Walkabout

So not long back I talked about lightning photography in two separate posts, and presented some of my examples therein. A friend of mine named Jim Kramer, who recently moved to Kansas, sent me these two examples from his second night in the state, I suspect just to make me sick. Here I am struggling [...]

I know, this is taking advantage of my vast following on this blog to skew the results, but why else would I have a blog? The photo contest at Panda’s Thumb is entering Round Three, for invasive species, and one of my images is up there. Now, I wouldn’t dream of telling you who to [...]

Usually, I can look at an image I take and tell pretty quickly whether it works or not, and so far my judgment seems to be, if anything, a little harsher than the average viewer. But this image has me stumped. I scanned it from slide some months back because I liked it, then decided [...]

This is what I get for walking around without a lenscap on, ready for action. Swung the camera through a spiderweb without realizing it. Lovely pattern, isn’t it? Spider webbing usually takes lens cleaning fluid to get off (I know this because I have had jumping spiders leap onto the lens to run around,) but [...]

First, we’ll talk about the photo. What you’re seeing below is a two-by-two stake (so 1.5 inches square, or 4 cm) that was probably used to anchor a crab trap or something similar. It had fallen into shallow salt water in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon near Melbourne, and everything that is not wood colored in [...]

Unfortunately, I don’t use this blog to demonstrate composition in nature photography as often as I should, and instead you get illustrative, detail, or portrait-style images. I do a little of everything: illustrations and identifying details are important for many uses, but it never hurts to have a well-composed image as well. So now I’ll [...]

Yesterday was definitely not the day to really be tackling this, but I spent a little time down at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, and still managed to get a couple of useful images while there. The sun was hiding behind either heavy haze or clouds while the temperature hovered in the [...]

Recent downpours have kept the amphibians happy, which means I encounter at least one a day. Sometimes the encounters are closer than I’d like. I have to draw you a picture here, so you understand what happened. Maybe. It’s still hot outside, so my clothing is loose shorts. In order to get decent portraits of [...]

…but then again, you already knew that, didn’t you? This little bugger here is, to the best I can determine right now, a Spined Micrathena spider (Micrathena gracilis,) common as muck in the woods of North Carolina, especially this time of year. Yesterday I was walking in the woods and came across a spread of [...]

Just a few shots from last night as an active but small thunderstorm cell passed quickly through the area. I had actually gone out on errands after the storm, seemingly insignificant, passed my area, and drove directly into a seething thunderhead. Had to go back to get my cameras and ended up missing the best [...]