September 17, 2009 - Slight reprieve in the rain

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The rains held off for a while, and the tree guys came out to make good on their promise. While it is not perfect, my yard looks a lot better now. And since it wasn't raining, they went ahead and cut down the last tree.

Since the ground was still wet and borderline soaked, they cut the tree up into pieces and used a rope to lower each part to the ground. This technique was also used to make sure nothing fell on the power lines going to my house, which were only a few feet away. It also allowed them to haul the trunk off in pieces instead of having to use the same logger truck from the day before (the owner told me he wasn't going to use that guy again).

To help properly illuminate this photo on such an overcast day, I used my dedicated flash. The camera was being fooled by the bright white sky, so I told it to over-compensate on the flash by one full stop. I thought this did a nice job of brightening up the photo without making it look unnatural.

This is a great example of why you shouldn't be afraid to use your flash in the middle of the day. Without it, the photos turned out much darker. Why? I was aiming up into the underside of the tree, and just 25 feet away was my dark brown house (which was acting more like a light sponge — soaking up the light).

Before using the flash, the tree and the tree cutter were much darker and lacked detail. With the flash, everything looks more like you would perceive it with your natural eye.

September 16, 2009 - What a mess

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Between cutting down four trees yesterday and this morning, we must have had around three inches of rain fall. And it was still raining. So I went to work, thinking surely there was nothing that would happen today with the tree cutting.

Oh, how I was wrong.

My wife, Rachel, called me around 11 a.m. and said the logger truck showed up and they hauled away the tree trunks that had been felled from the day before. She was busy upstairs when they must have arrived because she didn't realize they were there until the last log was being dragged through the mud to their truck down on the street.

When I got home, this photo shows what greeted me.

I called up the tree cutting service, and the owner apologized. Profusely. He said the logger truck (which is run by a sub-contractor) had permission to pick up the logs yesterday (before the rain started coming down) but he shouldn't have come today. Not after all the rain. And he was especially wondering why in the world the guy tried to do it while it was still raining.

So for my photo today, you get something more like a snapshot. I took a bunch of photos to show what kind of damage was done in case I wasn't going to get any relief from the tree service. This was taken as I was standing in the street where the truck had been, showing how all the logs would've been pulled towards down the slope in front of my house.

They promised to come back out tomorrow, rain or shine, to get this cleaned up.