When I was in Crested Butte, Colorado this summer, I went into a gallery that had a very beautiful photo of the mountain town of Colorado at night. It looks like the photographer did some HDR photography. (HDR stands for High Dynamic Range imaging. If you want to learn more about that, visit Wikipedia.) This photo was amazing because all of the lights of the town created a beautiful glow in the night sky. The man running the gallery said that the photo was printed on aluminum.

I had never heard of such a thing. But, when I got accepted to be able to do an art show, I thought I just HAD to try it. Printing on aluminum sounded very fun. I ordered the image from Bay Photo. It turned out just a little bit darker than what I had anticipated, but it still looked lovely.

This photo was taken on the edge of Hazard, Nebraska. Hazard boasts a population of 66 people. This photo was taken after the ice storm of 2006. The ice coated everything pretty thickly. You can see here that the rocks by the train tracks were coated over in ice and looked very shiny.

I have a photo in my current exhibit that shows a little square house in a pasture. I lived in the country on a cattle ranch when I was a kid, and there was a house just like this one down the road from where I lived. I loved the look of these tiny houses.

My dad was wonderful with helping me with my exhibit. He helped me hang it, and then we went out to eat. He asked where this particular house was. I told him, then he knew who lived in the house.

The story gets more interesting. If you take a look at that house, you probably think it was abandoned before 1950. However, my dad told me it was the Lundstrom house and that two old bachelors lived there in 1990 when we moved into that area. Isn't that something? These old ranchers were living Amish-like in central Nebraska. The house did not have electricity, and the men got their water from a windmill. Apparently they heated their house with a stove that ran on stove fuel. My dad said they didn't come into town that often, and lived a pretty meager existence.

Anyway, I have always had a special place in my heart for these rustic, little houses.

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