A friend of mine in Kansas (you know, the one who won’t go to a water park,) wanted to one-up me on the frost pics, which is fine, since mine were extremely limited. We’ve always had this minor competition going on since he got into nature photography, a nice motivation to keep improving as
Author: Al Denelsbeck
On composition, part 20: Contrast
I find it hard to believe that I never actually tackled this in a separate post before – I guess I kept thinking I’d done it early on, and have certainly touched on it in numerous posts. But it’s such an important part of photography that it really deserves its own specific, detailed treatment.
First and foremost, and something I teach my students right off the bat, is that photographs
Author Review: Gerald Durrell
A few years ago, I would have skipped doing any reviews of this nature, because the books I refer to had a limited run from American publishers and are nearly all out of print now some of them never actually had a US publication, since the author is British and they were primarily published in England. With the internet, however, it is now possible to find just about any book,
Dearly departed
A friend of mine has maintained a saltwater aquarium off-and-on for several years now, and she tends to find some pretty cool species to occupy it. She related this story to me a couple of years ago, and having been reminded of it recently, I’m obligated to feature it here.
She had, not long before she related this tale, obtained an exotic crab species for her tank, a colorful addition, and
Breathless
After about 36 hours of rain, the clouds cleared yesterday evening and the temperature plummeted, so early this morning was “crisp,” as they say when they don’t want to say, “goddamn cold.” It meant I finally had the chance to do some more frost pics, though the winds had carried many of my preferred subjects away. Most of the moisture left by the rains
Just because, part 13
Taken back in August, I was playing with the perspective of the dewdrops up close and going unfocused into the ‘distance.’ I knew I would get the spider in the pic, but didn’t know the metalwork of the porch risers would show up in the flash as well. Since it continues the curves started by the web, this is an accidental composition that probably worked out better
A (supposedly) fictional conversation
[The location: A dark room somewhere deep in officialdom, drifting smoke obscuring the light from a single table lamp because, if you’re going to do something like this, you have to do it right.]
Shadowy Figure #1: You know something? This president is really a pain in the ass!
Shadowy Figure #2: Boy, you said it! It would be so much better with him out of the way, because he’s
Well, now
What you’re seeing here is the view from the top of the world’s tallest waterslide, dubbed Verrückt, now under construction in Kansas City, KS. With nothing in there for scale or comparison, it’s hard to get a decent grasp of the size – a wide-angle lens will automatically make everything look more distant, and drops more precipitous – but
Bully for you!
I have a list of topics to address in posts someday, and within them is one about the difference between bullying and criticism. I was reminded of it with a recent interchange between Jerry Coyne and Deepak Chopra, and so…
Deepak Chopra is the shining god of the pseudoscience, new age, mystical reality, mushrooms-lead-to-higher-consciousness crowd, a guy who trades on his MD to try and convince
Clueless
I have a project I’m working on that requires a little airbrush work – nothing serious or fancy, but I’ve found that a little cup would work better than a complete siphon bottle at times. I don’t have the little cup, so I started looking online for it.
Courtesy of the arts & crafts & stupid dried decorative shit store called simply, ‘Michaels’ (because