Wow. Thanks for this challenge. Sometimes I can’t think of a thing that I can use for a challenge and don’t have time to take the right photo, but this week’s “Sunday Stills Challenge: F is for …” has delivered a market basket of choices of photos containing or about words beginning with “F”. So here we go:
First, let’s look at FLIGHT. For those of us who love nature we have a bald eagle flying down the Wisconsin River Valley.
If you prefer mechanized and somewhat crazy acrobatic flight, you have the Royal Canadian Snowbirds and their jets:
Taking wing from the freedom of flight, we enter the world of fences. Here we have a photo of the fence around the governor’s mansion in Wisconsin. And talk about luck, the photo shows the fenced-in mansion in the fog thus scoring a “twofer” in the world of photo challenges.
I have hundreds of flower photos but I feel confident that such photos will be fertile ground for responses to the challenge so I am skipping these. Rather, I will finish with a photo of a local fireworks display (“Fireworks on the 4th,”another “twofer”) followed natural “fireworks” of the type that come with the changes of the season in one of my favorite times of the year: Fall.
Points of View 
Ese’ s Weekly Shoot & Quote Challenge – Celebrate (speculation on explosive celebration before Jim Hendrix intercedes)
Posted: April 19, 2014 in Commentary, Creativity, Fireworks, Humor, Maple Bluff, Photography, Photos Taken Within 100 Meters of HomeTags: Ese’s Weekly Shoot & Quote Challenge, explosions, fireworks, gunfire, jimi hendrix, kiss the sky, lake mendota, wisconsin capitol building
I find it absolutely fascinating that in a number of places around the world a common way of celebrating something is to fire one’s gun off into the air and yet here in U.S. where we are more or less awash in guns this form celebration is quite uncommon. Instead of that joyous sense of personal violence, we celebrate with the joy of sharing spectacular explosions. Both approaches to celebration have a subtext of danger – people are injured and killed by both forms of celebration, though much less so as a result of the reasonably well-regulated local fireworks display than through those pesky raining bullets that are a consequence of the individual with great celebratory enthusiasm, an automatic weapon and money for ammunition.
Now that I have finished with my pompous pontificating, it is time to turn to a different kind of celebration, one of a gentler sort and for that, a riff from Jimi Hendrix would never work, but this quote from him seems to me to be perfect support for my contribution to Ese’ s Weekly Shoot & Quote Challenge – Celebrate. The photo is of our local (Maple Bluff) fireworks display which, for extra safety, is launched from a barge in Lake Mendota. For perspective. the Wisconsin State Capitol Building is in the background on the right.
Excuse me while I kiss the sky. ~ Jimi Hendrix