The bookends of 2019

In past years I’ve done various exercises like (what I considered) my best photos of the month, or a featured unused image, and jazz like that, so this year I decided to do something a little different for the year-end stuff (or should it be the year-beginning stuff? This is far too confusing for me.) To that end, or beginning, we shall be featuring the first and last images taken within this read more

Some winter progress

Okay, here’s the backstory. For some time now, I’ve been thinking of noodling around with photomicrography – photography through a microscope, you know, serious macro work. This requires having a microscope – surprise surprise – and I’ve been watching for one for years, since I wasn’t going to drop the serious money for a new one for something that read more

Per the ancient lore, part 19


Before we go any further, I’ll let you drink this in and try to fathom just what it is you’re looking at. The only thing I will say is, though I cropped it a little tighter to draw more attention to some details, I didn’t remove anything that would help explain it more.

I’m thinking the only things that are recognizable, and perhaps not even then, are the snails, which is read more

Still more Monday monochrome


I’ve been playing around with photo editing, and decided to toss up a few more monochrome images because, you know, the weather’s turning grey and so you’ll want to see… even more… grey… that’s not really making sense, is it?

Too bad, I’m plowing ahead anyway!

Some of these are relatively recent, some of them are much older, but all of them are fantastic! read more

Where’s Aldo?


I should probably let the cutesy titles slide on occasion, especially when I’m reaching…

I mentioned the posts being thin, and this reason for this was that I was traveling – I mean, not the reason for mentioning it, but the reason for the thin posts… let’s leave my poor sentence structure behind and move on. Actually, we’re probably not going to leave read more

Truly, a bug

While redoing some drainage channels around the house, something in the dirt seemed a little too undirtlike [spellcheck doesn’t like that word, but I’ve long since learned that spellcheck is bigoted] so I scooped it up. Lo, it was a cicada, the first I’ve seen in the earlier instar nymph form, the phase that stays underground for freaking years and feeds on tree sap.


Not read more

Breathless


After about 36 hours of rain, the clouds cleared yesterday evening and the temperature plummeted, so early this morning was “crisp,” as they say when they don’t want to say, “goddamn cold.” It meant I finally had the chance to do some more frost pics, though the winds had carried many of my preferred subjects away. Most of the moisture left by the rains read more

Macro photography, part three

I threatened earlier to return to this if you weren’t good, so you only have yourself to blame, but herewith, a quick tutorial on a method of macro photography called dark field photography.

Most times, this is used with microscopic subjects, which technically isn’t macro photography but photomicrography instead. The essence is, the visible background of the image is dark, yet the subject read more

My god! It’s full of snails!


When I was in Florida, I maintained a saltwater aquarium in the most casual way possible, by simply replenishing it with water from the nearby Indian River Lagoon routinely. The occupants were primarily porcelain crabs, tiny hermit crabs, and read more