Or, kinda chartreuse.
It is that season here in NC, when the wretched longneedle pines are shamelessly engaging in an arboristic orgy. Dissatisfied as they are with the rather gauche and needy technique of relying on pollinators like bees and butterflies, pines instead fling their emissions wantonly throughout the air, firmly believing in the concept of quantity over quality. If you fire enough rounds,
If you’re thinking these are just more pics left over from the previous post, you’re wrong! (Boy, I enjoy that way too much.) Instead, we had another electrical storm roll in right around sunset, mostly well to the south, when the sky was still too light to do time exposures. I had considered trying for more shots once the sky got dark enough, but the front
I was just about to go to bed when I heard the soft rumbling, and went outside to note the flashes in the sky, from all directions that could be called, “west.” I came back in and pulled up this lovely site I stumbled across, a real-time lightning map. From that, I could see the bulk of activity was west-southwest
Not too long ago, I picked up a simple USB microscope, primarily to see if it could be used to capture insect behavior. There has been no opportunity to try that out yet, though I suspect with the extremely short depth of field, my selection of subject matter is going to be rather narrow.
In the interim, however, I thought I’d check out how it worked on the Triops, restrained as they
After my failed attempt to hatch them late last year, I purchased a packet of eggs online and tried again a few days ago, this time actually producing several examples of Triops – click on that link for more basic info. I have been told this is a Triops newberryi, a less-common
I’ve been a little busy with various projects, which have kept me away from blogging, as well as failing to inspire any new topics or allowing me to tackle some of the posts in draft form that have been biding their time. So, for now, a few quick images from the past week.
On an outing on Tuesday, the same one that netted the image from the previous post, the
This is one from today that I just had to toss up here quickly. This is not a composite, or Photoshop job, or anything of the sort, but straight out of the camera. Almost, anyway – I did a slight color tweak sue me. But I honestly wasn’t expecting results quite like this.
Here’s what you’re looking at. These tiny bluet flowers (Houstonia caerulea) were growing from
There are a few photographers that are doing this technique now, which not only requires high magnification, it demands a pretty specific layout, the water droplets having to be positioned just right near a distinctive subject (usually a flower blossom.) Only, it’s pretty rare to find something that can suspend a near-globular water drop at the right height to capture a flower
Actually, you can run if you want, and you may, because the image above is the least icky – it’s all downhill from here. You should know I don’t say that lightly…
What you’re seeing here is the larva of a green lacewing fly, family Chrysopidae, bearing the typical camouflage for this time of year, which is a nice coat of lichen – the background surface
If I’d been more on top of things, I could have posted this the day I took it, which was Saturday, and thus only been a day later than the equinox and slightly more, I dunno, appropriate? Timely? Whatever, this is a nice illustration of spring, better than I originally believed, even. I think it’s fairly obvious how narrow a field of view this is, capturing a tiny section