After yesterday’s post that ended with damaging my brand new softbox, I repaired it, added some clips to keep the flip-up top from flipping up, at least when I didn’t want it to, and glued some coarse grit sandpaper to the top of the hotshoe to prevent slippage (it’s an accessory shoe that takes the PC cord, so I’m not doing this to the 7D body.) Then I went out to do some more tests, largely to make sure the flip-up top didn’t flip up when I didn’t want it to, and to see that the flash unit and hotshoe remained good friends.
While doing this, I pushed the count-of-bebby-anoles-on-the-property-in-one-night up to 49! I feel bad that I didn’t reach 50, because that’s a magical number donchaknow, and I really did try. Mind you, I’m purposefully excluding the full-grown adults from the count, because I’m taking note of the population boom, so the count was higher than that – or it could have been a little lower, since some medium-sized ones were in there and perhaps shouldn’t be, technically. I’m honestly not sure how fast the buggers grow, and have no way of differentiating them except in very specific circumstances like weirdly-damaged tails. Regardless, that’s a good number that I’m proud of, which only goes to show you how low my standards for pride are and, if you haven’t already looked at the image galley, this probably saves you the time now.
But okay, the flip-up top of the softbox was there for a reason, and it got exercised a couple of times last night, and this is one of the occasions:
Those are the Pirate Twins, the orphaned pair of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that visit semi-regularly, and I happened across them as I was driving the count up – curiously, they were in the middle of the yard and I’d apparently been going around them in a broad arc for a bit before I saw them. To their credit, they weren’t very spooked by my presence at all – wary, but they simply kept a certain distance and continued browsing. I’d credit this to being dazzled by the headlamp and not realizing that it was a person wandering around (I wasn’t speaking at all or even cursing, so you know I was in stalking mode,) but I turned a few times so the light thrown by the headlamp would have silhouetted me from behind, which is normally enough to send just about anything hurtling off from this sudden reveal, but these guys were cool with it.
Of course, the little Canon 300EZ flash doesn’t have much power, and I opened the aperture wide and boosted ISO way up to even get this shot – they were roughly 15 meters off, I think – but the softbox worked as intended, so it passed this test too. There’s just enough light to see that their spots have almost entirely faded.
I’m going to throw these up here, just because if I don’t, they’re liable to sit in the folder awaiting another opportunity anyway, but be warned – it’s yet another Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis.)
This one was not one of the count because it was clearly an adult, and a huge one at that, but I had to get the pic because it’s also the roughest I’ve ever seen, obviously having been in at least one major battle, but considering how many adults I found in the general vicinity, it could easily have been more. Given the size, there’s a chance this, or some of it, is due to simply age, but it looks more like scarring to me. I didn’t disturb him (I think it’s likely a male) to try for precise measurements, but I did use my fallback method:
By the way, the first of these pics was simply named, “KeithRichards.jpg,” because of course, which reminds me that I should do another roundup of the weird image titles that I’ve used. Betcha can’t wait…