Nature>Water>clear, stream, pattern.

There you have it, our 50-day April 1st-May 20th epic adventure has come to a close in my blog world. Thanks for coming along and enjoying our adventure. It was certainly a joy to revisit all that we did.

June found us in Washington D.C. and New York City so STAY TUNED!!

Happy Shooting!

Art, Cultural, keywording, Music, People, Places to Shoot, Travel

Music we enjoyed

August 29, 2022 Vicki Uthe 2 Comments

Music and people, people and music. You can’t have one without the other. It was tricky separating these two keywords as they are somewhat interchangeable.

Our first full-on musical encounter was in Progreso, Mexico when through the market came a family band. It looked like mom, dad, and three boys. Dad was on clarinet, the two older boys were on drums, the youngest had the donation cup and mom followed along, keeping an eye on her brood. They were really quite good but gone before I could get my camera out after our donation to take a decent picture. The sad part? The boys were working and not in school. We were there in April.

Our main musical encounter was, you guessed it, New Orleans! We were there for their first French Quarter Jazz Festival since Covid.

There were plenty of solo guitar players, some with donation tins and some not.

Definitely some well-worn guitars.

This guy had his karaoke music playing and was singing his heart out for a buck.

And some were just playing for themselves.

Then the parade began and the jazz bands came marching down Bourbon Street.

You can almost hear the music while looking at these images.

The Navy even sent some musicians. The fellow below was FULL of personality. Imagine if THIS is how we went to war and we wound up making music together instead of death and destruction. If only…

On a street corner, we ran into this quintet playing some interesting instruments. There was a standup base and a washboard among the crew.

Raw talent if you ask me, riding a bike with this big drum.

I’m not sure who this is but a painting was made of her and she was selling CDs. She was an amazing clarinet player with a small band on a street corner in NOLA.

We ran into Mai-Mai (My-My?) near some statues in Armstrong Park. He was just hanging out on the park bench, chatting with people and playing his guitar. We listened and talked with him for a while. Such a sweet man.

Dollywood had some great Bluegrass bands playing as well. The South definitely did not disappoint in the music department.

Food, keywording, Travel

Food along the Way

August 1, 2022 Vicki Uthe 2 Comments

Food was a definite “thing” on this trip. Before this journey, we were dialed in with three-four night campouts either in a tent, a rooftop tent, or canoe camping and we had it DOWN.

This experience was going to be entirely different. We now had a refrigerator that kept things cold and a tiny freezer that actually kept things frozen. It was amazing not having to manage a cooler and ice all the time. At home, we create a menu each week (thank you Mo Landrith!) and shop for those items only. This system creates very little food waste. On this trip, we had to figure out camper meals, meals with our peeps, and meals in restaurants as we went sightseeing during the day. We had to figure out what to bring that wouldn’t go bad but what was also easy to cook as we settled on just two saucepans and a frying pan.

Discovering that the freezer actually kept things frozen was life-changing. Also, at home, our routine is to basically skip breakfast Monday – Friday, have a blended salad smoothie for lunch, and a mostly meatless dinner. When we travel, making the daily juice is not happening so we came up with cold oatmeal with berries, nuts, dried fruit, and non-dairy milk. It’s our new, warm weather favorite.

For dinner, we found out we could store four one-pound bags of frozen vegetables in the freezer. With leftovers, it gives us eight meals when we add brown minute rice and a can of beans, and maybe an egg on top or some non-dairy cheese. Other than that we often had tortillas, hummus, and veggie roll-ups until we ran out of tortillas and literally couldn’t find any east of Texas.

Here’s our little stove at work warming up the beans and vegetables while cooking the rice for ten minutes. It became our favorite camp dinner. We tried to substitute quinoa but didn’t love it.

We found this on the beach of Padre Island. We took it with us and opened it with a hammer at camp in Walasco. It was good and we didn’t get sick. We were a little nervous about eating it as we had NO idea how long it had been out to sea.

We ate out, a LOT. Here we picked up some nuts from a street vendor in Progresso, Sonora.

We had our first Philipino food with Dave and Bong in Houston, Texas.

We had fish n chips and DELICIOUS mac and cheese at Katie’s Seafood in Galveston. That wasn’t necessarily new but it had been a LONG time since we’d had it.

In Louisiana things got interesting. It was recommended we eat at this grocery and deli by our Voodoo Museum tour guide in New Orleans . He wasn’t wrong. We got the gumbo and it was delicious. We ate it outside on the sidewalk, sitting against the building.

Near the Whitney Plantation, we found this cajun market and restaurant. It had alligator heads all over the place and we ordered the catfish PO-boy and shrimp gumbo. Other people ordered a platterful of very red crawfish. We skipped that delicacy.

At Dollywood, we ordered what amounted to be a $12 cup of rice with a little sausage and chicken thrown in so it sounded better on the menu. It was cooked in this giant wok. In Gatlinburg, we tried the chili cheese fries and were not disappointed. I believe they cost as much as the cup of rice.

In Weaverville, we ordered Mo’s barbecue ribs, cornbread, and mac & cheese. Yum.

In Hillsborough, we found a food truck and got some tacos.

Our friends and old neighbors, Trish Paul in Weaverville, put this delicious spread out for us one morning,

Cousin Colby impressed us with his chef skills in making these smashed potatoes to go with our roasted chicken, Ceasar salad, and garlic-me bread.

Granddaughter Akacia fed us one evening from a Hello Fresh box. It was a nice combo of burger and fries.

At the farm in Nebraska, Aunt Becky showed us how to extract honey from bee boxes. It was so interesting and delicious.

We got to bring home over 12 pounds of the stuff plus some honeycomb to chew on.

The grocery stores along the way were also an interesting experience. Once we hit the South we saw things not normally seen in our stores in Flagstaff.

I’m not sure what it’s all used for but I’m pretty sure if offered, I’d give it a try.

I hadn’t seen white asparagus before.

The food tour has come to a close. It was fun eating different local cuisine. We decided not to eat Mexican food once we left Texas but succumbed and DID have good tacos out of the food truck in North Carolina.

Next week I’m going to share some of our excursions. It’s a keyword change from my original list of nine. Excursions replaces Urban. As I said, keywording is a work in progress.

Happy shooting!

Art, keywording, Photography, Places to Shoot, Travel, Urban Art

Art along the Way

July 11, 2022 Vicki Uthe 1 Comment

There will be a minimum of nine posts in this series. Why nine? Because Lightroom allows me nine keywords that I have put in my “main themes” preset. Last week’s blog is the tenth as it was my introductory post on my keywording system, AND an introduction that we have returned and to expect the stories of the images. So, here we go.

As previously stated I currently have the following keywords in my “main themes” preset: art, buildings, food, music, nature, people, signs, transportation, and urban. Today’s theme is art.

In my first edit, I do a couple of things. I mark poor quality photos with an X to later delete, a P which flags “wow” images for future editing, and assign groups of images with at least one, sometimes more than one, keyword, usually from my main themes list, for future keywording. In this case, I then pulled up all of the art images to further assign keywords. I typed art into the keyword set box and nine more words came up to make it easy to further identify photos. Those keywords are folk, glass, graffiti, metal, murals, painting, patterns, statues, and stickers. I’m in the early stages of setting up these presets and as I discover better words to use I adjust the preset.

Another thing I’d like to point out is that I only had three cameras with me, an iPhone 8, a Canon Powershot S120 point and shoot, and a Lumix DX8 micro 4/3 body with my “travel” lens, a 28-300 equivalent. I’ll identify each image with the camera used.

That being said, let’s check out the art!

iPhone 8

When we got blown off the beach at Padre Island National Seashore and headed to Harlingen we had to find a way to fill our three additional days. On our first extra day, we went to South Padre Island, driving through Port Isabelle on the way. SPI as the locals refer to it is the polar opposite of the National Seashore. It is developed and very touristy. Think south Florida. On our way over we stopped to walk around Port Isabelle and found this dolphin sculpture. It turns out they are everywhere. This is Port Isabelle’s public art animal.

As a side note, these two art pieces were also assigned the main themes keyword of animals.

iPhone 8

On SPI you have to walk under this great big turtle to get into a store that sells all things beach.

iPhone 8

We also discovered that, in Walasco, we were about six miles from Progresso, Sonora. Yay! Mexico for a day! This wall, however, was at a restaurant we ate at in Harlingen upon our return.

Canon S120 Powershot

In Houston with my cousin Dave and his spouse Bong, while wandering around downtown, we came upon this musician.

Lumix

We only gave Galveston one day and really enjoyed ourselves wandering around and looking at the old buildings and seaport life. This sculpture was out at the end of a dock near the oil well museum.

Lumix

Oh yes, now we’re in New Orleans. Lots of art here. This cane belongs to our Voodoo Museum tour guide.

Lumix

We were in NOLA for the first French Quarter Music Festival since Covid and there were a lot of art vendors for our enjoyment.

Lumix

We were in Lousiana for three days, on the second day we went out to the Whitney Plantation Museum. It was a sobering experience and is the only plantation in Louisiana that focuses on the lives of the slaves more than the plantation owners. These two statues were outside of a slave house.

Lumix

We found this art exhibit in Dollywood. For me, it was the highlight. As much as we LOVE Dolly Parton we did not love her theme park. Maybe I’m just over theme parks and their fakeness. Oh well, the umbrellas were cool.

We rescued Dollywood day by leaving and heading to Gatlinburg. Evonne had told us that Gatlinburg is a popular place for the folks in Cincinnati to vacation. We began at the visitor center and found a Skyride that takes you to the top of a mountain where you can walk across suspension bridges and take in the views. More on that later. What you get here in the art blog is a sticker on the window of the restaurant we ate at from Hopi Radio!!

iPhone 8

Lumix

We didn’t spend enough time in the Asheville, NC area but I DID manage to find this very cute statue in a neighbor’s yard. I could do a whole post on just art in Asheville.

iPhone 8

in the Hillsborough, NC area these are the two art items that made the cut. The above dog is leaning up against my cousin’s house and below is one of a hundred mosaics, part of a public art project where folks can create a mosaic with the theme of I Love Hillsborough.

iPhone 8

A shark-headed girl, sitting on a bench, in the lobby of an art museum, in Cincinnati. I loved it.

Lumix

This is a May Pole blowing in the wind in the Amana Colonies of Iowa. We were turned on to this adventure by a friend we were texting with who used to live in Iowa. It’s so great to be able to add last-minute adventures while traveling.

iPhone 8

Now we’re in Denver, our last stop before heading home. The above blanket made of old ski sweaters was found in a thrift store in Iron Springs located in the mountains outside of Denver. They have lovely hot springs there and Colorado Style pizza. More on that later.

iPhone 8