Just a quick one here. I discovered this little lady Thursday night, after the rains had started, sitting up under the overhang of the porch endeavoring to remain dry. The rain continued all day Friday and she stayed in place the way the ground slopes down in the back yard, she was close to three meters over my head, so I had little choice in shooting angles and
Author: Al Denelsbeck
Misfits
Still involved in many other things right now, so here are a handful of images from the recent past that just never got into blog posts, for one reason or another – some of which may become obvious.
First off we have the most recent images from just a few days ago, an unidentified Hemipteran nymph, quite a small one. I am inclined to call it an assassin bug, but so far I have found no species
Monday color 33
I had originally identified this flower as a winter aconite, Eranthis hyemalis, but now I’m pretty sure that’s wrong – the leaves aren’t like that, and no image I can find shows this green translucent ‘berry’ springing from the middle. So if you know what this is, feel free to enlighten me. All I can say right now is that these are tiny flowers perhaps
Well, hello there
Not too long after the various Chinese mantids around the yard molted into adulthood, they dispersed in various directions. I actually watched the rose bush resident fly off one evening, quite possibly to be immediately snagged by a bat – I saw something happen out of the corner of
On composition, part 24: Planning the shot
It’s been a while since the last composition post, so let’s waste no further time and get into planning. Wait, somehow that doesn’t seem quite right…
No matter what the preferred style, sooner or later every photographer gets into planning a shot envisioning exactly how they want it to appear, and then endeavoring to actually bring this out in the image.
Not inspired
Once again, I observe that the posts are thin, which is a shame because I am/was well on the way to a record in number of posts, having already passed the total for both 2014 and 2012 (not combined, mind you.) A lot of that had to do with Monday color, which I’ll leave it up to you whether that should be considered cheating or not. But at best, they added five photos per month to the number
Monday color 32
So, Monday color was originally intended to be only for the winter months because they lacked color and/or subjects to chase. It had come from the overflow of images that I had pre-selected for an end-of-year color post. Since I ended up carrying it through the summer, I figure I’ll just
Convenient mediocrity
“Convenient mediocrity.” I mentioned it in an earlier post, and while it can be found in use here and there, it is not (yet) a common phrase, even if it is a remarkably common property. What it means (for my purposes here, anyway) is maintaining lowered standards because higher ones take too much effort. More specifically, it means accepting lower quality as long as it’s in a cool,
I know you are but what am I?
Some time back I created the ‘Ask an Atheist’ page linked above, prompted by a similar effort elsewhere, to provide anyone the ability to fire away with any questions they might have regarding atheism, secularism, or perhaps just my own personal outlook on some issue. Some time after that, I amended the initial paragraphs to reflect the bare fact that very few people ever bother to try
Stick with fashion
So, right outside the same porch mentioned in the previous post has been a pair of large orb webs occupied by barn spiders (Araneus cavaticus), both females – it was only one for a few days, then another moved in. And curiously, their webs were almost stacked while the centers



















































