My real job

This is what I have been doing for the last 3 months. We are doubling the size of a gas plant south of Breckenridge. I'm in charge of all the concrete footings. It was a great relief when 9 truckloads of machinery were finally delivered last week and it all fit right onto the foundations we had built. Now I get to start on a couple of really big footings, one has 2 1/2" dia. anchor bolts in it. I take my camera every day but its not often I have the time at work to snap off a bunch of pics.

A year?!! Really?

WOW A year. Time flies when you are, well, working your arse off. I follow some blogs that are posted to every day. I can't imagine. Construction ground to a halt, and that was the thing that allowed me the funds and flexible schedule to pursue my passion for photography. It's not like I quit taking pictures, I have just had a lot going on. I have shot several senior sessions and a couple of weddings but my real passion is cruising the back roads looking for abandoned houses or the occasional chimney out in the middle of nowhere standing sentinel  over ..... nothing. 

The birds

This spring I found this tom with two hens not far from my house. I stopped and got out of my truck to photograph them and got within 5 feet or so of them. The tom was so interested in the hens that he paid me no attention, well almost, for a minute I thought I was going to get spurred.

I have a family of roadrunners than live near the house. Last year I found their nest but they have moved it and I've yet to find it this year. This guy was after a lizard.

Some more spring flowers. Some with unusual genetic variations. One with multiple centers and one with brown spots on the petals that weren't on any other flowers.

More spring flowers, but they are starting to get scarce,

Prom

Yesterday was consumed with taking pictures of my granddaughter and a bunch of her friends getting ready for her first prom.
I have known most of these kids for the last 15 yrs. or so and it is just mind boggling that they are getting ready for their first prom.
It was really cool to go to this house to photograph them as I built it for these people a few years back when I was building custom homes (before the implosion).

Along with the spring flowers I have always been fascinated with old chimneys that you see while traveling the back roads. Sometimes there is something remaining of the structure that went with it but more often than not the only evidence that anything was ever there is the chimney itself. When the structure is partially remaining you can see how Mother Earth slowly absorbs this man made creation back into itself. It makes me wonder what was here. Was it a young family that was trying to make on the frontier? Did their house burn down? Maybe it was an older couple that had raised an entire generation out here in the middle of nowhere and as their lives came to the final chapters the children had moved on to fast paced lives in the city never to return to what they perceived as the boondocks. But the chimneys are always the last to go.