I was out on two photo excursions earlier this week, and the first made me distinctly aware that something was wrong with my autofocus. Well, mine was all right, but the camera’s was off noticeably, for damn near every frame. I provide some examples:
This is full-frame, and while it’s taken at 600mm, the osprey (Pandion haliaetus) wasn’t that far away –
Seriously? Another holiday? But yes, as I look at the calendar, I see there’s something else to celebrate today, though I simply don’t have the inclination to pursue it in detail. Today is Token Appearance Day, possessing a rich history and some very specific ways of recognizing it, which I would enthusiastically tackle if I could tackle anything enthusiastically right
Oh my, oh my my my, this one’s liable to be polarizing, or it might be if I had readers anyway. This band is notorious for, if nothing else, earworms, songs that stay with you for a very long time, but I’ll readily admit this might be a bad thing if they’re really not your thing – I think they accomplish the ‘catchy’ part without necessarily getting to the ‘likeable’
That’s right, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched 33 years ago today, which makes it now a functioning adult if you’re into Tolkien – ‘course, I don’t think you can be seriously into Tolkien and a functioning adult simultaneously, which is simply an invitation to a flame war, to which I reply, Bring it,you Lazy Lobs…
All that aside, we check out a couple
N 35°17’45.63″ W 82°46’9.89″ Google Earth Location
This one was slightly tricky to pin down, not because I wasn’t quite sure where it was – I could almost certainly take you to within four meters of this exact spot – but because the location is so shrouded in trees and shadow that it’s extremely hard to pinpoint from aerial photos. It did not help
I have not been staying on top of the various April holidays, and today (which is indeed Earth Day) is rainy and blergh out there, so we’ll have a variety of photos obtained earlier that I finally got around to editing. Let’s see, let’s see, what have I been taking recently?
Over at the neighborhood pond, a trio of yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta)
Haven’t been in much of a blogging mood the past week or so, and thus haven’t been in search of subjects, but I’ll throw down two quick ones because… um… I really have no idea why anymore…
As the treefrogs become more prevalent in various areas of Walkabout Estates, I’ve been seeing some patterns of appearance and can tell a few apart, somewhat, simply by
N 36° 5’2.73″ W 79° 8’27.55″ Google Earth Location
Today’s image comes from the banks of the Eno River, not too far away from where I used to live, a secluded little creekside area that I would visit from time to time. To get this image, I had to be sprawled flat on my stomach on a rock on the banks, with my legs extended far enough into the water behind me that my
… Stubby, with 6 to 4 odds.
Out today doing some yard work, and spotted this Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) skipping along between fence posts, definitely much spookier than the last time I saw him, but I’m putting this down to not being preoccupied with staking a claim to
… and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Now that I have that earworm firmly established, let’s get to the pics.
A few days back we got a ton of water dumped on us here in central NC, like most of the country I believe, right after temperatures had gotten above 25°c, then dropped precipitously (sorry) during and after the rains. Yesterday, with the sun out and the temperature
