Living in the past XV

Al Denelsbeck

Mecaphesa crab spider in defensive posture
Another from 2014, I always liked this direct portrait of a minuscule crab spider (genus Mecaphesa) – I went back to the original post to find that she measured 6mm across the legs in this position, which doesn’t make her a whole lot bigger than a tick.

Then I looked at the date, which was familiar, and thought, Is this the last arthropod photo that I took at the old place? Because we moved to the new house the day following, or over the next few days anyway. So I went back and checked through my stock; the answer is no, but close. The last was this (previously unpublished):

juvenile Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis on azalea after getting misted
This batch of Chinese mantids (Tenodera sinensis) had hatched from an ootheca right on this very azalea bush and I had been following their life cycle, so I was determined to collect a few and bring them along with us to the new place and continue monitoring them. Except that the very next image in the Arthropods 4 folder was this one:

juvenile Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis on Japanese maple tree at new place
This was taken on the Japanese maple tree alongside the front door at the new place, about the same size as the previous mantis shown, so there had been a hatching there too, and I figured I’d leave the others at the old place and just work with these. Moreover, it’s the same Japanese maple that has appeared in dozens (if not hundreds) of images here over the past 9 years.

I mentioned the Arthropods 4 folder; I limit them to about 4,000 images to make them easier to skim through, and I’m up to 7 now. The Arthropods 3 folder, however, contains images solely from October 2012 to August 2013 – easily my most prolific bug period. Someday schoolkids will be required to know that…

Tripod holes 48

Al Denelsbeck

This one’s for Mr Bugg, who is likely to be pretty damn close to this spot in about a week or so.

yellow-crowned night heron Nyctanassa violacea seen through foliage in JN Ding Darling National wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida
N 26°27’10.73″ W 82° 7’33.94″ Google Earth location

Accuracy? I sincerely doubt it. But I was somewhere along Indigo Trail in JN “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida when I took these frames, and that’s close enough, especially since this bird is unlikely to still be there 28 years later. I was on my first dedicated photography trip alone, though my second visit to Ding Darling – I’d visited the year before with friends – and was hiking the walking trail looking for critters. A then-unknown bird species was calling out across the marshes and, after spotting it in the treetop, I stalked it carefully, pausing every handful of meters to take another frame in the certainty that it would notice me soon and take flight. Yet it did not, and within a couple of minutes I was directly underneath it – there was zero chance that I had successfully maneuvered so close without it being aware of my presence, so apparently it just didn’t care. After securing some nice frames, I brashly imitated its call.

yellow-crowned night heron Nyctanassa violacea looking directly at photographer in JN Ding Darling National wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida
And this is what I got in return: the yellow-crowned night heron (Nyctanassa violacea) fixed me with an evil glare and held it, which I have to say is the only time I’ve been so honored. It’s easy to imagine what was going through the bird’s head and virtually guaranteed to be absolutely wrong; the best I can say is that I either did more than a passing imitation of its calls, which demanded close examination to determine that there was no actual interloper on its territory, or (more likely) I was only close enough that it was confused as to what was making this inept attempt. Regardless, I took advantage of this with delight.

And then after a moment or three, the bird looked away again, dismissing me as inconsequential. I have to note that this was taken at 260mm, since that’s the longest lens I had at the time, and while cropped, I was only a handful of meters from the bird’s position, quite close as far as wildlife photography goes – the first frame at top is uncropped and taken while I was still further off. But my proximity was no matter – the bird had more important things to tend to.

yellow-crowned night heron Nyctanassa violacea back to ignoring photographer in JN Ding Darling National wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida
I want to point out that the species does not have an orange stripe along its jaw at all; that’s simply a leaf in the way, visible in the second image too. What’s funny about this is, I still consider Ding Darling to be a great place for photos, but when looking for examples as proof, I have nowhere near as many frames as I do of other locales. Truth be told, I’ve been there four times, I believe, and two of them were remarkably unproductive; the last visit with The Girlfriend (in 2009, damn) has so few frames I could easily argue that it’s a poor choice. Yet my first fartistic gator shot came from here, not half an hour before these, plus some raccoons, plus some fartistic lizards, so, hit-or-miss, but when it’s a hit, it’s a big one. That probably says enough.

Living in the past XIV

Al Denelsbeck

I threatened to do this, and it was not a mere bluff – I’m going through with it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

[Well, there probably is, but let’s not go there…]

contrast and selective focus
We’re back to revisiting some of the images from years past that I particularly liked, and this one certainly counts – dating from 2014, it’s been a part of a gallery show, and resides on the main site, and has even been converted to monochrome. Moreover, the effort in achieving it was minimal – I think I had to be in a slightly awkward position to get it, but it was right outside the door one cool and humid morning and the light was right. ‘Course, knowing that it might look great with extremely short depth-of-field was all skill, baby…

Actually, I recognized the potential, but the result exceeded my expectations – not exactly a happy accident, just a nice bonus. Of course it deserves to be seen again.

Here’s why, part 6: Psychic abilities

Al Denelsbeck

This is a rather broad topic with no real consensus on what it includes, so it’s likely that anyone could either fault me for not covering something, or accuse me of lumping disparate concepts together. Overall, however, the same factors will apply to most or all of them, so let’s dive into, “Why doesn’t science take psychic powers seriously?”

The short answer is, such things have been tested repeatedly and extensively, and have come up sadly lacking in any actual impact. There are two key factors in such tests, however, which are double-blind testing and functionally-defined results. We’ll do these one at a time.

Double-blind testing is a common method of determining results of tests that can be influenced too easily by human perception and/or desired results. It’s been used in testing medicines, in that even the doctors prescribing the medications don’t know whether they’re issuing the actual medicine or an inert substance, and the patients don’t know the same; only those tabulating the results have access to the guide that reveals the truth. In this way, the subjectivity of either patients or doctors in evaluating the results is reduced to a minimum. With psychic powers, this method is often used by refusing to reveal what, for instance, the actual cards have on them that the test subject is attempting to guess, or even that the proctor of the tests doesn’t even know what they’re trying to find. Without this, the possibility arises that someone who wants to believe in psychic powers can interpret the results with bias, or even influence this – which leads to the second bit.

Functionally-defined results refers to an unambiguous and distinct set of goals, with little room for creative interpretation or ‘close’ results. One example that comes to mind is a test subject, asked to determine the target held in the mind of another subject, naming a ‘parade’ when the target subject was, ‘July 4th.’ There are a lot of reasons for a parade, and July 4th doesn’t rank as one of the more prevalent examples of such, but more to the point, where’s the value in having a perhaps-close-but-not-very-specific answer when resorting to psychic abilities? If I can’t remember ‘July 4th’ in conversation and say instead, “You know, parade day,” how many guesses would anyone have to provide to get it correct? And if I fail to confirm any answer, what then?

[A small side note that came from some of my researching on the topic: useful scientific results aren’t demonstrated just by the publication of a paper – initial results can easily overturned, papers retracted, to say nothing of the ‘pay to publish’ journals that exist. Confidence comes from peer-review, and especially replication; can someone duplicate the results with the same conditions and standards? This reflects the bit above regarding bias in researchers. Always look for review and replication before putting any confidence in any scientific studies.]

Other factors come into play, such as leading the test subject, usually unconsciously, sometimes not so much. The classic case of Clever Hans, many decades ago, revealed that a horse that could supposedly do advanced arithmetic was actually only reading the subtle physical cues of the owner and those running the tests – a horse, mind you. Unable to see the person posing the math problems, or worse, presented with problems that the person did not know the answer to, produced a sudden case of typical horse intelligence. Anyone experienced at reading the body language, the “tells,” of someone running the test can produce results well above random chance, especially when such tests often have very narrow choices that are already known to both. Inexperienced testers often inadvertently help the testees along, by answering questions that they shouldn’t or prompting for more details only at key times.

This of course leads to cold-reading, an extremely well-known, and well-understood, tool of countless public psychics. The field is broad with a lot of aspects and I would encourage anyone to look into it deeper if they want a full treatment, but in essence it is a method of allowing those seeking answers to actually provide them to the psychic. For instance, the psychic may ask if someone in the room knows someone whose name begins with “J.” A moment’s thought reveals this doesn’t narrow things down very far – we all know someone, usually in our immediate family, whose name starts with “J.” With a positive answer from an eager audience member, already primed to believe, the psychic then begins to narrow things down by guessing at names: James, John, Jack, Jerry, and so on, with the audience member virtually always confirming it when the psychic finds a match among these ridiculously common names. Once the reader has a ‘match,’ they can then proceed with providing vague, feelgood assurances that the recipient and audience somehow never notice is nonetheless more specific than “a name that begins with ‘J’.”

But with the common tricks of the psychic out of the way, let’s talk about the issues from the scientific side:

Somehow, the psychic lacks knowledge of matters that could be truly informative, lucrative, or life-saving. Any true psychic could make millions with no effort simply on the stock market, no clients necessary. They also would be remarkably invaluable when it comes to warnings about natural disasters or violent attacks – it’s actually hard to imagine that such abilities wouldn’t be utilized in thousands of ways in thousands of different functions, military and law enforcement being the prime candidates. And while it’s true that some psychics do occasionally offer their services to local police to help locate a missing person, it’s also quite easy to see how infrequently this has the slightest effect – not to mention that their input before the person went missing would have been hundreds of times more useful.

Psychic predictions demonstrate causality. This is a big one, because at the barest minimum it suggests that events are, for want of a better word, ‘planned.’ Whether this is through the determinism of physics or the will of some god(s), it’s still a earth-shattering thing to know about our universe. And it also raises the biggest issue with causality: is this fixed or is this changeable? Science fiction writers have examined the ramifications of this ad nauseum, including the number of flaws, but somehow this is glossed over entirely by psychics. I mean, forget which goddamn card I’m holding up – which treatment is going to be effective for my cancer? Shit, when’s the best time to travel this holiday? Where and when are the criminals going to strike next? C’mon, Aunt Agnes, let us know something important.

Moreover, how, exactly, are these future events recorded, and thus able to be read/sensed/divined/whatever? Videotape? Clay tablets? Radio transmissions? The implication is that events that have not even come to pass somehow emanate something detectable and specific, able to be discerned among the literally infinite events that the future holds. That sounds like a damn noisy environment. And what about the past? Do these records fade when they happen or something, because I have yet to see a psychic clarifying all those sketchy details about past historic events.

Communicating with the dead proves an afterlife, but who cares about who’s at peace there? Religion is one of the biggest contentions on the globe, and has been for centuries. Let’s have some solid answers about all this. Which religion is correct, and what can we expect after we die? How are you sensing anything without physical sensory organs, and what are the parameters? How boring is it? Have you talked to the folks in charge, and if so, what do they say? Seriously.

[I’ve already tackled the idea of non-corporeal souls earlier, so go there for a more in-depth treatment.]

The physics isn’t kind. [I know, switching back and forth so often between ‘psychics’ and ‘physics’ is cruel, and I’m one of those that can miss the distinction from reading too fast.] Brains are simple fats and proteins and a lot of water, and the energy with which they operate is remarkably tiny; this is the source of the ‘green jello’ problem with electro-encephalograms. Yet somehow, they can both send and receive distinct patterns of ‘thought’ across vast distances including, apparently, from brains that are no longer operational – that’s how psychics are supposed to find dead bodies, right? I mean, even if they ‘see’ them they have to know where to look in the first place? Yeah. But if this were indeed the case, the entire environment would be absolutely jam-packed with the emanating thoughts of everyone else in the detectable radius, and we’re all familiar with how rapidly thoughts progress and vary – to call this ‘noise’ would be a vast understatement.

We have the senses that we do because they’re what won the evolutionary lottery. And certainly, being able to sense the intentions of any living being in the immediate vicinity could be extremely useful – but the vast majority of us don’t have that, do we? Even if psychics are a genetic mutation, it would imply that they could come to virtually no harm whatsoever. Weakly supportable, perhaps, for the living psychics, not so much for the dead ones, but note that this should also prevent simple accidents and injuries, ‘bad luck’ and crummy days, and of course, all of the negative press that’s ever received. Any time a psychic makes an incorrect prediction – more on this in a second – they should have already known it was incorrect and how bad the repercussions would be, and avoided all that entirely. Yeah.

There’s this thing called ‘confirmation bias.’ The internet has not been kind to psychics. Before, someone would have to root through newspaper archives and perhaps even tapes of morning talk shows to find the various predictions that psychics made that were dead wrong, but now finding such things is easy. And such mistakes are plentiful – it’s almost as if psychics ascribe to the idea that if you throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick. Those sticky bits are the ones that are referred to as evidence of the psychic’s prowess, somehow ignoring all of the stuff that they should have known was wrong in the first place. Anyone can be right 100% of the time with such methods, but the real world (and especially the scientific community) takes into account all of it – no cherry-picking. When these are counted, the amazing results fade very quickly.

Oh, the excuses. One could disprove psychic ability just by listing all of the excuses for incorrect predictions and failures to operate, and realizing that there is no pattern, rhyme, nor reason to them. Again, why didn’t you see that ‘negative energy’ coming? Even if you can’t play the market because ‘your powers can only be used to help people’ (and who told you that?), we’re still looking at a lot of disasters and terrible events that were missed entirely, when they should have had a remarkable impact on that pre-recording of events. Even if we consider that such powers or properties are sporadic and capricious, this means that they have exceptionally little use to anyone.

If you look, you’ll also notice that the caveat, “For entertainment purposes only,” appears an awful lot in regards to published psychics (and astrology, and so on.) It would appear that a lot of psychics attest to their remarkable abilities, but not to the point where they’ll legally stand behind them. No guarantees, no money back, let the buyer beware, you were the sucker that bought into it.

But what about the police using psychics? A legitimate question, but one with a lot of baggage. ‘The police’ is/are not a single entity, but a collection of law enforcement agencies for individual districts, guided by individual officials. The vast majority have nothing whatsoever to do with psychics, and I have yet to come across any that routinely utilizes such. Psychics often volunteer their services in high-profile cases, with often terrible results, and officers that don’t automatically dismiss them are considered to have some confidence in their abilities – you see the flaw in thinking here. On occasion, police departments let the psychics do their thing from a) there being no harm in it (they’re not being charged for the services,) and b) they may get accused of not using ‘all available resources’ when trying to find a missing person or something. And one more, that’s come up more than a couple of times: so-called ‘psychic information’ is occasionally from someone who actually knows something about the case, such as a witness or relative thereof, but wishes not to testify or be named. It’s more prudent to pay attention to such ‘readings’ on the chance that this may be the case, than to dismiss them regardless of how badly psychic powers have been proven.

[There was a prominent missing person case where I used to live in central NY, and a psychic popped up with information – the details were incredibly vague of course, mostly attesting that the body could be found “near water,” which it actually was. But not for many years, because depending on your definition of “near,” this applies to the entire state and indeed everywhere in the country that’s not actually a fucking desert. It should also be noted that the missing woman’s purse and driver’s license had already been found within a park bordering the major lake, which had been reported in the news so, yeah, wild shot in the dark there. The body was only discovered by accident, as I said, many years later.]

People believe what they want to believe. This is how psychics still abound, because far too many people want to believe in mystical powers and properties, and listen uncritically to the accounts. They go on the defensive the instant that anyone raises the slightest question, and never, ever raise any questions themselves. Any positive aspect is grasped lovingly, any negative aspect is ignored. The biggest issue with this is, naturally, that anyone who recognizes this kind of behavior and has no scruples can exploit it easily – and routinely do. It must be said here: it takes a special brand of shithead to twist the emotions of the grieving for personal gain.

Moreover, such beliefs contribute to the too-prevalent distrust of science – the old, “Science can’t explain this,” and, “We don’t know everything,” which is true, but doesn’t actually increase the probability of any given concept in any manner. Those who spout such weak little proverbs may be prone to dismissing intelligent evaluations regardless, for myriad reasons, but the number of people who profess to have some kind of extra-special mystical powers, as well as the number who want to believe them, contribute to the idea that ‘there must be something to it’ – while the solid results that we should reasonably expect if there were remain elusive still.

Note, too, that it hardly requires recognition or testing from the scientific community, however you might define that, to establish the usefulness of psychic powers – anyone with such should be quite capable of making their own amazing progress in the world, at a distinct advantage over everyone that lacks it. Doctors didn’t need the investigations or recognition of priests, shamans, or really anyone to actually start healing people.

Or, you know, we could simply ask ourselves where the phrase, “parlor tricks” originated…

But is it an interesting post?

Al Denelsbeck

Today, November 23rd, is Reflect on Anxiety Day, and I’m getting an early start on it because I’m winding down from a stressful day yesterday, and the stresses were rather widely divergent.

The first factor was, I picked up a new photography gig, but something that was out of my wheelhouse, which was/is showroom photography. Not the high-end stuff where items are brought into a studio for the promotional photos that will grace every advertisement thereafter (for which I know I’m unqualified,) but items within a display in a retail store, intended as much to show off the wide inventory of the store as the individual items. Nothing terribly difficult, but not something that I’d done much of before, and even that’s been a long time.

Now, I teach photography, and have studied a lot of different techniques and genres, if you will; there’s a part of me that internally critiques a lot of images that I see for how well they work and what might have been done better. So the job, in and of itself, shouldn’t have been stressful at all, and seriously wasn’t. What was stressful were the imagined expectations – not even what the client wanted, but what I perceived them as possibly wanting, exacting standards and high-end studio stuff. And ‘stressful’ is probably too strong a word, but there’s always a distinct amount of uncertainty when taking on a new job, that I think everyone suffers from, and a certain amount of, ‘Make sure you’re thinking of everything – no fumbles, no silly mistakes, don’t forget the lens cap,’ kind of thing. [It’s impossible to forget the lens cap on an SLR, but I’m from the tail end of an era when that was actually a thing, and I believe I actually accomplished it once, with my old rangefinder camera.]

At the same time, I knew what I was doing, as well as how to express some of the potential pitfalls to the client – things like uneven lighting and cluttered backgrounds that would make an image much weaker. So my confidence and my semi-imagined anxiety were clashing a little – again, nothing serious, but almost amusing in retrospect, after the session when I’d had a chance to settle into my groove, as well as speak at greater length to the client. And as I typed the above portion, the images were downloading from the card; now I’ve done an initial perusal, and I feel even more comfortable. I think I managed to make the store seem much less cluttered than it actually was, and kept focus on the excellent settings that they had. I hate to say, ‘cluttered,’ (here’s that anxiety again – isn’t this fun?), because they did well with the space, but they had a serious buttload of inventory on the floor; call it a clash between the photographer that wants distinct subjects without distractions, everything ideal, and a retailer that’s optimizing the space for sales.

I went through something similar with wedding photography, many years ago. My biggest concern when I tackled it was, ‘Would I be able to interact with the guests effectively?’ I’d never been an outgoing person, never a partier, never an ‘Alpha,’ (stupid term) – much more introverted, quiet, and so on. That’s not the kind of person that works as a wedding photographer. I knew what that type of person was, but the anxiety over that was, ‘Can I be that person? Will the guests recognize me as a charlatan, a poseur?’ Could I even take control of the myriad guests for those aspects that required a bit of direction, group shots and such?

This is where I got my full understanding of, “Fake it ’til you make it,” because I had no other choice. I went into it as if I was the confident, comfortable, commanding-but-friendly presence that I wasn’t – and found out that I was, or at least could be as the situation demanded. And it fed itself – the immediate feedback where people did as I asked and complied without reservations or any visual resentment let me stop feeling anxious about it at all. In truth, the whole judgmental thing, I think, gets instilled in us in school and takes us a long time to get rid of, while adults rarely bother with it; no one really thinks, ‘Is this a real wedding photographer?’, they just assume that you are and everything’s golden. So that’s my tip – it’s probably a lot less judgmental than you might believe, so put that aspect out of your head and be confident in your abilities.

[Another aside: This background-level insecurity still remains with my wildlife photography. I see plenty of work from other photographers that blows mine out of the water, not to mention the various things that I see in my own photos that, ‘could be better.’ So how do other people see it? I mean, I know there’s a huge disparity among viewers, but on average? There’s virtually no feedback, so I’m left to puzzle it out for myself – but at least I know that I should always be working to improve regardless.]

So now the other aspect of stress from yesterday. I was awakened by a phone call from The Girlfriend’s Sprog and her SO, who were stranded on the side of the road (on the way to the airport) when the car died. The first bit was fine: get out there quickly and get them to the airport – full credit to them for having left early, so there was no chance of them missing the flight. The next bit was much more complicated: What was wrong with the car? Could I determine this on the roadside? Could I fix this on the roadside, or would it have to be towed? And the standard bit when working on cars, because I’ve never received the slightest instruction in this at all: Am I evaluating it correctly, and not missing anything? Am I going to make matters worse?

In the middle of this, by the way, was the scheduled photography gig.

Long story short: I discovered the problem without much difficulty, and the necessary part was available not too far away. I only had time to buy it before I was due down at the photo job, so repairs had to wait until that was through. But then they also had to be accomplished on the side of a ridiculously busy interstate, and if you notice, today’s another holiday in the US, so, traffic. Whizzing by a couple of meters away, including from my head as I was poking out from under the traffic side of the car. All of this I consider fully-justified stress, not at all dependent on my interpretations or imagination. One idiot fucking with their smutphone or swerving to avoid another idiot and I was done for, gruesomely. The only other option was to have the car towed, and I consider that a last resort.

It worked out, easier than many repair jobs that I’ve tackled, but I did have to get The Girlfriend’s help with it since portions required two people, and she wasn’t thrilled about this either. Like me, however, she considered it a necessary risk, and we managed just fine – tense as hell, mind you, but successful. We even managed to merge two vehicles into crowded, high-speed traffic afterward without too much difficulty.

But it also meant acid stomachs for both of us that greatly limited our meal choices last night, and waking up sore as hell from the muscles protesting the various positions I’d asked of them. Not to mention that I got absolutely nothing else done yesterday at all. Already behind on my posting schedule.

Tick tock, motherf–

Al Denelsbeck

Hmmmm. For reasons that I won’t go into now, which makes it sound a lot more mysterious than the ridiculously trivial thing that it is, I have a loose goal of completing 40 (now) more posts by December 27th. That’s roughly twice what I’ve been averaging. Not impossible, but not the easiest thing to accomplish during the slow winter season. I’m up for it, sure, but can I do it without resorting to nonsense, filler posts like, um, this one? That remains to be seen.

Now, there are still five more Tripod Holes posts that will come in by that time (which are already written and scheduled, by the way) and the end-of-month abstract (which is not, but I know what I’m likely to do for it,) so that’s six less. I have a couple posts in the planning stages, including a potential podcast, so I’ll push those through. On top of that, I can resurrect the Living In The Past posts that served the same purpose last year. So the density/frequency of posts should go up to not quite one a day – on average, anyway, I won’t say that I’ll keep to that schedule.

But while I’m here, I’ll put up an older image that’s been sitting in the blog folder.

fake moon with almost-hidden schtuff behind it
No, I didn’t overexpose a moon image, but a fake moon instead. This came from this experimental session, but was rejected because of the background. If your monitor is adjusted properly and you look very closely, you can see the fittings of the lightstand that was supporting the moon ornament (this is shot straight down from above) and, beyond that, the boards of the back deck. I do have a black velvet blackout/backdrop cloth, but didn’t dig it out for this – I tend to use it sparingly, because it attracts the cat hair that’s a permanent fixture at Walkabout Studios and it’s a bitch to get them all out. No, of course none of our cats are black.

Anyway, more to come.

Semi-cooperative eagles

Al Denelsbeck

I originally considered them uncooperative eagles, but realized that was being unfair. And then as I type this, I recognize that assigning them any level of cooperation is unfair and a stupid human perspective, because they simply don’t give a shit and are going about their days, but I digress.

These all came from an outing with The Immaculate Mr Bugg… psssfffhh, thirteen days ago now… and I’m just getting to posting them now, partially because it wasn’t a very good outing and I didn’t have a whole lot to say but, you know, regular content and all that. A couple of bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) made their presences known, but not through any significant level of activity. The best was a second-year juvenile, who flew almost directly towards us. Only during the sorting did I pick up on a small detail.

second-year juvenile bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus approaching with tiny fish capture
This is at 600mm of course, and cropped significantly here – this is just shy of full resolution – and so it was quite distant for this frame, but you can see that not only does it have a small fish that it captured, but it’s attempting to snack on it in mid-flight. This is exactly the reason that teenagers’ insurance rates are so high.

As it got closer, it tucked its capture up under the tail hidden away, obviously having no desire to share.

second-year juvenile bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus in profile carrying a hidden tiny fish
We were psyched to see that the eagle flew up into a perch right along the lakeshore just a few hundred meters ahead of us, and we began the slow stalking to bring us closer for a nice photo opportunity.

Now, we were making it a point to only travel a few meters at a time to avoid spooking the eagle, and stop and examine the trees with the long lens frequently – we’d seen where it entered the trees, obviously about to perch, but not the exact location, so we were endeavoring to pin this down. However, this also required watching our footing on the rocks of the lakeshore, exposed by drastically reduced water levels, and when looking through the long lens, the field of view is obviously quite restricted. So despite best efforts, I never saw the eagle perched, and was alerted by Mr Bugg that it had left the perch and was flying back out over the lake, long before we drew very close. Rats.

second-year juvenile bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus still bearing remains of tiny fish as it flies off
Amusingly, you can see that it still has at least vestiges of the tiny fish clasped in its talons as it leaves, somewhat curious since the fish was too small for more than two or three bites to begin with, and the eagle had had more than enough time to polish off such an inadequate appetizer while we had been working closer. Still, this was a much better light angle than we would have achieved had we caught it perched, since that required looking not just towards the sun more, but into the deep shade of the tree canopy, so at least we have these.

Not too long afterwards, I saw a distant adult approaching the tree that held the osprey nest that overlooks that bay of the lake.

adult bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus approaching tree with old osprey nest
This is the same nest that’s appeared here many times before, which sits high above the lake in a tree that’s largely exposed, as well as distinctively shaped. It clearly belongs to osprey, since it’s not only too small for eagles, I’ve seen it occupied for several years now, though this past season I never saw any kind of feeding activity, even during the hectic day that I was down there – my guess is that the eggs weren’t viable this year. Now, eagles can commandeer old osprey nests for their own, but will build them significantly larger, and it won’t take place at this time of year anyway. Thus, I think we’re just seeing the eagle using a nice vantage and nothing more.

If it could even be said to be a vantage.

adult bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus hiding within foliage around osprey nest
This tree is visible from a large portion of our stalking grounds on this bay of the lake, so it’s easy to keep an eye on, though usually from a distance. Again, this is at 600mm and cropped significantly, but I recall that I could just barely make out the spot of white within the branches by naked eye, only because I knew I should be looking for it.

[I find “naked eye” to be an overused and annoying phrase, but as yet haven’t found anything that conveys the same concept so easily. I’ll work on it…]

A little farther along on our return path, the eagle was now out a bit more prominently, but it had been present for nearly an hour and was showing no signs of leaving or hunting or anything. Again, at least the light was right.

adult bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus perched more visibly in tree by osprey nest
When we were about to leave the area to make another failed attempt at sunset colors, on a lake branch that faced the sun better, we detoured slightly to a spot that would allow us to see this tree from a very short distance, which should have given us a nice view of this eagle, though it was nowhere to be seen when the tree hove into view. Did it see us coming and spook off? Had it simply gotten tired of hanging about and left of its own volition? We have no idea.

I didn’t do much for fall colors this year, but while down there, I took advantage of what could be found in the immediate area.

bald cypress Taxodium distichum trees in autumn colors against ugly old loblolly pines on Jordan Lake
The bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) turn a great color this time of year, offering some nice contrast against the ugly and ubiquitous pines. These trunks are normally in the water, but as I said, the lake level is way down. As I type this, I realize something: this particular body of water isn’t actually part of the lake, separated from it by a narrow bridge of land – that’s the shore on the left here. However, this bridge floods routinely during heavy rains and runoff and so this becomes a part of the lake, for a few days at a time, and the bridge is manmade anyway, the former rail bed when the tracks cut through. It occurs to me that, while the main body of the lake is controlled in level by a dam at the far end, this pond shouldn’t be affected by that, but it’s maintaining a matching level here – they’re connected somehow, just not visibly. It might simply be the porosity of the sandy soil that forms the bridge, though I would have though that a rail bed would be a whole lot more structurally stable. Curious.

And finally,

lone gumball among autumn colors of American sweetgum Liquidambar styraciflua tree
The American sweetgum trees (Liquidambar styraciflua) also turn nice colors in the fall, though no particular vantage point gave me a better working distance, so I went in close instead, isolating the gumball. I’d say I at least made an effort, but I don’t think you’d buy that. Two other images from this outing are better, though you’re not going to see them until the end of the month, so you’ll just have to contain yourself until then. I know it’ll be hard…

Why, yes – yes I did

Al Denelsbeck

I don’t know why I did, because the results were as expected, but I made the attempt again early this morning to capture some meteors. It was, at least, quite clear.

night sky exposure showing Cassiopeia and Andromeda galaxy
Not a glimmer of shooting star in there anywhere, nor did I see any no matter where I looked. So I boosted ISO to 6400 and just did some night sky exposures of this nature – but this is the funny thing: the narrow dynamic range of any photo means you can only get so bright (white) and no brighter. This means the brightest stars reach maximum exposure quickly, but then the dimmer stars catch up to them in a longer exposure and can end up obscuring the ‘visible’ constellations and asterisms. Cassiopeia, a prominent ‘M’ shaped constellation standing by itself in the sky, has become almost totally obscured in this frame, slightly frustrating because I was specifically framing to get it and the Andromeda galaxy into the frame here. Though the faint Milky Way, which wasn’t visible, shows a little detail along the right half of the frame, so you pick your battles, and I probably could have set an exposure to capture Cassiopeia largely as it appears, but then Andromeda would likely have disappeared – I know I had a hard enough time trying to spot it, and I knew where to look. That was the point of my doing this framing, because the higher ‘peak’ of Cassiopeia points to Andromeda, more or less. Here’s a marked version:

night sky exposure with Cassiopeia and Andromeda marked
The five most prominent stars of Cassiopeia are marked in yellow, while Andromeda is found within the red pointers. This is shot a little wider than a ‘normal’ view, which would have placed them right at the very edges of the frame, but basically, find Cassiopeia and you know how to locate Andromeda, though it may take binoculars and it will still be very faint.

I did make an attempt at Andromeda with the 600mm lens, but my focus was slightly off. Moreover, really nice definition would take an exposure of significant length (or a much faster lens at least, but that would probably not be sufficient by itself,) and in that time, the Earth turns, the sky moves, and Andromeda blurs sideways – it really requires a tracking motor to stay on target. One of these days.

I also played with Orion and his dog, briefly.

night sky exposure of lower half of Orion with Sirius peeking in at corner
I was trying to balance framing to get Sirius into the picture, as well as capturing a little of the Orion nebula, while not getting too much motion blur into the frame – this is as close as I got. Now we’re a bit closer than ‘normal,’ but Sirius, the Dog Star and the brightest star in the sky, is there at lower left while the bottom half of Orion is at upper right – the key stars are still prominent, but you can see how many dimmer stars surrounding them have appeared in the longer exposure now. And yes, there’s a hint of the Orion nebula forming a faint haze around the ‘dagger’ stars, though really, the entire region is rife with reflecting dust and gases that it takes a lot more effort to capture in an image, or even see. Just so you know, this is a nine-second exposure at ISO 6400, f5.6, and 42mm focal length, and I did perform my sensor-noise removal trick afterward. This seems a little complicated at first, but once you’ve done it a couple of times, it takes less than a minute to accomplish and helps a lot.

One more, for giggles.

night sky exposure over Jordan Lake with Jupiter in upper right corner
I said above that Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, which is true, but some of the planets can exceed that easily – that’s Jupiter at upper right. While it looks like cloud cover down on the horizon, I’m fairly certain it’s just atmospheric humidity, catching the light from distant Sanford, NC (I think.) My view east and northeast was also stained, but by Durham’s light instead – this isn’t a good area to escape light pollution, but the best I have within easy reach. And that streak left of center is not a meteor, but a mere airplane instead – they were exceedingly hard to avoid, and I don’t think I’d spotted this one until it got a little closer.

But yeah, that was it – not really worth the trip.

Tripod holes 47

Al Denelsbeck

American alligator Alligator mississippiensis lurking under thick duckweed in pond, Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge, South Carolina
N 32°14’36.57″ W 80°46’9.83″ Google Earth location

On our way to Hilton Head Island many years ago, we found ourselves passing right alongside Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge, and stopped to do a quick tour. Nestled within the marshy wetlands of the coastal islands, it was brimming with a large variety of shorebirds and waders, crabs, and of course these guys: American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis,) though this is quite a small specimen. Several species of waterfowl were herding their new offspring around in the pools, and while we were there, we could hear a mother – moorhen, maybe? – bringing her brood close to the edge of the little island within this pond, though we couldn’t see them at all. The gator heard them too, and cruised silently over to the very spot on the shore of the island whence came the mother’s calls, waiting patiently for their appearance. So was I, because I’m happy to catch anything feeding, or indeed most kinds of wildlife behavior, but a gator especially. Yet nothing happened, possibly because mama was smart enough to know that the coast was not clear.

I have mixed feelings about this visit, because while we saw countless aspects of wildlife in pretty decent conditions, this was when I was still using slide film for the ‘important’ stuff, but most of the slides have a horrendous color cast to them that’s difficult to correct. I’d say it was a bad batch of film, except it’s on multiple rolls, and I kept my film refrigerated until use. I’m inclined to believe, then, that it was processing error, but it meant very few keepers from the trip, and between this and the increasing difficulty in even getting film processed, it spelled the end of my film days. I still pine for the colors and vibrancy of Fuji Provia 100F and Velvia, which digital has never been able to approach, much less duplicate, but between my associations with the lackluster results from this trip and the bare fact that no one seems to recognize those differences, staying with digital seems to be the best move, or at least not more than trivially reductive. Though some of my former results still beckon…

More local “news”

Al Denelsbeck

It’s about 7:30 PM right now, only a little chilly, with clear skies, unlike last night. Will I go back out and make another futile and disappointing attempt at the Leonids? The answer, may surprise you. But first, let’s check in with what’s happening on the Estates.

Well, what was happening, five days ago to be precise – these are all older photos. But they’re newer than some others that will be posted soon, which is very important for you to know. Somehow.

Japanese maple tree on Walkabout Estates, with not-too-hidden occupant
The average temperature has dropped, but we’re still getting some pretty warm days with the nights only dropping low on occasion. The Japanese maple out front displayed some nice color, and within that time I spotted a little occupant. I shot wide here for context, but certainly went in closer, because you know I had to – it’s like a curse.

juvenile green treefrog Dryophytes cinereus on Japanese maple tree
I keep expecting these guys to find their winter hidey-holes, and yet keep spotting them in various visible locations during the day, though I suspect at least some of them have decided that it’s time to pack up for the year. This juvenile green treefrog (Dryophytes cinereus) was perhaps a little smaller than the top joint of my thumb, so less than half of adult size, and hasn’t been seen to return since that day. Unlike the next ones.

two green treefrog Dryophytes cinereus taking advantage of adjunct greenhouse
Due to neither The Girlfriend or I knowing what ‘restraint’ is, we have overflowed the original greenhouse and had to ‘construct’ a second one, that I call the adjunct greenhouse. This uses the back wall of the shed and the back fence as structural elements, and largely consists of plastic sheeting, but it can hold the various plants that need to be protected from a hard freeze but otherwise can go dormant for the winter. It works actually much better than I expected and can get toasty inside fairly easily, despite not being airtight, and the treefrogs have discovered the charms of it, yet they seem to favor being right at the very edges where the benefits are minimal – I guess they know what they’re doing. This flap of plastic serves as the ‘door,’ tucked in around the ladder that hangs back there, so I always have to check carefully before I pull it aside to enter. They’re both adults, with the top one being a good-sized specimen – tucked in as seen here, roughly 45mm in length and 30 in width, give or take.

A short distance away on the gate, this Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) had shifted away from me warily, then appeared to grab a 12-second power nap.

adult Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis snoozing briefly on narrow tree, showing color variations
Really, it had just dodged off of the gate as I approached, acting quite concerned about my presence, then immediately closed its eyes as I leaned in, like I was going to believe it was asleep and not up wrecking the bedroom well past its bedtime. Moments later it opened its eyes again and surveyed me judiciously, but I wasn’t moving then and it no longer appeared concerned – as much as I’ve watched them, anole behavior still seems a bit random at times. What I was after here is the coloration, though, which I suspect might be in transition between a darker, more heat-absorbing color for basking, and the green hues that help it blend in to the various plants; to my eyes, this appears to be occurring within individual scales rather than as ‘regions’ around the body. Makes me think I could train them to produce distinct patterns, maybe spell out advertising for the site? Let me think about this – forget you heard anything.

And finally, a quick pic from the proper greenhouse.

serious crop of lemons on tree in greenhouse
I’ve been monitoring these all year, so I’m 95% certain that all of these lemons were ones that I pollinated personally back… shit, I thought it was February, but it’s just shy of a year ago, once again in the greenhouse. In the intervening time they’ve been outside enjoying the sunlight and warmth, natural pollinators and the rain and, when the rain wasn’t sufficient, my own routine waterings (from the rainbarrels, asshole,) and while the lemons grew bigger, they never did more than turn just a little more yellow. Put them in the greenhouse in late October and boom! it’s about harvest time. People that actually know about growing citrus are likely shaking their heads at my ignorant antics, but hey – we were never after any kind of agricultural pursuits, we just liked the trees. And the limes are coming along fine too, while the avocado pit that we planted about 18 months ago is now a proper sapling over a meter tall and still putting out new leaves in there. I can’t say it wasn’t worth the effort to put that cheesy little greenhouse in, at least.

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