Greetings,

The featured video today is the time Elley and I visited a horse ranch run by a fellow photographer, Barry Denton. He and his wife were very accommodating and the ranch is breathtaking and located in Skull Valley. I think one of my bucket list images that I really wanted to duplicate was a woman in that actual water trough. So it made sense to get my own from there. I’ll include all of the images from that and a few more from that adventure. Thank you Barry for inviting us to shoot there. I’m looking forward to another opportunity.

My shooting has slowed down some, with only one shoot on the calendar right now, and that’s on Saturday. A lot of projects and chores here at Bonita have taken my time. Between the solar project and restoring this monster antenna, and hiking the creek, I’ve been busy. I hope to get back to some studio work with either some new models or ones who we’ve made beautiful art with in the past. It is time to get creative. You gotta’ use it or lose it as they say. I’m not ready to lose it.

As always, even when I’m shooting regularly, I still love to go back in time and find a shoot that needs more edits. Models never complain about getting new images, sometimes 8 years later. I went back to a class I taught on lighting in 2015 with the beautiful Lisa. I had done a few shots myself during the class and noticed I hadn’t edited many. So, I looked them over and found some outstanding images to polish up and turn into fine art. I have those included this week too. The few that aren’t Elley. (grin) For those who follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve seen these recently, but here the quality is far better, so I hope you enjoy them as they should be seen.

Geek time: Today is a red-letter day for our place up here at Bonita Creek. In a few hours, the solar company is coming to finally turn on the system. Class in session. A KWH means kilowatt-hour, or a thousand watts for an hour. Consider your typical light bulb might use 60 watts, and your iron might use 1500 watts. The key users in a home are the fridge and freezer and the AC unit. We’ll have 5 KWH of panels and 10 KWH of storage battery. That’s 5,000 watts per hour we will generate…when the sun is up of course. And any power we generate that we don’t need will go to our battery or to the neighbors. To make those numbers make more sense, we use about 1.5 KWH on average each hour here. So, here at Bonita, we will never have a power outage. And if we do run low for some reason, we are still connected to the grid and can use power as we normally did. It is kinda’ the best way to have a sustained source of power that is pretty much renewable 99% of the time.

Of course, now we will spend more time making sure lights are off and things that don’t need to be running are powered down. We actually get paid for any power we generate over what we use.

I first talked with them last November. So it was a long process, mostly because it is harder to get the equipment these days. And it’s not cheap, but I’m a geek, and reducing our footprint on the planet is important to us. With tax credits and other things, about 1/3 of the price will come back in the first couple of years. And any time our power bill is zero or a negative number, we’ll be happy. We partnered with Arizona Solar Concepts for anyone curious. Good people!! And they pay for referrals, so mention my name if you decide to go solar.

Stay cool and happy!

Dave

And if you’d like to give me any feedback on these Museletters, feel free! I love to hear from you all! - Contact form