So, what is it?
I’ve had this experiment in the back of my head for a while now, and tried it last night. What you’re seeing here is Sirius, otherwise known as the Dog Star or the Dog’s Nose, and the brightest star in the sky. As a quick aside, for some reason many people think Polaris, or the North Star, is supposed to be the brightest, which would be handy but is far from the
… but it’s better if you find it on your own.
North Carolina doesn’t really see ‘winter’ as many people imagine it – honestly, it’s pretty boring – but we do get cold spells from time to time, and went through one a few days back, after some heavy rains. Things that had collected water were frozen over, and in some cases nearly solid, so I took the
I got out the camera to chase a particular subject, which disappeared on me, so while the strobe was still charged I decided not to waste that electricity and went looking for something else to photograph. Yeah, I really do think that way sometimes, though if I do find another subject, I’ll fire off a lot more frames (and flashes) than if I simply discharged the capacitor
Just playing around the other evening while the holiday lights are up, trying a bunch of experiments. The raindrop on the lights was a subtle touch – while I’d like to do some shots against a nice layer of snow, that’s always an iffy thing at this latitude. I may annoy about half of the people in the country with this, but I was shooting in just a t-shirt (or is
When you spend all spring and summer tracking the praying mantids that have hatched and taken up residence locally, naturally you want to see the whole cycle, and that means the production of the egg sac as well. Of course, they’re not inclined to do this for an audience, so a bit of luck is involved, luck that I did not have this year. I watched one particular female
A friend of mine in Kansas (you know, the one who won’t go to a water park,) wanted to one-up me on the frost pics, which is fine, since mine were extremely limited. We’ve always had this minor competition going on since he got into nature photography, a nice motivation to keep improving as
I find it hard to believe that I never actually tackled this in a separate post before – I guess I kept thinking I’d done it early on, and have certainly touched on it in numerous posts. But it’s such an important part of photography that it really deserves its own specific, detailed treatment.
First and foremost, and something I teach my students right off the bat, is that photographs
After about 36 hours of rain, the clouds cleared yesterday evening and the temperature plummeted, so early this morning was “crisp,” as they say when they don’t want to say, “goddamn cold.” It meant I finally had the chance to do some more frost pics, though the winds had carried many of my preferred subjects away. Most of the moisture left by the rains
Taken back in August, I was playing with the perspective of the dewdrops up close and going unfocused into the ‘distance.’ I knew I would get the spider in the pic, but didn’t know the metalwork of the porch risers would show up in the flash as well. Since it continues the curves started by the web, this is an accidental composition that probably worked out better
It’s been a slow couple of weeks for finding topics of interest for some reason, which hasn’t helped with my resolve to top the number of posts done in 2011 (2012 was well short, and I’ve already passed that mark.) It’s one of those things that I don’t worry about too much, because I’d rather post because there’s something that I want to
