One day four years back, I was checking out the neighborhood pond and noticed something slightly odd about a tree at the head of one portion of the trail it seemed to have some dry leaves adhering directly to the trunk, which of course is not where you typically see leaves hanging. Had it been anywhere else, I likely would have passed it by without even noticing,
Category: Photography
Three moons
Just posting three photos from a recent trip (which I’ll cover in detail a little later on.) I thought the comparison was worth seeing. They are from August 8th, 10th, and 14th.
These are fairly good illustrations of why shooting a moon that is less than full can look a lot more dynamic. You get great shadows and textures from a slightly oblique sun angle, and the results just seem more real.
The
A pattern I haven’t determined yet
Out last night poking around in the backyard, for the first time in days, I came across a green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) – gratifying, because I’ve been trying to convince them to hang around in the region, but curious nonetheless because I haven’t seen one here since early spring I thought the Copes grey treefrogs had pretty much taken over. I didn’t
Storytime 34
I’m not even going to tell you what you’re looking at here I’m simply going to let you puzzle it out on your own, given the visual clues within. Then you can tell me the story behind it.
Oh, all right – since you’ve read all this way, which certainly puts you ahead of most webnauts anymore, I suppose I can fill you in. Except, not entirely, because I no longer remember
Storytime 33
Today, we have a reminiscence of a reminiscence – or something like that. What you see here is “Silver Bridge” on the railroad spur that crosses Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in central New York, which is where I grew up. Or passed my adolescence, anyway – we won’t discuss how little I’ve actually grown up. It’s known as Silver Bridge,
Just because, part 31
Another quickie, as threatened. Given that I found this itty-bitty treefrog sitting on the upper rim of the same rainbarrel that had produced a previous photo subject, I’m going to hazard a guess that it emerged from the same source, the rainbarrel itself,
Just because, part 30
I occasionally get the chance to snag a pic or two, but not a lot of time to write up anything at all about them, so I’ll present a couple of ‘Just because’ posts this week. In this case, it’s a cicada, of an unidentified species, that I found molting into final instar (reproducing adult phase) while attached to the tire of the car that I was working on.
Stormy season
Just a quick note, but there’s another meteor shower peaking soon, this time the Perseids, supposed to reach maximum on the nights of the 12th and 13th. I tell you this mostly to point out that, yet again, the moon is going to be too bright to make much of them, being damn near full those nights. I’m going to have to sit down and calculate how often either a) the moon has been too bright,
Storytime 32
This week we have something commonly called a comb jelly, but more specifically called a ctenophore (silent ‘c,’) because it’s not a jellyfish and in fact pretty far removed from such – it’s in a phylum all its own. I found one by accident in Florida one time, because they’re so completely transparent that I didn’t even spot it when I was
Haven’t broken that cycle yet
You know when I mentioned earlier that not a lot of things were going right? Yeah, still at it.
We’ll start with a photo outing with Mr Bugg, intended to chase birds and the sunset, though I already suspected the sunset wouldn’t be too fascinating, since the sky was completely free of clouds. We had several good passes from vultures and osprey, but for reasons unknown, the autofocus on



















































