Cut out for me

Alex Wild of Myrmecos (sidebar,) and Compound Eye at Scientific American, has announced that he will feature any “Best of 2012” sites from science & nature photographers in a post at Compound Eye. There’s already a nice collection of links, so check them out!

While I usually skip the whole “best of the year” stuff and rarely get engaged in rating my images, I figured read more

Humidity and challenges


So, The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog had a volunteer engagement at the North Carolina Museum of Life & Science in Durham, so I tagged along to kill time at the museum, because I hadn’t been in a while. As you may have already surmised if you’re exceptionally quick, the museum has a butterfly house.

For a working nature photographer, such places can be nice, but not necessarily read more

Just because, part seven


Just a quick one before the day closes, an image I got this morning while trying (and failing) to capture a bird in a treetop illuminated by the first orange rays of the sun. I had turned towards the sun peeking through the trees and was dodging back and forth, hoping to find something perched that I could silhouette against the light. As I moved about, the nearby holly bush caught read more

The days of yore, part two

Okay, so, I had this idea a couple of weeks ago, to feature an image from the summer solstice on the day of the winter solstice – kind of a callback to nicer weather, and a reflection of that little archive list on the sidebar, right? Yeah, so, first, I had to stick to digital images, since over a decade of slides in my stock are only dated by the month and year I got them developed, so no read more

Minor updates

While I pay no attention to the news, I’m still hearing about the impending winter storms across much of the US, and this coincides with one of the posts from two years ago in the sidebar. So, while I was doing some of the year end updates on the calendar and such, I decided to add two pages to the Tips Gallery. Should you read more

Changing perspective


I just find this amusing. The Girlfriend, like probably 85% of the world’s population, isn’t terribly fond of bugs, most especially not the big ones. But she’s watched me pursue numerous arthropodic subjects, and still finds fascination in the details revealed from macro work.

The net result of this is seen here, what I’m fairly certain is an Acanthocephala declivis, read more

Frustrations, part eight: Where is it?

There’s not going to be anything insightful hidden within this post, I’m just writing it out because I’m hoping it will be cathartic.

First things first. I’m actually pretty good about being able to find some place on a map that I’ve been to years before, based largely on the general landscape and my memory of how I’d arrived, and this even applies to little unplanned read more

Macro photography, part six

I had to go back through my images to peg down this time frame, but ten weeks ago, a green lynx spider (Peucetia viridans) created an egg case on one of the flowering fronds of the pampas grass in the yard. I kept checking on progress, looking for spiderlings, but never saw anything, read more

Amateur naturalism, part five

While I’ve covered some details about specific types of animals in the previous posts, I’ve been slow in getting back to some overall tips that apply to all of them, so with that in mind, let’s talk about behavior.

Years ago I worked at a humane society that, among many other things, offered obedience classes and sport training for dogs, as well as some counseling on behavior problems. read more

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