March 12, 2023

News

According to the National Park Service, the Cherry trees at the Tidal Basin are going to bloom early this year. Please check out my Cherry Blossoms gallery if you want to avoid the crowds at the Tidal Basin. Please send me an email if you would like to meet down at the Tidal basin for a portrait with the Cherry Blossoms in bloom.

If you have been following my Facebook Page, you know that I have taken a lot of bird photos in the last few months. I have created a Birds gallery for just my bird photos, and I plan to remove most of the bird photos from my Wildlife gallery.

It was nice to see so many guests from Keswick Hunt Club at the Farmington Hunt Club's February 11, 2023 Joint Meet at the Schoolhouse Field fixture. Please also check out my Farmington Hunt Club page for pictures from other meets this season and in previous years.

I wasn't able to select a Top 10 set of photos for 2022, so I selected one photo per month to create my Top 12 of 2022 gallery. Those photos,and quite a few more are in my Favorite Photos of 2022 gallery. I hope you will also find a few favorites in the galleries. You may also want to watch a soundless video I posted to Facebook with the photos from the bigger gallery.

After learing about the deaths of these three cute grizzly bear cubs (they disappeared shortly after I returned to Virginia, and the consensus is that a male grizzly killed the cubs, so that the male could breed with Blondie), I created a new gallery with just my bear photos from Yellowstone and the Tetons. Even though I wasn't able to get photos of these three cubs during my too brief return to Yellowstone and the Tetons in July, I did manage to get some more bear photos to add to the gallery.

I had a pretty good trip through the West with stops in Utah's Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Monument Valley at the Utah/Arizona boundary, Capitol Reef National Park, the Grand Canyon and, very briefly, Bryce Canyon National Parks before I headed North to Grand Teton and Yellowstone Parks for about two weeks in May and early June, and then I had another week and a half in the Tetons and Yellowstone in mid July before coming home. The photos are in my West-2022 gallery, and please also check out the West-2021 gallery for last year's photos from many of the same locations.

You can see what others wrote about some of the photos in my Facebook page and Instagram feed.

Last spring, I had a vixen and four kits lving under my backyard shed once again much to my terriers' displeasure. Here is the full gallery of backyard fox photos from earlier years.

I created a new gallery of Waterfall Photos to collect some of the photos from my Rivers & Streams, Autumn, Winter and other galleries. This new gallery only contains a few of my many photos of Great Falls of the Potomac, and it doesn't contain photos of kayakers and canoeists running waterfalls, which you can find in the various Whitewater galleries.

Please check my Farmington Hunt Club page for my photos from this year's new fox hunting season and for my photos from previous seasons. This includes January 14th from Overstreets, January 8th from Mount Fair, New Year's Eve, December 31st from Hunting Ridge, December 17th from Overstreets, and December 10th from Indian Echo. Details and the most up to date information on my FHC page.

Over the last few years, my fascination with pictures of the rising or setting moon has grown to encompass many photos of the Milky Way and other astrophotography images, which you can find in my Stars & Other Astrophotos gallery. There is some overlap with the photos in my Moon & Nighttime gallery for now just as the moon photos overlap with photos in my Sunrises and Sunsets gallery. The Sun & Moon is a bit of an orphan now though I occasionally do add photos there as well as in the more specific galleries.

During my trip out west, I captured quite a few photos of wildlife in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, and I have added those new photos to my Wildlife gallery to go along with the ducks and herons along the C&O Canal or at Huntley Meadows, the deer at Big Meadows that seem to always be grazing in the late afternoon when I'm up there for sunset and other photos, and of course the photos of the bison and the Lamar Valley Wolf Photos from my 2019 Yellowstone Winter trip. The wildlife gallery also is a home to the bird photos I've been taking in my backyard during last year's "stay at home" period and other local wildlife that doesn't fit in the Wilderness category or I have trimmed from the Wilderness gallery. I still have the separate galleries for my Abbott Lane Foxes.

I have scanned some of my old slides and uploaded a lot of images from places like Mount Baker, Yosemite National Park, the California coast, and spots closer to home. Check out the Wilderness and Ocean Images galleries in particular. I will also be adding a few more slalom races and other kayaking and canoeing photos in the Whitewater galleries in the next few days.

I have created several time-lapse videos over the last week or so as we approached and passed the autumn equinox. During the equinox, and the few mornings on either side, the sun rises almost in a direct line from the Lincoln Memorial through the Washington Monument and to the east of the US Capitol. I posted the videos to my Facebook Page, and the direct links are Sunday September 19th from the Netherlands Carillon, Monday September 20th from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and Sunday September 26th at the USMC War Memorial though I chose to use the Memorial as my foreground instead of looking across the Potomac in the final time-lapse.

Website Updates

I added a field to the filter form, so that you can now search for photos taken in a specific year in my larger galleries. The form field should only appear when the gallery contains photos from multiple years.

If you are still having problems with the shopping cart, you can always send me an email with a list of your favorite photos, and the size(s) you wish to purchase.

Several people have asked questions like, "What (shutter speed, aperture, lens) did you use for this photograph?" Now, you can find the answer if you click on the "Camera Info" button when you click on a photo thumbnail to get the zoomed in view, and if it is one of my newer, digital images.

Let me know what you think of those changes or if you discover any new bugs.

All of the URLs on my site should now be a lot easier to remember and share. Instead of the old format with the gID=XXX in the URL, you should now be able to simply enter a URL like www.CathySummers.com/2017-NVSL-All-Stars to find the photos I took during the NVSL All Star meet, or www.CathySummers.com/Abbott-Lane-Foxes to see the photos of the foxes who used to live in my backyard. You can always use the Gallery Search page to find a gallery by name or part of a name.

If you login when you start your visit, you can now mark photos as your favorites, and then you can look at all of your favorite images on a separate gallery page. I hope this will really help those of you trying to collect images from multiple galleries as you try to decide which one to purchase. Once logged in, you will see "Your Favorites" as the first item in the "Your Galleries" menu.

The Framed Prints gallery now allows you to look at zoomed in photos of all the framed prints I currently have and are ready for immediate pick up or delivery.

I have added a limited search capability to the gallery pages. You can now filter the images in a gallery by how I have rated the photos, if you want to see which ones I think are the best, and you can search for keywords if, for example you just want to see my rose photos without looking at the other flower images. Please let me know what you think of this change, or contact me with other suggested improvements.

Remember to follow my Facebook page for additional updates including previews of images that I add to the galleries here. See the button below.

Swim Photos

Lee Graham Parents,

Please contact me if you need access to the Dive or Swim Team Picture Day galleries. I also posted a gallery of photos from the July 2nd A Meet versus Vienna Aquatic Club for your enjoyment. While I will be out of town for the next few weeks, I can fill ordered for ePrints (higher resolution copies of the photos without the visible copyright watermark) while I'm on the road if I can get a good internet connection. I will be able to make prints when I get home in late July / early August.

Swimming is a highly photogenic sport with water flying off the swimmers' hands or cascading down over their faces, or with the distortions provided by the water, and sometimes I think the pictures can be enhanced with various effects in Photoshop, so I created the Swimmers as Art gallery to showcase some of those treatments and otherwise dynamic images. (If you have a favorite photo of your swimmer, contact me if you want to see if I can apply any of those transformations.)

If you are looking for the photos I have taken at some of the High School or other "winter" swim meets, you can try the Gallery Search to find the gallery. Contact me if you need a gallery's password. I will leave the photos from the High School and other swim meets on this web site for a while, and I will be happy to sell you prints or electronic copies.

With Elena now too old for swimming in NVSL meets, I will not be as tied to Lee Graham pool on my summer mornings. Please contact me if you are interested in discussing having me do your team photos.