An old rusting refrigerator in the backyard of a neighbor produced many good photographic opportunities recently. Everywhere I looked, different shapes, colors, and textures appeared.
You’ll have to forgive me if you think the title crass. However, it’s appropriate. I’ve recently became the proud owner of Canon’s 50mm Mark II lens. Except for the glass, everything is made of plastic and feels like it might fall apart at any moment.
So why on earth buy such a thing? For one thing, it’s cheap at around $100. It’s also fast (in the parlance of photographers), at a maximum aperature of f1.8. This means you can shoot in much lower light when needed and blur the background to great affect. And because it’s not a zoom lens, it both takes very sharp pictures and makes you work a little harder by moving your feet to get closer or further away from your subject.
I’ve already gotten some fun pictures. (All of these link to larger versions in the photo gallery.)
I really like the sharpness of this garden gnome with the blurred colors of the flowers in the background. I have two more good shots in the photo gallery.
The Bruce is hard to take pictures of. He tends to either get come up to the photographer to be petted and held, ending any opportunities for pictures, or get annoyed and refuse to cooperate. He also moves around lot. So I was thrilled to get one of the better pictures I’ve gotten of him, half in shade, half in bright sun.
Our neighbor has a patch of Indian Blanket that yielded this colorful shot taken in somewhat low light.
Overall, I’m having a blast with the lens and if it falls apart after a few years, I’ve already got my eye on an upgrade.
Don’t you just hate it when your carport gets overrun with an infestation of nightjars? I know I do.
But this is just what happened when I stepped out to the car this morning. The poor thing had gotten confused and was flying upwards, encountering only the hazy image of the world outside through the fiberglass windows.
I knew it wasn’t a Chuck-will’s-widow (they’re insanely large1), but I needed to be certain it wasn’t a Whip-poor-will (a find indeed for west Texas). A quick look in the book (with the bird in hand no less!), and I was satisfied that it was the more expected of the three — Common Poorwill. (Though not my best picture ever.)
Unable to find a box, a frantic search for a suitable transport container ensued. I settled on a T-shirt strategically folded to close the openings. After a short drive through residential streets (forgetting no more than one stop sign), I released it under the bushes at a local cemetery.
1 I was once on a pelagic trip 80 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico when we saw a large dark bird flying low over the water’s surface. For a moment we thought it was a shearwater, but it never glided and no one could figure out what it was. When we finally got close enough, it turns out it was a Chuck-will’s-widow.
So start to things off well, I’ve put up a photo gallery as a penitence for my absence. In March, 2007, I and several others accompanied a friend to Starr County, Texas, where he was conducting research on an endangered cactus, the Star Cactus1 (Astrophytum asterias).
The study involves marking as many cacti as we could find in a quadrat, and then revisiting the areas occasionally to monitor what’s eating the cacti. Other efforts included trapping for small mammals to get a picture of what’s in the area, and using cameras that are triggered by tripping an infrared beam to catch herbivores in the act…
While reaching out to place a flag near a cactus, I noticed an odd rock at arms length. Turns out it was a Common Poorwill sitting on the nest. I had to sprint back to the car to grab my camera, but the shots were pretty amazing.
I’ve put up a handful of pictures of this bird and some other neat highlights from this trip in the photo gallery.
I’ll put up other shots of other trips as time allows.
Another blogger has used (after getting my permission of course) my recent picture of Burrowing Owls that I put up recently.
Says one of the commenters on the post,
Many thanks for the burrowing-owl photo. It brightened my Monday considerably.
It’s nice to see the shot getting wider exposure.
My wife and ventured to southern Colorado for spring break. I’ve finally gotten around to throwing up the pictures from the trip. They’re heavy on Sandhill Cranes in flight. Why? Because literally tens of thousands of these birds migrate through the San Luis Valley and use it as a staging area on their way back north, and the birds are just about impossible to sneak up on when they’re in the fields feeding. So it’s much easier to take pictures as they fly by.
It was really a magical experience. Most cranes in the world are endangered. These ancient birds haven’t coped well to the changes people have brought. And while it wouldn’t take much too see Sandhill Cranes get in trouble, their populations are currently large and stable. Like all cranes, they’re quite vocal and frequently display towards one another by jumping in the air and flapping their wings. In short, they’re sexy.
Other highlights of the trip included a couple of Burrowing Owls sitting in the rain on the drive up to Colorado, my first Snowshoe Hare (I now understand why they’re in the same genus as our jackrabbits), and an amazing place named the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
I’ll leave you with a selected few pictures. (Click on them to see slightly larger versions in the gallery).
A while back I caught The Bruce up to his typical mischievous ways, attacking phantoms behind the couch. So I got the camera out, and captured the following.
It’s been too long, hasn’t it? I’ve got friends asking me to write again, friends that are hilariously cajoling me into writing again, and absolute nutjobs that leave the craziest comments on old posts.
This latter comment is especially hilarious for it’s illiterate ramblings against evolution, repetition of the belief that no one is required to pay income taxes, and then a sudden divergence into the necessity of vitamins and seed eating to prevent cancer. The list of seeds we should eat are apple, peach, and apricot seeds, which as any good biologist can tell you are filled with cyanide. If you’re skipping the fruit and going straight for the seeds, it doesn’t take but a handful at once to provide a lethal dose. But hey, you don’t get cancer! I especially liked the National Cancer Institute’s description of a drug name Laetrile based on these seed products. “Laetrile has shown little anticancer effect in laboratory studies, animal studies, or human studies. The side effects of laetrile are like the symptoms of cyanide poisoning.”
Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve blogged.
The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.
I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.
I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.
I didn’t want to post again until I really knew what I wanted to say. I think where I am right now is that I would love to post about science. There’s just too many cool little things that I learn to not share them with anyone. And I have fun whenever I can taking pictures, so there’s no better medium than the web for sharing the fruits of that labor.
I promise nothing. I certainly won’t be posting every day. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. We’ll just have to see how it goes. But I’d definitely like to get back to talking about science, birds in particular, and I’ve got a few papers that are worth sharing due to their general “cool factor.”
So for all three of you still checking the blog, I’ll leave you with a few pictures. I have been busy working at photography when I have the time, and I’ve posted many of these quite some time ago, but never wrote a post announcing them. Here’s a list of the recent galleries. Some of the pictures are of course better than others.
The trip to Marfa, TX (which is in deep southwest TX north of Big Bend National Park, was probably one of the most enjoyable though. I managed to get a couple of incredible pictures of a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.
There’s more in that album too. And speaking of pictures, I’ve got lots more to process from recent trips which I’ll be posting shortly.
I went birding for a short time with my wife yesterday to the north unit of the San Angelo State Park in west Texas. For those of you that are birders, you’ll understand that there are rare days that are just magical. Yesterday was just such a day.
I was hearing a kingfisher chattering in the distance. Not its full machine gun fire call, but just individual chattering notes. After walking through the brush and peering out along the Concho River, I spotted this guy (or rather girl). It’s a Ringed Kingfisher, the largest new world kingfisher that ranges throughout Latin America, barely reaching south Texas. They’ve been straying north, seemingly with greater regularly, with sightings from central Texas. This is perhaps the third sighting and first photographic record for the Concho Valley.
That alone would have made it an incredible day, but the magic wasn’t done. We walked down to a dry spot on the river to try and refind the kingfisher, when my wife pointed out a small passerine bird coming down to the water’s edge. I was somewhat distracted, still looking for the kingfisher. When the bird finally hopped out into view, my jaw hit the ground. A male Black-throated Blue Warbler, one of two regularly occurring U.S. warbler species I’d not seen, hopped in view to get a drink. This is a hard bird to find anywhere in Texas, but when it does show up, it’s usually on the southeast coast. They breed in the northeast and winter in the West Indies, so most migrate down the eastern seaboard and miss Texas all together. As far as I know, this is the first record for the Concho Valley.
I’ve also put up lots more pictures of both birds in the photo gallery.
When it was all said and done, I’d seen a couple of highly unlikely birds within the span of 15 minutes. When you least expect it, birds can really surprise you.
I like this picture simply because the chair adds an interesting aspect to its composition.
