You think I could let the end-of-mear/yonth abstract go by like that? Not hardly!
Moreover, this is quite current, having been taken today, so deal with that! You know you can’t! And we gots that color in winter thing going on too, practically assaulting your eyes.
A handful of us (if you’re missing a finger on that hand, anyway, and if you consider a ‘handful’ to be defined by how many fingers and not how many could actually be held in that hand, which would be ‘none’ unless you count only portions that we’re not even going to examine,) paid a visit to the Greensboro Science Center in, of all places, Greensboro, NC. Curiously, I ended up shooting a lot more video than still photos, so while you’re getting a selection here, the more interesting captures will come later on after a bunch of editing, which will include deciding how much of the esoteric background noises (mostly kids saying the damnedest things) will be retained.
The last visit that The Girlfriend and I paid to the Science Center was long ago, pretty close to this time of year, but it was in relation to their hosting of Bodies: The Exhibition (which was fascinating, and in fact, the second place we’d seen it,) and I don’t think I’d lugged the camera along because they didn’t permit it within the show. Our briefer visit to the animal exhibits afterwards were thus photo-free, which is a small shame – worse, however, was not returning in well over a decade. Greensboro is not that far away, so we will be rectifying this long lapse more often, I believe.
While we saw activity from plenty of species, many of them weren’t displaying or even visible, which is typical of zoos, and so return trips are necessary if you wish to get good examples of most of the residents. The Science Center has many indoor exhibits and a decent aquarium, so plenty more to see than the sample that I’m showing here, but most of the indoor stuff I didn’t even bother opening the camera bag for, knowing the anemically low light would only introduce slow shutter speeds and thus plenty of blur. I also have to point out that most of the aquarium exhibits featured rounded glass, and there’s no way to get decent photos without horrendous distortion through that; some of them were even faced with giant magnifying lenses, which was great if the subject in question decided to be centered, but otherwise was easily capable of inducing motion sickness just in passing. Cylindrical tanks are fine to let a large number of people view species at once, but distortion is omnipresent, and hexagonal, flat-sided tanks would be far better.
They have a few species there that are hard to find in other places (like, hundreds of kilometers away,) so we really should have been visiting more often. I’m just nagging myself now.
Anyway, that’s four more images to add to the year’s total, which isn’t going to beat last year’s (exhorbitant) number, but takes a firm second and isn’t a bad showing for all that – 971, I believe, so, yeah.
Happy New Year, all, and enjoy yourselves, but responsibly! (I sound like a mother, don’t I? That’s what getting old does to you, but I’m this old by being responsible, so I’m living proof of the benefits. Probably not the best way to convince people, come to think of it…)
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Species seen above, in order:
American or Caribbean flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber
Indian peafowl (commonly just called, ‘peacock,’) Pavo cristatus
Aldabran tortoise, Aldabrachelys gigantea
Komodo dragon or monitor, Varanus komodoensis
Of course, immediately after saying that, I present a weed that I’m not bothering to look up, but it has a pretty cool slate blue color. This was enhanced a bit by the lighting conditions, since the camera was still set for sunlight though I was shooting in open shade by this point, so the original image is tinted by the blueish light that results. Thus I tweaked it, at right, to be closer to what the colors looked like in white light – still fairly blue, but a lot closer to grey – they remained distinctive because there wasn’t a hint of brown therein, unlike virtually every other dried flower or seed pod, or leaf or stem, in the landscape. Might have looked pretty cool in a dried flower arrangement, if you’re into that kind of thing. Notably, it was not a mantis egg case, which is what I’m into, so I did not collect any.
But then, while I was playing in the editing program, I took the color-corrected version and slammed the Saturation setting against the stops, which is rather abusive to such precision programming though there are times when it’s necessary. Or maybe not. But since the image wasn’t too saturated to begin with, the effect is not as cartoonish as it would be in many other images, and is actually kind of pleasant in color. Plus it gives me another image to upload for the year, which 
So whatever you celebrate, or even if you don’t, take advantage of the holiday and kick back, be mellow and froody. By the way, I read somewhere that some people’s cats have been affected negatively by the lockdowns, not at all pleased with people being around the house all day, but Kaylee here is just the opposite; she’s quite happy with attention anytime she desires it, and gets a little antsy when The Girlfriend has to be away.
