Thar she glows

That was terrible, I admit it…

As comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy has been getting brighter, we’ve had zero visibility here, until tonight. I went out and did some searching with binoculars, finally locating it, then brought the camera equipment out to give it a shot. read more

Friends with benefits

I’m not surprising anyone when I say humans are a social species, both from the biological definition and from our own self-description. But it goes further than that – we’re socially-influenced and socially-dependent, meaning we make a really stunning number of our decisions based on how we feel others will respond to them, often without any other consideration at all. This isn’t read more

On composition, part 23: Weather


Let me be up front about this: when the weather turns nasty, it is rare that I’ll be out in it, any more than the next person, and I don’t make a habit out of many of the practices I’ll be talking about here. So don’t take this to be preachy or anything. But if you find yourself itching to get out and chase photos but blocked by weather that’s read more

Checking off the list

[Repost of original posted January 5, 2015, destroyed by hosting failure.]


I have a lot of little things on a mental checklist to get images of, experiments to try, and items of that nature. It’s 2:30 am as I type this, having just come back from attempting one, the results you see here.

These are all moonlight shots. A low pressure system pushed through recently and brought a lot of rain and read more

Insufficient

[Repost of original posted January 4, 2015, destroyed by hosting failure.]

This one’s just for fun, mostly, but hopefully will provide a bit of perspective as well.

Arthur C. Clarke once offered his three predictions for the future, which came to be known as Clarke’s Three Laws, and the third is fairly frequently read more

Oh, that’s not funny

I noticed earlier today that the blog was coming up with database errors, and while I could log in, a lot of data wasn’t showing up. My WordPress is hosted on a domain that outsources their database hosting, and WordPress (the ‘local’ files) was working while the data itself was missing, so it was pretty obvious that this outsource was the one having the issues.

After several hours read more

Call it therapy


In years past I’ve done a gallery of my “Best of the Year” images, or various shots I’d edited for blog use but never posted this year I’m doing something different for the year’s end. Largely because the weather has been dismal around here, and much the same for large portions of the country – indeed, probably most of read more

Still getting out occasionally


Despite the weather and the holidays, I do still get out to do some shooting now and then, even though the pics in this post were from… jeez… ten days ago. These were taken, with one exception, at a botanical garden during a halfway-decent day. Above, a pintail duck (Anas acuta) provides a dozing pose as the cloud cover thickened up.

While UNC’s Botanical Gardens are dedicated mostly read more

How not to be a conspiracist

While this post was sparked by some recent discussions (it’s that time of year, or at least, it was a little over a month ago,) what I talk about here is quite common, and I’ve seen it all over and over again. So, I figured it was time to address it again.

“Conspiracist” is defined as someone who believes or promotes a conspiracy theory. Which means that my use of it herein read more

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