In comparison


Just a sunset shot from last night. The passing storm had left some clouds in the sky, which haven’t been there at sunset for literally weeks even when we had them in the late afternoon, they’d magically cleared by sunset. Without clouds of some kind, you get no colors and nothing to show the light strata as the sun disappears. It wasn’t read more

Token cooperation

During a recent outing to Jordan Lake, Buggato and I received the barest cooperation from our subjects – enough for them to claim they were doing their part, but not enough to earn any tips over it, you know what I mean?

The animal subjects this spring seem to be slow in getting active, though maybe this is only perception, but I’m more than happy to put the blame solely on them. We saw read more

On this date 26


This week, we’re reminiscing about 2006 (to begin with,) a summer with a series of fierce electrical storms. These growing thunderheads were catching the light of the setting sun, so peaks of different heights and distances were getting contrasting colors dictated by the atmosphere you’ll notice that the very bottoms, and the foreground details, had read more

Another try


So, Monday night I went down to the lake to try again on those focus and tracking tests. The light was again ideal, only this time, it remained that way until the sun disappeared behind the trees. Unfortunately, I saw even fewer birds than before. I may be partially to blame here, since we’re now past nesting season and the adults have much less to do with no babies to feed. read more

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: read more

On this date 19


Don’t ask me why, because I could have done this at any time, but putting together these ‘On this date’ posts serves as a reminder of what was going on in my life at times past, and it’s fun to find little gems to feature. The image above is used in several of my presentations and in a few posts, and I think it might even have been in the read more

A splash of evening color


Just a quick pair of pics, taken less than an hour ago. There will be another post coming, hopefully before the day is out, that has more of those words that you all love so much, but for now, we have color.

And a moon. And if you look closely, Venus. I think it’s Venus.


Yeah, just checked through Stellarium – it’s Venus. You might see it better later on, depends.

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

Branching out


Not gonna say a lot about these, because it’s a little hard to type right at the moment, but here are a couple of pics from Monday’s sunset and Tuesday’s successive sunrise – not too often that this happens for me, except at the beach sometimes. These are both local, however. The sunset above was from Jordan Lake, looking in much the same direction that the read more

Brand spanking

It’s about 2:30 AM as I type this – again, my sleep ‘schedule’ is totally wacked and yet, completely typical for me. And knowing that the posting date will show and that some astute reader may refer to this for confirmation of conditions, I feel somehow obligated to refer to events as ‘yesterday’ even though they were a few hours back and all that. But yeah.

Saturday read more

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