I haven’t finished processing all of the Yellowstone pictures – it takes a bit of work to get the color balance set right. (THM – that’s why I always shoot raw on the D80. It gives me more freedom to get the image “right later.) But at least the first half is done. I’ll post the second half this weekend sometime.
About a year and a half ago (November 2006), the wildlife clinic K volunteers with transfered a water turtle (yellow bellied slider) to her. A cute little guy, just over 7 grams and about the size of a quarter. Yesterday, weighing in at 125 g and with a shell about 4 inches long, we released her into the nearby lake. It’s easy to fall for a lot of the animals K rehabs. Their cute and tiny or just plain helpless and on the mend, but the turtles are particularly hard because K keeps them for so long. The following are a handful of the pictures we’ve taken of the turtle: ...
When it rains it pours. A month into spring and K hadn’t received any calls about rehabilitating animals until today when she got two. The first was about baby bunnies. K doesn’t take baby rabbits because too many of the stories end with “and then they died. For example, “I was rehabbing some bunnies in the spare room, the dogs barked, the rabbits got scared and then they died; or “I successfully rehabbed the bunnies, but they got stressed out while I was releasing them, they stroked out and then they died. You get the idea. The other call was for a litter of opossums whose mother had died. She took those. ...
It was a rough night to try to get any pictures of last night’s total lunar eclipse. For long durations of the evening, you couldn’t even see the moon for all of the cloud cover. I did manage to get a few pictures. Most of them were slightly blurred because of the long exposure time and the 900 mm of focal length. However, some came out quite nice. The general process I used was: ...
An interesting conversation at work today. I was talking with the guy, L (no – a different one), who has been responsible for our IT for the past 3.5 years. L isn’t the guy that always does the work, although he can. His real job is as an engineer in the company and that’s his primary focus. However, he does handle the technology strategy and monitors the folks that do the IT work. (He and I are talking quite a bit since I’m trying to take some of the load off in this area). ...
I was talking to hunter last Friday about macro photography and a great, relatively inexpensive, device to take macro pictures with almost any lens. Essentially, the ability of a lens to focus on a close object is related to the focal length and the distance between the inflection point of the lens (point inside the lens where the image flips) and the film plane. It’s something of a funny relationship for modern lenses with multiple internal pieces of glass. However, the important thing to remember is that your ability to close focus depends on those two factors. ...
In response to the two comments on my last post about the calendar: etselec: I’m not certain if you were kidding or not. FWIW, I don’t usually think of the calendar as something people outside of my family would be interested in. I think that’s a pretty usual INTP trait 🙂 If anyone is interested in the calendar, it’s available at Lulu at the baseline cost of $11.29 each. I didn’t put a markup on it, because it’s a fun thing rather than a plan to take over the world make money. ...
As I mentioned earlier, I’m printing the Yellowstone calendar using Lulu instead of Kodak. I got back my sample and all in all, I’m happy with it. I like that the image is the full size of the page (no border). The print quality is pretty good – it’s not as good as Kodak’s but that’s not a big surprise. The paper is also a bit lighter weight than Kodak’s card stock. But hey, it’s about 45% cheaper! 🙂
To forestall my mother’s nagging polite and subtle reminders, I took some time yesterday to select pictures for a 2008 Yellowstone calendar. I tried to limit myself to pictures taken on this year’s trip and was happy to see that I could 🙂 The ones I finally selected are shown below. They start with the cover image and then go from January through December: To print them, I’m going with Lulu instead of Kodak. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is price 🙂 The other is that Lulu will do a full 8.5″x11″ edge to edge print whereas Kodak always puts a border. The images above are all scaled/cropped to a 8.5×11 aspect ratio, so hopefully, I’ll end up with a pretty nice result. ...
When I was taking the dogs out last night, I noticed that we had a visitor. A bat had decided to hang out on the front porch. I’m guessing he was resting before going to work eating the insects in the area. I called K, let the dogs do their thing and came back in for the camera. Fortunately, he stayed put while I took a few pictures. From our field guide to mammals, I would guess that he’s the Little Brown Myotis, but it’s not clear that they live in this area. I guess we’ll look a bit more. ...