Sunny Saturday

A friend from work decided to celebrate an upcoming milestone birthday by hosting a party at her home in Hebron, NY. The drive there took me through the Mettowee Valley on what could only be described as a picture-perfect fall day: cool and crisp with sunny blue skies. If I hadn't already been running late I'd have ended up making myself late anyway, as the temptation to stop along the way to take photos was extremely difficult to ignore. But I only gave in once, and then only for a minute or two, to photograph this mountainside. And for whatever reason, I decided I liked the effect of the lens flare in this shot even more than I did a similar photo that was flare-free:



It was the first time I'd ever been to my friend's place, and immediately I was jealous beyond all description—not only is her home lovely, but she has an absolutely breathtaking view:



I've gone back and forth in my head quite a bit about the question of posting photos of of people on this blog. My family is fine with it, as long as I don't post anything too unflattering. Same thing with some of my friends. But unless other folks have given me their approval I don't feel all that comfortable putting pictures of them out there in public, so to speak. Which is my long-winded way of explaining why I'm not posting any shots of the party itself; I didn't know most of the people there, they didn't know me, and they certainly didn't know about my ongoing project here, so it just seems like the right call to me.

Yoshi, of course, is totally fair game:





And I figure it's hard to go wrong with horses, especially a pair as beautiful as these:





Depending on how ambitious I feel, I may just end up taking a drive along that same route tomorrow and see about getting some more foliage shots. We'll see how it goes.