For one or two posts a year, I have to touch on the idea of extra-terrestrial life, and this particular facet of the topic I’ve mentioned before, but I’m going into it a bit deeper this time. Given the extremely low likelihood of such an event coming to pass, this post counts as far more attention than is warranted, but if I only tackled relevant and important topics, I’d lose
Author: Al Denelsbeck
I’m getting old
Seriously. I can’t find an excuse for this.
I just finished typing up a lengthy post about a particular topic, and as I was viewing the penultimate draft, I decided to click on one of the links at the bottom – you know, the ones that show potentially related content? Only to find that I had already tackled pretty much the exact same details in the earlier post.
Now, I might have felt better
Macro photography, part nine: Changes
For the past two and a half years, I’ve been using a specialized rig for macro lighting, one that produced dependable and pretty damn good results. But it was not to last. The Sunpak FP38 flat panel flash is a surprisingly neat little package, but like everything that I ever really like
Good help is hard to find – sometimes
While looking up details for an earlier post I came across a curious trait of this particular species of assassin bug, and decided I’d like to try and get shots of it in action. I have been too lucky lately, and thought this luck might hold, but alas…
Pale green assassin bugs (Zelus luridus,) seen in several recent posts, are spindly little insects usually measuring less than
Monday color 41
Today, a recent one, taken a few days back with the others but saved for this special occasion. The mix of colors on the same sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua,) combined with the backlighting and the clear blue sky photobombing from the rear, made this an obvious choice. A bit too complicated for
They’re coming… maybe
I suddenly realized that the term, “meteorology,” with its inherent inaccuracies, must have come from the predictions for meteor showers, since only once has the claim of a “good storm” come true in my experience. An awful lot of times, when I’ve gone out specifically to view one during peak times, I’ve seen nothing.
With that pessimistic opening, I can say that
Still not over
When the weather wasn’t bad, I was tied up, and when I had free time, the weather was terrible. Plus, the terrible weather was enough to take the leaves from the trees in most places. Thus, the autumn color season danced away from me this year, but I think it avoided a lot of people, so I’m not going to feel too badly about it.
So when the clear skies and my availability finally synchronized
Monday color 40
For this week’s Monday color we have a variety of milkweed flowers (family Asclepiadaceae,) looking somehow unreal, possibly due to the heavy haze light conditions. Milkweed species have a wide range of colors, from white to pale pink to deep orangey-red, but so far I have found none that seem to have orange flowers with this magenta center, so this might be a hybrid.
Logistics, logistics
I said in the previous post that more would be coming “in a day or so” after I worked out some details. “Or so” apparently means “five days.” However, that’s nowhere near how long I’ve been waiting.
Back in 2010, I snagged a pair of images of a small unknown insect, one that flew away before I could do anything detailed, and this was before I had the
A preliminary image
Just a quick preview image, trying to beat up Monday color (posting in four minutes.) More coming within a day or so while I hash out the best methods.
EDIT: It helps if I’ve changed the blog time to reflect daylight savings bullshit – I was only 57 minutes too late ;-)



















































