Another interlude


I’m just doing this to break up long strings of posts unrelated to nature photography. You know that means that yet another will be coming up next, I’ve just been taking my time completing it.

Just remember, no matter where you are, an insect may be watching you. Whether they’re judging you or not depends on how mellow they are.

Which makes me wonder what could horrify a damselfly, read more

Are We Alone? (Part Two)


This continues a rather long-winded essay on my part. In Part One, I talked about the idea of extra-terrestrial life from the standpoint of cosmology, the planetary conditions that might be needed to produce it. In that post, I went out on a speculative limb, always a dangerous thing from read more

A brief interlude

The other day I chased a pair of Southeastern Five-lined Skinks as they ventured around the opening of a hollow tree outside my place. I was hoping to catch some feeding behavior, but it was not to be.

However, on examining the photographs in detail after unloading, I noticed that the breeding male (distinguished by his bright red head) had done exactly what I have, far too many times when walking read more

Are We Alone? (Part One)


I’m warning you ahead of time, this is going to be long, as evidenced by the “Part One” bit above, but hopefully it’ll be interesting as well. I’ll do my best.

One of the staple topics of all-night bull sessions, and not just in college dorm rooms, is the concept of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, or to keep it simpler, elsewhere merely in our own Milky Way read more

I’m not sure what happened

So, here’s the scene. Several years ago, I was living in Florida and trying to get steady income, and one of the avenues I explored was working as a wedding photographer. I was working alongside a couple of established photographers in the area doing backup and creative shooting – photojournalistic style, candids, B&W, that sort of thing.

One particular morning, ten minutes before read more

On composition

If there’s one thing that I emphasize above all else in photography, it’s composition. Don’t just take a photo, but put the elements together within it to your satisfaction. This, to me, holds up far more than what kind of equipment you’re using and how technically proficient you are with it. And it’s not an easy thing to teach – I’m still at the point where, read more

The stage is set


A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the concept of staging shots in nature and wildlife photography, and I’m finally getting back to tackling that as a subject. I’m going to attempt to throw some things out there for consideration without inserting too much personal opinion into the mix – we’ll see how that goes ;-)

While I don’t know if it has ever been measured by read more

Happy Birthday Hubble

Twenty years ago today, the space shuttle Discovery carried a brand new telescope aloft into space, to be settled into orbit the following day. And this was a significant delay over plans – the Challenger accident had occurred only eight months before the tentative launch date of Hubble in October 1986, and set its schedule (as well as everything else) back several years.

The telescope was read more

Happy Birthday Ben

As I finish typing this, it will be April 15, 2010. My cat Ben, pictured here, turns eighteen years old.

Well, more or less. Ben is a shelter cat, adopted at roughly two months of age in June 1992. He was born sometime in April it would seem, so I arbitrarily picked the middle of the month.

At the time he was adopted, he was a ghost tabby – a black cat with deep grey classic tabby markings, read more

Things that go burp in the night


It’s been longer than I planned since my last set of posts, and I actually had something else intended this weekend that didn’t work out – basically, my telescope was way the hell out of collimation. For a reflecting scope to work properly, the mirrors have to be precisely aligned, otherwise you can’t get properly sharp images. It’s still not up to read more

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