The grey hours


Nature photographers are all familiar with the ‘golden hours,’ times right around dawn and dusk when the light conditions are often highly conducive to great photos. That is, when it’s not rainy or overcast of course, but fog – that’s another thing. It’s hardly golden, but it can be a great element in photos. Yesterday morning as I was read more

Greasing up the ol’ camera


Okay, don’t do that. All I was referring to was actually getting out to do a bit of shooting (like, over 400 frames) when I’ve been doing almost nothing for the past few weeks. Both students that I had to cancel out on last weekend when I felt like crud had been rescheduled for this weekend, when we had some surprisingly cooperative weather, so I was able to chase some read more

The cosmic ballet goes on

I had intended to post this earlier, but life got in the way, mostly in the form of an illness that caused me to cancel out on two students this weekend. ‘Tis the season…

Anyway, there is a cool event going on tomorrow (Monday, December 7th) during daylight hours, one that may be worth going out at a specific set of times to try and see. Venus is going to pass behind read more

Too cool, part 29: Flatulent Enceladus

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a masterpiece of subtlety, belying the fascination to be found in one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus is a small frozen satellite, actually a thick crust of ice over what is believed to be a global ocean atop a rocky core. In other words, a hard center suspended in a ‘water’ read more

November’s abstract (a day late)

Dammit, I meant to post this yesterday, and forgot all about it. I’m disappointing my legions of readers…


While I’ve had it in the back of my mind to maintain this new ‘tradition’ of posting an abstract at month’s end, it hasn’t worked out for every month. But I knew this one was in the running the moment I saw how it had turned out. With read more

Thursday color

Just a few pics without a lot of explanation, because they don’t need it. Two are fairly recent, and one has actually been seen before, dating from May.

Two weeks back, I was at the nearby pond watching what the sunset colors were doing when the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) departed, though a handful of them circled the pond at low level, honking loudly – I can only surmise read more

Macro photography, part nine: Changes

For the past two and a half years, I’ve been using a specialized rig for macro lighting, one that produced dependable and pretty damn good results. But it was not to last. The Sunpak FP38 flat panel flash is a surprisingly neat little package, but like everything that I ever really like read more

Good help is hard to find – sometimes


While looking up details for an earlier post I came across a curious trait of this particular species of assassin bug, and decided I’d like to try and get shots of it in action. I have been too lucky lately, and thought this luck might hold, but alas…

Pale green assassin bugs (Zelus luridus,) seen in several recent posts, are spindly little insects usually measuring less than read more

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