Today I’ve decided to talk about taking pictures for the fun of it. To me, photography doesn’t have to be all about the technical aspects like “Is the lighting exactly right?” or “Am I applying the rule of thirds?” or anything else. There are many times when I take pictures just so that I and others can later look back on them and remember what a fun time it was and not worry about how great or poor the pictures actually are.

Take last weekend. My friend decided that she was going to bake cookies and decorate them. By “baking cookies” I thought she meant 2 or 3 dozen. I was way off. I don’t know how many she did end up cooking but there were a lot.

That shows just a portion of the ones we decorated. We ended up not decorating them all because A) there were too many and B) the holes in our makeshift icing bags (made from ziploc bags) became too large and started spilling icing everywhere. Some of our decorating escapades gave birth to the story that unfolds below.

From a technical aspect there are probably multiple things wrong with the pictures. The angles could have been better, the cookies could have been positioned better, or something else. But for these pictures, that’s not what matters. What matters is that they exist and that they can remind us of what a fun time we had.

This is just one of the many aspects of photography that I enjoy. Later on I’ll be writing about some of the others… once I get ideas for them, anyway. By the way, I’m still on the lookout for more suggestions for topics to write about.

And now instead of rambling on about rather pointless bits of information I’ll share some pictures I took over the break.

First the cats encountered the dogs— through the glass door. My mom has two dogs that run loose most of the time. The cats had already had a tiny run in with them when we carried them inside the night before. What this picture doesn’t show is how much Midna arched her back and bushed her tail out after seeing the dog. Since they were running around the back of the house we decided to take the cats out to the front. What we didn’t count on was my mom’s dogs running to the front of the house as quick as they did.

As you can see, Poe was not amused. We hadn’t brought Midna out yet so he was the only one that got to experience the dogs up close. (That is, until one of them got inside the house the next day. That made both of the cats run downstairs and stay there for a good while.) See, not only is Poe not amused about the dogs he really didn’t like the whole outside experience. At. All. He wasn’t quite as bad as Minda who wanted to bury herself in our laps or run under the steps but he didn’t seem to enjoy it at all.

On Monday my mom suggested that we go hiking at a nearby park. I’ve been to this park several times but never on the trail she wanted to go on. So off we went to climb this ridge. And a climb it was. They’ve made it fairly accessible but there were some pretty steep parts. I took several photos that I’ll be posting on 365 this week so look out for those.

This is what we were treated with at the end (rather, the midpoint) of our hike. Sadly it was a rather hazy day so the mountains didn’t show up all that well. I think if I were ever to move farther away from this area the mountains are one of the things I’d miss the most.

After a short break we headed back down. The trip down was considerably shorter than the trip up. Maybe because my mom and I stopped less to take pictures but maybe because of two incidents we had. The first happened when we stopped for a minute to rest. My mom thought she felt something crawling on her neck but then realized that there was a HUGE hornet on her leg. Maybe it wasn’t a hornet but it was large and definitely looked like it could sting. That certainly shortened our break and off we went again. It wasn’t long, though, before she started yelling and pushing me off the side of the trail. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I saw this:

Believe me, when I saw that I started screaming as well. My mom thought it was a copperhead but when we showed the pictures to some family they said it was a rattlesnake. Whichever the case it’s still a snake and likely poisonous. Michael had walked right by it on the other side of the path but it was between us and our way forward. My mom and I walked very slowly off to the side and managed to get around it. Her pictures were probably better since she had her telephoto lens; you can bet I wasn’t going to try to get closer for a better picture! Once we were past it we definitely walked a bit faster and kept a sharper eye out for any more snakes.