Beware the Abstracts of March


Okay, okay, I’m finally starting to get something interesting to post, so more content will be along shortly. For now, we do our month end abstract, a quick exploitation of the sunset colors a couple of weeks ago. They were on their way out here, vanishing completely within minutes, so I was lucky to get even this. No ducks or geese wanted to cooperate and fly off against read more

January’s abstract


If you’re seeing this, it means I’ve failed.

I am committed to continuing the month-end abstract images that I kinda sorta started doing last year, but I really haven’t shot much this month. I did not neglect the winter storm that hit the east coast of the US, but also didn’t shoot a lot of it either, and while I am scheduled to go out on a session with a student today – read more

December’s abstract


I got this one during the same outing as the previous post, but I needed to close the year with another abstract, so here it is. It’s a tight crop from the original, a down feather floating on the pond and sporting some raindrops, taken while perched precariously on the shore. I suspect it did much better with the near-overcast light than it would’ve with bright sunlight, read more

November’s abstract (a day late)

Dammit, I meant to post this yesterday, and forgot all about it. I’m disappointing my legions of readers…


While I’ve had it in the back of my mind to maintain this new ‘tradition’ of posting an abstract at month’s end, it hasn’t worked out for every month. But I knew this one was in the running the moment I saw how it had turned out. With read more

I’ll have to do this in the front yard someday


Wouldn’t it be a great diorama, about a thousand times life size?

For Halloween this year, I feature a jumping spider, most likely an Habronattus pyrrithrix (what a great name,) peering out from around the edge of a dog fennel stalk. I captured this while in pursuit of another subject one evening a few years ago, and the flash angle was ideal to produce the ominous effect with the read more

July’s abstract


Yeah, now I’m feeling obligated

This one’s from not quite a week ago, an earlier morning outing. The sun had finally broken through the foliage and was attempting to burn off the overnight dew that had been surviving in the shade. In the brief time slot where the light was hitting it, before it evaporated within a couple of minutes, I played around with short depth images at f4, read more

Abstract twofer

I realize I started a pattern with posting abstract images on the last day of March and April, then pathetically let this lapse for May. So, for June we will have two.

Neither of these need explaining, of course, so I will end the text here, and simply let the images speak for themselves. Stop raising your eyebrow skeptically – I have not been kidnapped and replaced with an exact duplicate.


Life is not all spiders and mantids


Something to remind yourself when things start to look bleak. Or maybe I’m the only one that suffers from this narrow focus…

Naaaahhh.

Anyway, a brief break for the fartsy stuff, since I don’t do art. Some are recent, some not so much – every once in a while I just have to post a string of images without a whole lot of oral background.

When I’m out with students, I don’t read more

Fighting with abstracts

This one’s going to be a little bit weird. I mean, more so than usual. It started as just an offhand comment, but grew into a strange bit of philosophical inspection.

I recently read, yet again, the journalistic cliché about someone “beating the odds.” Which is complete nonsense. No one ever beats the odds, though they might fall right in line with the odds in a favorable way – read more

Perpetually confusing

Infinity is this curious concept, wide open for misinterpretation, but even in its refined sense, it often suffers from one of the biggest problems of philosophy: we believe that since we’ve put a lot of effort into it, it must be important.

To explain the most misunderstood aspect of it, I’m going to steal brazenly from an article in Science ’82, a now-defunct magazine read more

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