Month: June 2016

A change of plans for my Eastern Sierra trip took us through Yosemite National Park Monday morning.  I’m exploring the Eastern Sierra with my photography buddy Richard and Dave, a  mutual friend who is teacher from the Canon Digital Learning Center.  We left the Sacramento area at 3:30 AM (driving my Lincoln MKZ —AKA “N FOCUS”—on its first road trip) and reached the Arch Rock entrance to Yosemite by 7:30 AM.  A short drive took us to Cascade Falls, which is  now a spectacular raging torrent fed by melting snow and which, by August, will be a mere trickle.

I was reminded Sunday that Bobo hasn’t been featured in my blog for a while.  Here she is in all her glorious colors!  I used my new Nikon SB5000 speed light for this shot.

I took this shot of a canoe docked at the edge of a walkway at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm using my 600mm lens.   I had been photographing egrets and spoonbills and when I swiveled my camera around behind me, I saw the empty canoe.  I made a few adjustments using Silver Efex Pro to give it an old film look.  Although it’s probably not immediately apparent, that is the tail and right rear leg of an alligator at the lower right of the photograph.  Maybe that explains why the canoe is empty.

 

While in St. Augustine, FL, I photographed many great egrets in various stages of preening and in various stages of breeding plumage.  Not only do the great egrets grow long elegant back feathers in breeding season, their nares and eyelids  turn a brilliant green.  While this great egret preens a cascade of long feathers, its eyelid partially closes, shielding the eye from the sun.  I’m not sure about the anatomy of egret eyelids.  It appears that the eyelid closes from the bottom of the eye instead of the top of the eye.  I suppose that’s because they plunge their heads under water after prey and it protects the eye better with that structure.

I did a double take when I walked back from the mailbox Thursday.  My live oak was sporting some new growth on the trunk but these leaves are about 10 times the size of the tiny live oak leaves.  On closer inspection, the leaves aren’t new growth from the tree.  This small tree is growing from an indentation on the trunk of the oak where a branch was removed years ago.   At first I thought it might be another kind of oak but based on the shape of the leaves, I think it’s a fig, probably planted there by one of the scrub jays who plant acorns everywhere.  What the fig?  I know one of my neighbors has a fig tree so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

The midday light filtered through the tree on the leaves was quite pretty and I grabbed my D5 with the 300mm lens already attached and went back outside.  I wasn’t happy with the first shots I took so I tried again a few minutes later but by then, the beautiful light had changed to a very flat light.  I added a chiaroscuro filter from Topaz Impressions and it magically  created the same gorgeous light effect.

I had company for dinner Wednesday night and with no roses in bloom in the midst of our current heatwave, I clipped a few handfuls of lemon thyme which was in bloom and I thought would look nice on the table.   I pulled the thyme leaves off the bottoms of the stems and dropped the stems into pint cream bottles.  The pile of tiny leaves on the counter suddenly moved and from beneath the pile emerged a small praying mantis, itself about 1/2 inch long.  Of course I ran for my camera.  It took a few minutes to get my macro lens on and then to find my table top tripod  so I was surprised to find the little creature still where I’d first seen him.  But, the sudden appearance of the camera (what do they see with those eyes?) seemed to concern him and he climbed everywhere over and under the leaves and then onto the granite counter surface.  I had a hard time manually focusing on the tiny moving creature who would disappear frequently, camouflaged by the leaves.  I didn’t change any settings (my bad) so the shutter speeds were very slow and the depth of field was extremely shallow.   I did manage to get a couple of marginally in focus head shots before I felt such guilt that I herded the praying mantis onto a piece of paper and took it back outside to the thyme plant.

The prairie dog pups are irresistible.  These two were especially cute together .  I managed to capture one as he finished his prairie dog “wave,” a gesture that occurs with regularity in a prairie dog town.