We have been to Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge many times and we just never get tired of it. It is a a three and a half hour drive from our home so we usually leave early enough on Saturday to be there for sunrise. The wildlife are active from just before sunrise until about 10 AM and then again from about 4PM until just after sunset.



So that leaves plenty of time to drive over to Meers for a World Famous Meersburger. This is a really unusual burger joint. The burgers are huge and they have a new one that is even more huge. They raise all of their own grass fed Texas Longhorn cattle right on the premises. They grind their beef fresh every day. Nothing is ever frozen. All of the fixin's come from local farms. They also make their own ice cream to serve with the peach cobbler. It is not humanly possible to leave this place hungry. I don't know if it was the best hamburger I ever had but it is in the top two or three.

There are numerous hotels nearby in Lawton. And there are a half dozen museums in town, on the Comanche Nation reservation and at Fort Sill. And, of course, there are a zillion casinos on the reservation as well. So there is plenty to see and do in and around the Wichita Mountains NWR and Lawton area.

A few of the many images we have taken at Wichita Mountains NWR are here.

We had a nice drive over to Winnsboro ostensibly to look for fall color but we were about a week to ten days too late for the peak. It was still a nice drive and we got to drop in on the Winnsboro Antique Car show which is a part of their annual fall festival which runs throughout the month of October. The car show was great fun and their were some unexpected beauties in the display. My favorite was a white 1946 Lincoln Continental convertible with a 3.4 liter V12 engine.




One thing that I noticed that I thought was strange was that all of the old Ford F100's had Chevy engines. So I asked one of the owners and he told me that no one uses a Ford engine because they weren't any good when new and didn't last long enough to be used in a running antique. All of the Model A Fords still use Ford engines though.

Some of our images from the car show can be found here.

Joy is compiling a cookbook to include some of the zillions of recipes she has collected over the years. Currently they occupy an overstuffed 3-inch loose leaf binder. Many of them are just cut out from various printed materials and just lay loose in the binder. Others are stuffed into image protectors. Over all it is a complete mess although Joy maintains she knows where everything is. So now it is all going into a cookbook created in iBooks. The book itself is just beautiful. Everything falls into one of several categories and it is all indexed and cross indexed so it is really easy to find anything. And when using it while cooking you just have to prop up your iPad on a kitchen counter somewhere and everything comes easily to hand. Because it is all digital it is easy to search for anything by any keyword such as a recipe name, ingredient or whatever you like.

Jambalaya

The fun part for me is that I get to take pictures of all of the dishes for the cookbook as we prepare them. I have taken over the dining room with a semi-permanent food photography setup. This makes it very easy to photograph all the dishes since my lights are already setup and adjusted correctly for food photography. The setup uses two AlienBees B800s. The key light is a 36-inch softbox and the fill light is a 32-inch octabox. There is also a 36-inch white reflector in the background. This gives very uniform lighting with just a hint of a shadow for depth. I shoot tethered into my MacBook Pro sometimes but it is not really necessary since the lighting setup has been perfected through a lot of testing. All in all a fun project.

I have been very slow to update my site for the past 18 months due to being treated for cancer. I haven't even taken any photos in a long while. But now I believe I have turned a corner and I'm actually getting better. And for the first time in a long time I actually feel like getting out and shooting. So since it is spring and because I still have to stay close to the ranch I have taken a lot of flower photos around the house and in nearby parks. I never get tired of flower photos. Flowers are a beautiful blessing from God. It doesn't matter if they are cultivars or wild flowers. It's all good.

These images are the first efforts from my new Nikon D850 and also new Micro Nikkor 105mm f2.8 lens. Some were also taken with a Nikkor 85mm f1.8. This is the beginning of my switch to all prime lenses for the majority of my shooting. I still have several Nikkor zooms but I will be using the series of Nikkor 1.8 primes for most of my photography from now on.

Here is a selection from the hundreds of flowers I have shot this spring.