Can’t be smug

The snowstorms that have hit the northeast have completely passed us by here in NC… or had, anyway. Tuesday morning it came in with a vengeance – thick clumps of snowflakes packed together like schoolgirls on the way to the ladies room, but considerably quieter. I ventured out for photos, but had to keep the camera covered with a towel almost the entire time it was in hand. The snow read more

Freezing my balls

As New Horizons draws closer to Pluto, it’s starting to send back some really detailed images of the distant dwarf planet, including this lovely shot of dawn over its frozen surface.

Okay, that’s an outright lie. You’re looking at something that I’ve wanted to try since I saw it online last winter, and we’ve gotten the conditions necessary for it now. This is a soap read more

Under the wire

So, in a post on August 10 of last year, and again on August 13, I mentioned a trip that we’d taken that I was going to feature “shortly.” Given that there is no firm definition of this word, I maintain that I still made this deadline.

Also, I had waited for both The Girlfriend and a friend who had traveled with us to forward me some of their own images to feature, which never actually read more

Tanks for the memories

I really have to stop doing stuff like that with the titles…

As a section of the photo gallery shows, while I lived in Florida I ‘maintained’ a small saltwater aquarium – not exactly intentionally, and certainly not in the way that aquarium enthusiasts do. Instead, it was born simply from finding critters read more

I can still do a bug update


While the weather has produced a few cold snaps and the trees are progressing into their autumn colors, the arthropods have gotten harder to spot, but can yet be found. Above, a jumping spider (genus Phidippus) saw me coming and took refuge in a shelter it had created within a rose blossom, presenting a significant photographic challenge – this is the best I could read more

Expectations

Several days ago on my birthday The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog, with notable forethought, presented me with a Triops hatching kit. Triops are a peculiar critter sometimes called ‘tadpole shrimp,’ they are freshwater crustaceans of the order Notostraca, and their eggs are one of those types that can sit dormant in dry sand or soil for years, only to hatch read more

Worse than Speedos


So, I was testing out a new flash attachment (not quite what I was after, but still functional) when I came across this little guy, quickly identified as an Enoplognatha ovata, but you probably said that the moment you saw it. You likely also know it’s a male, because that detail is kind of hard to miss, seeing as how it’s displayed in those boxing gloves right read more

Nothing escapes!


The other day while doing some work on the deck I spotted a tiny spider, only a few millimeters long, and as I observed it for a moment I got this freaky focus problem while looking at its dark eyes. Having seen this before, I captured it for a quick photo session.

This is a very young magnolia green jumping spider (Lyssomanes viridis,) notable in that it is one of the few species where read more

The long-awaited mantis update

Posting is still slow – I’m finding a lot of my time taken up with other things, boring things from a blogging perspective – but I’m trying to keep up with images at the same time. There will be another post featuring various arthropods coming shortly, but for now I’m going to focus on just one.

One of the many mantises that had inhabited the Japanese maple has now switched read more

On composition, part 22: Distortion

A fundamental part of photography is focusing light onto the recording medium, be it film, digital sensor, or even our own retinas. And the method used for doing this the vast majority of the time is a lens, a transparent substance with a certain index of refraction – the trait of bending light when it passes through the surface of the substance. Put the right correct surface angle read more

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