Becky Ochsner Photography Website

When the amount of posts on photography started out numbering my blog posts about our family, I knew it was time to build a separate website.  You can now find my photography information here:

www.beckyochsnerphotography.com

It still has some cobwebs in it that I'm cleaning out, but it's up and running.

I hope to focus more on family adventures on this blog!  And maybe some more good recipes.  You can never have enough yummy recipes.

Backwoods Boy

This was my first senior session with a guy, who happens to be my cousin, who happened to poke me in the eyeballs when he was two-years-old in order to wake me up to play for the day.  He now traps in the North Skunk River, hunts about anything, and gently throws farm cats who always find their way into whatever picture we were trying to capture, which he says is only appropriate since every picture he has of himself as a child also has a stray farm cat in it. We managed to keep the cats out of the pictures, but not out of the house to play with my boys during supper afterwards.

And for fun...A picture of me holding him after singing at the Southern Iowa Fair evangelism tent the summer before my 8th grade.

Farm Kids

Last night I took pictures of my neice and nephew at grandpa and grandmas house.  We jumped on the ranger and stopped at a few different spots that looked good.  My favorite part was putting them in settings that I thought displayed their personalities.

The last one, though not one of my favorites of Ethan, looks like "little mark."  He is very similar to his dad.

Nephews

I got to take pictures of my nephews yesterday at their house. Here are my two favorites. You might see more on Stacy's blog later. It is such a beautiful week here, though just a touch warm for October. We hope the weather stays beautiful for our trip to Michigan!

Harvesting Beans

Here are a few pictures of us harvesting the beans yesterday with Grandpa Steve.  This was the red combine's last job before moving on to another farmer.  It has been a beautiful weekend of sunshine.  You will be able to see the sun setting on our progress as you scroll through these pictures.

We started mid afternoon, sun high in the sky. 

And a few of my monarch butterfly photos that I took along the sides of the field.

Elliot getting into drive the grain cart.

Brian catching up with the neighbors while grandpa Steve starts in on the fourth of five small fields.

Brian pulling out of one of the hilltop fields with the grain cart.

The river bottom was filled with dust, created from the chaff coming out of the back of combines of several farmers working on getting their crops out on a nice day.

The first woolly caterpillar I've spotted this fall.

Chaff from the back of the combine.  This always reminds me of Psalm 1.  "Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away"  

Geese flying over the harvested field after the sun has set.

Butterfly Movement

Yesterday our family was able to harvest our bean crop of a little under 40 acres in 5 different small river bottom and hilltop fields.  The harvest process is a little high maintenance, and requires taking the bean head off the combine to move to each field.  The wooded areas surrounding the fields were full of insects collecting pollen.  There were monarch butterflies and bees all over.  At one point I was giving Ezra and Elliot a ride on the four wheeler, and dropped them off with Brian to ride in the grain cart while I took a few photos of the insects on the outside of the fields.  I wanted to catch the movement of a monarch butterfly, and this was the result!