Working the French Quarter with a horse and buggy is a challenge. There's thousands of points of interest to talk about and the stories run on and on. But there is also the daily traffic of cars and pedestrians that you have to be careful for in the small, tightly packed streets -- streets designed when a horse pulled surrey was the trendy mode of transportation. It takes a good guide to do this job. These are real artists.
I know you're going to do, so go ahead. I know you're going to call me "the cloud man." Go ahead. I can take it.
Here's what happened. I was walking down int the French Quarter of New Orleans when my eyes fixed on this fire escaped stairs. I determined to see if I could find a angle to capture its zig-zagging. Across the street I tried a few angles. Under the stairs I tried. Down the street, up the street. Then the clouds started moving across the top. I decided to try shooting it with a polarizing filter and sepia toning to get that "white cloud- dark sky effect. " This is the result. Nothing at all like I thought when I started. Go figure.
Our niece Paige was having a lot of fun making giant soap bubbles on our recent trip to the New Orleans Childrens Museum in the Warehouse District of the city. If your imagination (young and old) wasn't running wild in this place, then you don't have one.
You remember when you were young and the sun was starting to look droopy on the horizon -- getting ready to slip under its covers.
This was the grocery store at the New Orleans Children's Museum where we spent Saturday. The kids enjoyed picking food off the shelf (empty but real containers) and bringing it up to the register where other kids checked it out. Our neice Rebekah is the check out lady here, trying to collect the $300 bill from here sister Sarah -- Sarah just ran over to her nanny's purse and pulled out the check book.
Saturday was a day of fun in downtown New Orleans with Linda's nieces and nephews. We took an umbrella-covered stroll through a downpour down to the Riverwalk for lunch. This scene is Casey, Paige and Rebeka looking out over the river when the rain stopped. The Riverwalk is a fun-filled shopping experience at the site of the old World's Exposition. The large glass wall of the food court gives a panoramic view of the Mighty Mississippi. Step outside for a view of the wharf and the full feel of the busy waterway.
We were at the New Orleans Children's Museum with out nieces and nephews yesterday. Of course this kid (me) was draw to the plasma globe -- you know that ones that shoot sparks inside of a globe. When you put your hand on the globe, the sparks shoot toward it. I kept coming back several times shooting a couple dozen shots, trying to get the perfect photo.
I was out looking at an industrial site in New Orleans East. It has been raining so the ditches were still pretty full. This White Ibis let me drive up slowly in my car and shoot his picture out the window. He is still a growing boy, but he will get a couple feet high with a wing span of about a yard. There were three of them in the group, groping in the water for tasty things.
This little foot-high Black-Necked Stilt is keeping a weary eye on me, but it didn't stop him from keeping up his morning meal in the road-side ditch. As awkward as he seems, they are very elegant bird. The long legs seem to give them a better vantage point to check out the shallow water.
I ran across this excerpt from a speech of Sen. Robert Kennedy on a blog the other day. I needed a inspiring photo to complement it. But read the speech, you will see what the photo has to do with it."We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods.
"We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them.
"The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missles and nuclear warheads.... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.
"And if the Gross National Product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike.
"It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials...
"The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America -- except whether we are proud to be Americans."
Sen. Robert Kennedy --two months before his assasination March 18, 1968 University of Kansas
With the help of a brave assistant, I was able to capture this photo of a stinging caterpillar which was hanging at eye-level with me, about 2 feet away. I grabbed Linda's camera and started shooting. Her camera does a decent job of macro photos but it was a challenge with the tiny stingers on this guy. See the picture below for a more detailed shot of the stingers.
Lagniappe -- I posted a picture on Pixel Eyed that shows the identifying characteristic of these caterpillars -- a red and white stripe running down both sides which you can just barely see on the left top of this guy. 
Your bones are hollow, your wings translucent. You are crafted to slice the wind. Let the wind slowly glide you down to your nest. Hundreds of feet of silent wind skimming. You are a Great Egret . You were born to be a brother of the wind.
Great Egret chick 1: "I'll let go when you let go"
Mom sits up high out of the fray: "You chicks fight it out. When you're finished, we can all sit down to an orderly meal. If not, you will both starve to death." 
This guy stood quite still to let me shoot his photo at Audubon Park in New Orleans. I think it was the new suit he was showing off. Is that seersucker? Very summer-ish.
I suppose someone told him, "go ruffle your own feathers." This was at the rookery on the Audubon Park lagoon in New Orleans today -- before it started pouring rain and I scurried for shelter.
Traveling home from work in New Orleans tonight, I saw a particularly interesting cloud structure full of filaments. This isn't it. 
So I am driving home, down Poydras Street, heading out of town and this guy pops his head up and stares at me, like "hey, where did all the wind come from?"
The window wall at the Port of New Orleans reflects the Crescent City Connection bridge above and a Carnival Lines Cruise Ship down below. The Port's office sits below the massive bridge over the Mississippi River and in between two of the port's wharves. At the bottom left is a much more mundane for of transportation. And if you click on the picture to enlarge it, you will see behind the blue fence a more popular mode of transportation.
I really didn't intend on posting a picture like this tonight -- after posting two cloud pictures from the ride Sunday. But as I was driving home, this big cloud was billowing up -- kind of unusual for clouds to billow as the sun is going down -- the weather man even commented on that last night. But billow it did. It was like one of those candle extiquisher, snuffing out any light it could find. It seemed upset about something. I jumped out of my car and started shooting, like I had some kind of disease for shooting clouds -- Mad Cloud Disease.
Carrying a camera and playing with the settings, shooting the sky. It makes you be more observant of what is around you. For instance, if I had not been taking cloud shots on our drive home from Texas, I might have told you that the sky the whole way was partly cloudy.
Driving home from visiting our kids in Texas, gave me a chance to practice some of the setting on my Olympus Evolt 510 camera. I had to shoot at a really high shutter speed because I was riding shotgun as we were heading down the highway. The clouds were cooperating though.
Even a Blue Heron is entitled to a tasty crawfish every once in a while. Just carry it to the top of a high branch with plenty of clear sight distance so that no one can try to sneak up on it and steal the treat.
The story the other day said that even though bees are dying out all across the country, a few states, Louisiana one of them, are not having that problem. Nobody knows why. Sweet.
The skies around New Orleans got angry and punch their chest and billowed their clouds. They swarmed around the sun and blew out its light. But they couldn't keep up their ire, so that the sun was able to break through and regain its strength. In the end the winds pushed the clouds away over the sunset and the night came up pink and golden, then purple.
The sun is tired. The last ray, hopefully the last bite. The lakefront in Mandeville, just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Maybe it wasn't a good day, but maybe it will end well. Maybe.
Another look at our friends Sam and Theresa's fish pond in their back yard. It was fascinating to watch the fish fathoming the clear, dark waters. The sun could only get a ray or two through the umbrella of the giant oak that loomed overhead. But where it did, it painted the pebbles on the bottom with a golden tint. As I moved around the pond to capture a good shot of the Koi fish, they always seemed to find a way to keep a lily pad between me and them, that is until Theresa came out with some fish pellets. An occasional pellet would bring them out into the open, but I had to work quick because they would scoot back to lily-pad darkness in just seconds.
The crawfish boil, as you can see, is a very social event. Every one crowded around, picking, eating and conversing in a hive of activity. The signature of the haute cuisine is the newspaper strewn table -- makes it easier to clean up, just roll it up and toss it in a garbage bag. It is impossible for anyone around the table to be a stranger at one of these feast. It's a true New Orleans event, though this one was Saturday at my brother Ted's house in Baton Rouge where we held a Buser family reunion.
