The other two

I told you this was coming…

The Girlfriend and I did a brief trip to Jordan Lake a week back, just checking out conditions before it turned cold (again) – there really wasn’t much to see, and the light angle was wrong even if there had been, but I did a quick snap of the pine pollen turning the lake edge into something from a horror drama.


That’s not one of read more

April must skedaddle

Nobody skedaddles anymore, do they? It’s becoming a lost art. Maybe I’ll start a school…

But it’s the end of the month, and you know what that means. No, not fresh underwear day – it’s the end of the month abstract, begun through a trivial coincidence and continued through sheer lack of originality and good sense. Today we have…


… to read more

Pining away

I was asked if I was going to do a post regarding the pine pollen this year, and I considered this kind of redundant and basically said, Only if I get something remarkable. And now, I’ll let you decide, because damn, it’s been a heavy year. North Carolina is virtually read more

March timeses on

… or something like that. It’s end-of-month abstract time, is what I’m saying.


Our abstract here is a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) that I’d waited until the light was bad so the shutter would drag, and captured it on takeoff – this was all carefully planned to appear like impressionist brush strokes, y’ see. Really.

And another, because I got two that I liked read more

On this date 13


This week, we’re going back just three years, partially because this image shows typical conditions for the season, which is the deluge of pine pollen that occurs. Those are the little yellow specks all over the main subject, which I am taking to be a short-tailed ichneumon wasp (Genus Ophion) – that seems to be what BugGuide is indicating, though their read more

It’s all behind us now

As I said, I have a handful of photos from 2018 that never made it to posts, plus I might add a couple more from even earlier that have just been sitting in that folder – dunno yet, we’re still in the first sentence. And yes, I know you’ve probably had it up to here with all of the “Let’s look back” shit that’s all over the place, but what do you read more

March abstract is here, and it brought a friend


I pretty much knew this was going to be the month-end abstract as soon as I took it – with the caveat, of course, that I might find something better afterward, but here it is, so you have a tiny insight into my photography outings. I don’t suppose this is too hard to figure out, but it’s pine season here and the fucking pollen gets all over everything, and it floats. read more

No choice but to go green

Or, kinda chartreuse.

It is that season here in NC, when the wretched longneedle pines are shamelessly engaging in an arboristic orgy. Dissatisfied as they are with the rather gauche and needy technique of relying on pollinators like bees and butterflies, pines instead fling their emissions wantonly throughout the air, firmly believing in the concept of quantity over quality. If you fire enough rounds, read more