A mother’s day post

I mentioned earlier, I believe, that I had a few mantis egg sacs that I was watching to see if they’d hatch, the intention being (of course) to photograph their emergence in better detail than before. One of the sacs was in the front garden where most of my mantis images from the past two years have been read more

At least 800 obscenities

You’ll probably have to look closely at this one for a moment to realize what you’re seeing.


On the back porch early this evening, I spotted a black ant ambling along with what appeared to be captured prey, as ants are prone to doing. A closer look changed that impression, and made me run get the camera for a quick photo session. Apparently, a contentious encounter between read more

The fame keeps rolling in

Several weeks back, I was contacted out of the blue (rather than out of the yellow or the aubergine, which are much less abrupt) by Catherine Scott, a biologist/entomologist that specializes in spiders she had seen some of my images on BugGuide.net and wanted permission to use them in a post on her own blog, SpiderBytes. After a lengthy and heated discussion on terms (me: read more

The reveal

I told you yesterday that I’d reveal the secret tomorrow, meaning today, and it’s still May 1st as this posts…

What you saw in the last month-end abstract was simply a dragonfly, one that was doing a good job of hovering in one spot, and so I snagged a photo of it in midair. At 1/50 second shutter speed, the wings blurred, and with the sun behind it, the reflections from the wing read more

April abstracts bring May, um… abstracts I guess


For this month’s end abstract we have… something. I’ll let you try to figure out what. I’ll be back tomorrow to eradicate the mystery, should it still exist. All I will tell you now is that there is nothing at all tricky about it, no editing, no special techniques, just a grab shot yesterday.

Monday color, uh, 48?

Wow, I really dropped the ball on this one! Seems I simply forgot to post Monday color since, oh, the beginning of the year.

Okay, fine, it was an exercise begun in winter a year ago, that carried over throughout the rest of the year, and that I simply let slide in 2016. But I’ll still occasionally get some images that work almost entirely because of their palette (or at least I think read more

A closer look

Just a few pics from yesterday morning not long after sunrise, poking around in the yard looking for subjects. While I had initially modified a 80mm macro lens from my Mamiya medium format camera to work on Canon bodies when my Sigma lens failed, I have maintained the use of it because it’s one damn sharp lens, despite the fact that both focus and aperture must be manually controlled. I cut read more

Spiders, spiders, spiders, spiders, spam, and spiders

Is there a blog in existence that hasn’t gotten off at least one Monty Python reference? It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?

We’re still dealing with the lingering effects of the cold spell, meaning it gets chilly at night and well into the morning, so I haven’t expected much to be happening on the arthropod front and haven’t really been looking. Today, however, while read more

Let’s all pretend

I have an idea: let’s all pretend that we are not getting unseasonably cold weather after the spring rebirth has begun, and that the temperatures are remaining exactly where they should be. In fact, let’s insist on it, in ALL CAPS if need be – it seems to work for religious folk…

So naturally with such wonderful conditions, I got out a couple of times this weekend to do some read more

Green greeting


More stuff will be along soon, but right now I just wanted to post this one. From a short outing yesterday to the NC Botanical Garden while the weather was nice, this is the first green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) that I’ve seen this year, pretty early as far as I’m concerned. It is perched upon a clump of scouring rushes (Equisetum hyemale) growing in read more

1 145 146 147 148 149 199