On a sunset outing to Jordan lake almost a week ago, we had clear skies – not ideal for sunset – except for some haze down on the horizon – not ideal for birds, which were pretty much the only thing that we saw. The majority of those were more distant, which put them down lower and thus against the haze, so most of the backgrounds for this post are going to be
Tag: black vulture
Thin but long
I don’t watch a lot of movies, for various reasons, but one side effect of this is that I’m not influenced by the common associations created by such. I’m not spooked by dark, quiet forests at night, and I find nothing at all mysterious or foreboding about fog it’s pretty damn cool, in fact. I’m still watching for conditions that I got one night decades
Four birds
Hmmm, it’s 5:09 AM with the next On This Date post set to go at 6:00. Can I do it?
On a slow outing yesterday, we nevertheless found a few subjects to shoot, and you’re about to see most of them. We’ll start off easy.
I mentioned earlier how little impact
The golden hour
You know, poetic license is all well and good, but you’d think photographers could be more specific and descriptive. The periods where the sun is low on the horizon are usually called the “golden hours,” but the colors are often not just gold, and spend more time in the various orange hues than yellow or gold. We could have the amber minutes, and the saffron, the
You wanted to know
“Hey, Al,” started the thousands of e-mails I received the past couple of days, more-or-less-kinda (which means absolutely not,) “how come you haven’t posted anything for almost a week? This is prime season – why aren’t you out shooting?” Though no one nearby actually asked that (no duh,) because they knew what the local conditions were like:
We got birds
Boy, howdy, we got birds
These are actually from several different shooting sessions, and the first here is from May, a grab shot as a red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) cruised by near the sun – I just liked how the feathers turned out, though this gives a rotten impression of the actual coloration. I’ve had this sitting in the folder for a couple of weeks
On this date 4
Today’s feature comes from 2013, and is somewhat appropriate because these two are waiting to feast on the decaying remains of the blog.
Okay, it’s not that bad – it’s just a typical winter slump, and overall a bad time to chase photos for myriad reasons, free time, weather, and fighting to get over a sinus infection among them. But in comparison, I already have more posts
A little winter activity, part 1
Okay, technically, these are all fall photos, because they were taken before December 21, and because we’ve really only had a couple of overnight frosts while still having days with decent temperatures, but it looks like North Carolina winter around here, and the critters are largely behaving as if it is, so it counts within the realm of nature photography, okay?
Anyway, getting a few more
Just imagine if I’d had more time
Insofar as illustrating a manuscript goes, this image isn’t a very good fit, but I happened to like it and it was among the first images that I got for this session, so here it is. This is a black vulture (Coragyps atratus) looking down on us suspiciously as we slipped in underneath.
The “us” in this case is The Girlfriend, The Girlfriend’s Sprog, and I, and the locale is
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