The date of the above shot is unknown it’s a slide, and I know where it was shot but not when. For some reason this slide has no date stamp, though others, from what I believe was the same trip, do, so I’m going with that: August 2006. Down by a boathouse on Hyco Lake in northern NC, these guys were everywhere,
Tag: macro photography
Friday cuteness
Two specimens for you today, both within a couple of meters of the front door – I’m spoiled.
Last night while checking out Walkabout Estates for various nocturnal critters, I came across a diurnal one instead, which made it a lot easier to actually get the shots I was after. This one was camped out on the big Japanese maple right by the door.
Unless you’ve never
More mouths to feed
Luckily, I’m not the one to do it.
I was busy with other tasks this morning and neglected to do my morning check of the mantis egg sacs, but judging from how many were swarming around when I finally did notice this one, they’d probably gotten started in the very early morning hours. Only a couple were still displaying a slight forehead bump that’s the last
Some quick closeups
Last night I did another check at the nearby pond, not just seeing how active the treefrogs were, but also looking for other, aquatic subjects. They weren’t hard to find, but my first surprised me a little.
This is a juvenile painted turtle (Chrysemys picta,) and unless I miss my guess, it’s this year’s brood, judging from the lack of ridges on the scutes
For the time being
What, exactly, does that phrase mean? I mean, we all know how it’s used, but how was it coined? Being what? Can time be anything else? Do we want to know how ‘idiom’ got its name?
Anyway, the point is, I’m going to be a little busy and I don’t know what I’ll be able to produce for a little while, so I’m throwing down (actually, I’m tossing diagonally)
On this date 15
Way back in the shady mists of time, called by some, “2013,” we have this image of an unidentified red ant species. Age has ravaged my memory now, so I cannot recall the exact circumstances, but there’s this nagging suspicion that the nights had been fairly cold when I turned over a rock in the morning and revealed a colony of rather large red ants
Closer than last year
… or the previous one, for that matter.
I’d mentioned earlier that I’d primed the yard with egg cases of the Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) – seven of them, to be exact – and this morning I found the first of them had produced progeny. Unfortunately,
On this date 8
This one comes from fourteen years ago in 2006, with the Canon Pro-90 IS camera and a reversed Olympus 50mm f1.4 attached to the front for extreme magnification – this is what produced the circular vignetting seen in the corners of the frame. My subject here is a common jumping spider in these parts, most likely Phidippus otiosus, and is quite dead, but this allowed
Keeping my hand in
There definitely needs to be a little better planning on our part, meaning we humans, because we have two major holidays that come up in winter, which is good because we need something positive to focus upon as the weather goes hyurgl, but they’re slammed close together towards the beginning of the season (in fact, there’s yet another holiday beating them both to the draw, coming
Supplies are low, outlook bleak
The last couple of months this year have been pretty poor for macro photography, from what appeared to be a bad birthing season to begin with, through a long drought that ended as the weather turned much colder, so subjects have been few and far between, and it’s only going to get worse from here (until it gets better again, but that’ll probably be in the spring.) So



















































