I felt the need to throw up some photos for today, but had no idea what to display, until I realized that it’s International Look Back and Wonder What Happened Day, and so I dug up a few photos from this date in past years. I’m not sure what it’s going to tell us, but hey, I didn’t make up this holiday!
One year ago
This Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) was being a little shy in Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, and so I only got a couple of frames, but I just needed one to celebrate the holiday.
Two years ago
I had sized and prepped this photo back then to use in a post, but never did anything with it, so here we have it now. This pregnant Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) was in Gold Park in Hillsborough, though I had to crouch low to frame her against the blue sky while she watched me with grave suspicion. Or maybe I’m assuming too much here.
Three years ago
I’m fairly certain this was in the yard at home, but photos of this unidentified spider were all I captured on that day, so I have nothing else for reference. It is safe to say, though, that it’s ridiculously small.
Nineteen years ago
Wait, what? Nineteen years ago? Why the big jump? First of all, because there’s only so much poking around in the folders that I’m going to do for this silly holiday, but also because I just so happen to know what day this was shot on, even though it’s from a slide and thus has no EXIF info or file creation date (other than the date that it was scanned, which was well after the fact.) It was years before I discovered that this was an eastern lubber grasshopper (Romalea microptera.) This was from Manatee Springs State Park, which has its own anecdote from posts past.
While I’m at this, I’ll throw up some more photos, just some monochrome edits that I was toying with. I’ll be the first to admit that the originals were better in color, but I don’t think the greyscale versions are totally lacking in merit either.
Of course I had to do this one.
This was from last year’s trip to Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach, after the hurricane then prevented us from going to Jekyll.
Yes, I was obligated to do this one too. All of these had some careful tweaks done in the brightness curves, to bring out the contrast that I liked the best from different regions of the frames, but so far I haven’t been able to do channel clipping in GIMP – I figure there’s a way, but I have yet to find it.
Anyway, enjoy the holiday!