Author Archives: makielb

So, I started taking photos in the mid-1950s with my Mickey Mouse Camera, which took 120 film. I put a roll of film through it in the early 1980s and it still worked fine. When I moved to Ann Arbor in the 1970s it was the first time in years that I didn’t have myContinue reading “The photography community in the 1970s”

This is a journal page where I was attempting to capture the essence of a soaring kettle of hawks. I used this effort to create the following watercolor painting. Painting clouds and the sky are a lot of fun for me. An illustration of a Swallow-tailed Kite that never went much further. A Scissor-tailed Flycatcher,Continue reading “Art in the sky”

The art challenge for today is “forest.” I managed to find a few things that I think qualify for this. All of the above watercolor sketches were done at Emily Lake at the base of the Keewenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We were camping near the lake for a few days whileContinue reading “The Friday art challenge and the latest on Covid”

Oh the issues with written English (or some other languages). I think that this might have been part of the problem for the Red Win gs last night.

It’s hard to believe that I spent 5 hours at the EMU Biology Department and at lunch without taking a single picture. It was great seeing Chiron, Anne, Skip and Marianne. Brought back memories of great times. It was also strange seeing my office was not a small conference room. I also spent some timeContinue reading “The art challenge, EMU and more”

Better get your shopping done soon! Anybody else every watch Buck Rogers in black-and-white on late night TV? The Bible is perfect for humor. Ah, written language. Yep, it’s that time of the year. Well, not if you’re a fir. That’s all.

The above photo is neither great nor definitive without a lot of experience. It is, however a photo of four Long-eared Owl that were migrating at Whitefish Point. It was in the 1970s when I first started going to Whitefish Point. That was before the formation of the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory (I was aContinue reading “A nocturnal art challenge”

Back around 2003 we were visiting Alexis in Minneapolis and went to a sculpture garden. There was a sculpture of a horse made of tree limbs. Every angle you looked at it was an entirely different perspective. So I decided to do quick sketches of each view with a different brush-pen. I thought that thisContinue reading “Art challenge – variation”

At Whitefish Point we are surrounded by water, and it has been quite rainy recently. But the other night the clouds parted just long enough to see Jupiter and Saturn as well as Venus almost on the other horizon. Yesterday when the rain stopped and the sky started to clear we were fortunate enough toContinue reading “An aquatic art challenge and Whitefish Point”