First off, a brief but appropriate celebration.
Woo hoo! Hot damn! Who da man? I da man!
In short, I have just repaired one of my lenses, and it’s working perfectly. The lens in question isn’t one of the old manual ones that I fiddle with off and on, and have repaired many times past, but a complicated modern one: the Canon EF-S 17-85mm 4-5.6 IS USM. Those last bits mean
“Oh, boy!” you say, “Al’s finally done a trip to Australia [pronounced “Olls-TRAYYLL-yer” of course] and is going to feature something truly exotic for a change!” But no – Al’s still too strapped for cash to pull that one off (damn expensive mics,) and didn’t even leave the backyard for these. What I’m referring to
By about this time in the past few years, I would have posted roughly four thousand mantis pictures. I am definitely behind those numbers this year, so let’s see if we can rectify that.
To begin with, I was super-prepared this spring, having ordered a bunch of Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) egg cases – called “oothecas” if you want to get technical or simply confuse
Remember when I said, on last year’s trip to North Topsail, that I hardly did any insect photography at all? Of course you do – forgive me. This trip was about the same I might have fewer than ten more insect images over what I got last year. This is one of them, taken the grey morning of our last day there after an overnight rain, and I decided it
So first off, let me just assure you that we did get outdoors for National Get Outdoors Day (which was Saturday) – The Girlfriend and I took the kayaks out on Jordan Lake for a short excursion. “Short,” in part, because we’re still not conditioned to long kayak trips yet, but also because I had to be at work that afternoon. It was good to use the
I’ve made two mentions of it now, but on a particular day last week I really and truly got out and did a little shooting – not anywhere near enough to make up for the poor showing in the first quarter of the year, but more than, say, nothing. And then the following morning I got some more, with both days contributing to the recent
Running a day late on this one, partially because I didn’t start it earlier and got busy, partially because I forgot what day of the week it was (weird schedules can do that to you.)
For this gripping episode, we have… eggs. Eggshells, mostly. I suspect the scale is pretty apparent, but they’re attached to a reed on the edge of a lake in Florida, so I’m going to say they’re
So last night, when the weather was reasonably warm, I went across to the nearby pond to see what I could find. I had two primary things in mind, knowing they were likely stirring by this time: frogs and fishing spiders. With the possibility of water snakes. Of the first and third, I saw no signs, but the fishing spiders were available.
A quick note: The easiest way to find spiders
Herewith I begin another semi-regular topic, though I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to aim for weekly or not. But for each of these, I will be featuring one of my earlier digital images, thus the ‘ancient lore’ bit – we’ll be stirring deep into history here, going as far back as 2004! That was actually before I’d purchased a digital
I’ve had a small handful of posts (how many is that? What do posts mass? How many fit in an average hand?) in the works for several days, trying to get enough time to sit down and work on them, so this is evidence of them to some extent – there’s going to be a lot of photos in this one. But some of that is due to conditions, too.
It is perfectly expected to be mired in the lingering