I thought I was pretty fortunate to discover a few tiny praying mantises on the azalea bushes out front yesterday, until I went out this morning right after sunrise when the dew still hadn’t cleared…
If you look closely at the top pic, you’ll see a large dewdrop adhering right between the mantis’ eyes. Which means, if you look at the image to the left, that forward bump by
I’ll let you in on a little secret. No, it’s not that I can’t photograph cute animals – that’s pretty damn obvious. This has to do with book reviews. You see, I spend more time on the illustrating image of the book cover than I do on the review itself, largely because I get a concept in my head and try to produce that image, which may or may not work.
In the case of
A friend of mine (yes, I have some, hush) handed this book over to me, because we’d had numerous discussions related to the content while he was reading it – and I was the one who initiated them without even knowing about the book. Anyone familiar with the content of this blog may be forgiven if they suspect it’s about insectivora, but that’s not the kind of bugs we’re
First off, even if you don’t like spiders, you really need to check out this video, an extremely well done collection of jumping spider behaviors. This comes courtesy of The Dragonfly Woman. Even though I’m embedding it here, I encourage you to go
Aw, c’mon! Some titles you can’t resist!
This jumping spider (genus Phidippus, perhaps a Phidippus audax) produced a great pose while I was working with it, appearing to salute with its pedipalp, or maybe shield its eyes form the sun. In reality, it was cleaning its eyes, perhaps trying to wipe away the spots in its vision from my strobes going off right in its face.
I feel bad about this, because I think I should be more in the loop, but this really is the first I’ve heard about it. “Earth Hour” is tonight, between 8:30 and 9:30 PM. As a show of support for energy efficiency and easing our reliance on limited resources, people across the world are shutting down as many electrical appliances as possible for an hour tonight.
Probably not. I really shouldn’t ask questions like that.
In winding down this evening (well, yesterday evening now,) I noticed that a lot of my favorite bloggers have nothing new to post, with good reason. They’re all at the Reason
I know this is a poor showing for National Wildlife Week, but hey, I think every week is National Wildlife Week, so chill. I been busy.
Anyway, in poking around today after staging a few shots for a presentation, I came across this little lovely, in a very typical place for such: on a rock, in a cranny sheltered by a clump of leaves. This is a southern black widow (Lactrodectus
I threatened earlier to return to this if you weren’t good, so you only have yourself to blame, but herewith, a quick tutorial on a method of macro photography called dark field photography.
Most times, this is used with microscopic subjects, which technically isn’t macro photography but photomicrography instead. The essence is, the visible background of the image is dark, yet the subject
When I was in Florida, I maintained a saltwater aquarium in the most casual way possible, by simply replenishing it with water from the nearby Indian River Lagoon routinely. The occupants were primarily porcelain crabs, tiny hermit crabs, and
