Black racer

I found this black racer sunning himself on a pile of old lawn debris. It was a somewhat cool day so cold-blooded animals like this snake need all the sun they can get. Black racers like this one are a very common nonvenomous snake in this part of Florida.

I used my telephoto lens for this photo. Black racers are shy and will slither away if you get too close.

Little Blue Heron

I've seen this little blue heron on the neighbor's dock many times. It is very shy so the only way I can get a good photo is with my telephoto lens. Even then, it usually flies away while croaking. The little blue heron is not a songbird. Today I had the lens zoomed in all the way, to about 300mm, and I used the cloudy setting on my camera, as it was a very gray day. Once I had the photo on my computer, I tweaked the color and contrast a little and cropped it to 50% of its original size.

Insects on a desert rose

The weather's been unseasonably warm this winter so far. We actually have the air conditioner on and it's the day after Christmas. Today it rained. These insects were hiding from the rain underneath the seed pod of a desert rose.

These photos were all taken with my 105mm macro lens. I set the camera to AV mode and tried various aperture settings until I found one I liked. 

Zebra longwings on Christmas night

Last night I went outside after dark to look for these butterflies. They rest on twigs and vines at night. Their zebra coloration actually works well to conceal them, as at night, they resemble dead leaves on wild grapevines from a short distance away.

I used my macro lens, a tripod, and a flashlight. This photo was taken with a 0.5 second exposure and ISO 6400. You can tell it was a high ISO setting because of the considerable graininess of this photo.

Green anoles

Green anoles are a fairly common lizard in Florida. Around here, they're not as common as the Cuban anoles, an invasive species that has outcompeted green anoles in recent decades. I found these two anoles mating on the leaves of a gumbo limbo tree.

Mud

This is just a picture of some mud and silt on the bank of the Indian River, I thought it looked interesting so I snapped a photo.

Barnacle

Barnacles are strange creatures. They're actually crustaceans, like crabs and lobsters. They live a sessile existence in adulthood, but earlier in their life cycle, they actually exist as free-swimming, one-eyed larva, similar in appearance to a copepod. They molt several times as they grow, like most crustaceans. As adults, barnacles feed using their legs, called cirri. That's what you see here. I took several photos before I could get a clear photo of the cirri.

Another weird thing about barnacles is that they are hermaphrodites, having both male and female organs, but they rarely reproduce through self-fertilization. They also don't sexually reproduce the way coral does, by releasing eggs and sperm into the water. Instead, barnacles mate through the use of an extremely long, prehensile penis. Barnacles may have the largest ratio of penis size to body size in the animal kingdom. Eventually, the fertilized eggs hatch, and they live within the shell of their parent for a while, until they molt for the first time and go off to look for a place to develop further and eventually attach themselves to something.

I took this photo shortly after I got my 50mm prime lens. If you're interested in a DSLR, you should definitely get that lens. It takes nice sharp photos, it's cheap, and it's compact. This picture isn't really representative of its capabilities though, as it was taken through water, causing the blurriness.

Airplanes at night

Sometimes I go out at night and take photos of stars. With a telephoto lens, you can photograph the Orion nebula, Andromeda, and a few other things. I'd like to eventually hook my camera up to a stronger telescope though, and maybe use an equatorial mount to take long exposures without the stars blurring.

These photos are of airplanes, however. If you take an exposure several seconds long, you can get interesting patterns caused by flashing lights on the planes.

Owl

 I found this owl back in May. I believe it's a screech owl. He seemed a bit sleepy, as it was still afternoon, so he let me take a number of photos before flying away. The two photos are the same owl.

Pelicans

I took some photos of pelicans from the neighbor's dock. The pelicans go there frequently, but a few days ago, there was an unusual number of them catching fish.

Most of these photos were taken in Sport Mode. This mode is nice because it constantly tries to keep the subject in focus. However, it doesn't let you mess with many settings. I'm going to see if I can make use of the good things about sport mode in one of the other settings, like Aperture Priority mode, because then I'll be able to mess around more while still using the AI servo that does focus tracking. 

The Spiny Orb-Weaver

I've always called these crab spiders, but apparently there is a different group of spiders that have been given that name. These spiders, called spiny orb-weavers, are common around here but they often don't photograph well for me. Their scientific name is Gasteracantha cancriformis. Appropriately, the specific epithet, cancriformis, means crab-shaped.

For this photo, I used my macro lens with manual focus and aperture priority. I turned up the F-stop to f/14 to get a good depth of field, so the whole spider would be in focus, and then I used ISO 1600, because at f/14 not much light gets into the camera so I needed it to be sensitive. The camera chose a shutter speed of 1/50 of a second, which is good because any slower and I risked a blurry photo because I wasn't using a tripod.

Dragonflies in Palm City

I took these photos in August in Palm City. There were dozens of these small dragonflies flying around, it must have been their mating season. I was using my macro lens with manual focus and no flash, as it was a very bright sunny day, and I used mostly automatic settings in P mode. I might have gotten better photos of dragonflies in flight if I had turned up the f number, and used a high ISO setting to compensate for the smaller aperture.

Sandpipers at the Indian River

Sandpipers are a common sight at beaches around Florida and elsewhere. These small birds congregate in flocks of a few dozen individuals and use their sensitive bills to feels around for small crustaceans underneath the sand's surface. If approached, they will walk away from you as a group, until they get scared and take off, at which point the entire flock will fly together to some nearby place, usually not more than a few dozen yards away.

I took these photos with my macro lens. A telephoto would have been a better choice, but I wasn't expecting to take any good photos of birds so I didn't have it with me. 

October Lightning

Last month we had some thunderstorms. I went out to the neighbor's dock and took some long exposure shots of the lightning, mostly around 30 seconds or so. This way, if lightning appeared, it would expose the sensor without me needing to try to press the shutter every time I saw lightning. You can tell it's a long exposure because the clouds blurred a bit as they moved.

Hurricane flowers in the rain

It's been raining a lot lately.  This has made it a good summer for the hurricane flowers. These bromeliads, scientific name Billbergia pyramidalis, tend to have their flowers after a storm has come through, and that's how they got their name. Like many other bromeliads, the hurricane flowers produce an inflorescence made up of lots of small flowers, and you can see a few of these in the photo below.

I also went to White City Park today, a nice park in Fort Pierce. I found these air plants there, growing on the limb of an oak tree overhanging a pond full of water lilies. Most of the water lilies had closed up, I guess they open in the morning. I'm not exactly sure of the species name of the air plants, it may be Tillandsia fasciculata. There are a lot of species of Tillandsia around here; Spanish moss and ball moss are both members of Tillandsia. Although these plants might seem like something that would be parasitic, like mistletoe, they actually just use the tree as a place to grow. They don't take its nutrients or water. The air plants get everything they need from rain, air, and dust.

Zebra longwings and Giant swallowtails

Note: This post was written on October 2, but I've been having problems with Blogger so I haven't been able to post until now. 

Today I tried to take some photos of butterflies in flight. Some of the photos came out better than others but they are challenging to photograph. They don't stay in a place where they'll be in focus. I found that it was easiest to choose a high ISO setting, use manual focus, and a fast shutter speed, like 1/500 second. I also used the screen on the back of the camera, instead of the viewfinder. This first photo is one of the best I took today. The other photos depict a giant swallowtail that I found under a banyan tree.

Night Blooming Cereus

Last night, the night blooming cereus bloomed. These are cacti that hang from palm trees, and they're where dragonfruit come from. Usually when ours grow dragonfruit, racoons end up eating them. The fruit is sweet but kind of bland, and they have a very striking appearance. If you buy them in the store, they are expensive.

I decided to take some photos of the flowers because the air was still. They're very large, pretty flowers, but it's kind of pointless to try to take a photo of them if there's wind, as your photo will be blurry, and if you use the flash the white petals can get all overexposed and then your photo looks too bright and too low in contrast. So here's my photo, of the inside of the flower. I used a flashlight to shine light into the flower from the side, and used an 8 second exposure. I used f/25 because I wanted a wide depth of field, so all the parts of the flower would be focused as well as possible.

Owls in the Melaleuca tree

These owls were in the melaleuca tree in my parents' front yard a few nights ago. My mother held a flashlight on them while I took some photos. To capture them, I put my camera on a tripod and I used a 75-300 mm telephoto lens, and I used relatively long exposures, (this one was 1/4 of a second), and I turned up the ISO setting to 6400. The ISO setting is basically how sensitive to light the sensor is, and 6400 is really sensitive, so you can expose the sensor to light for just a very short amount of time, and hopefully get a good photo. However, these high settings can cause grainy photos.

Canon doesn't let you use the ISO 6400 setting right out of the box if you get my camera, a T1i, I think because they felt it was too grainy. The T2i and T3i have better performance at this setting, and so the manufacturer feels the 6400 and 12800 settings aren't up to their standards on the T1i. So you have to go through some custom settings menus to even find these settings with my camera.

Fortunately it wasn't windy, if it had been then the long exposure method wouldn't have worked. I considered using the flash, but decided not to, as I thought the camera was too far from the owls for the flash to make a difference. I was probably wrong about this. With the high ISO setting, I could have got the owls exposed something like the way I got the tree in this photo using the flash. I took this photo about three hours after the first owl photos, because the owls were making a barking sound. I could not find them anymore, only hear them.

Butterflies and more

Today it seemed like a thunderstorm was coming. It didn't rain, but there was a lot of rumbling. I think it's harder for insects and birds to fly when there's a storm coming, due to the reduced air pressure, so they tend to not waste their energy if they can. I got some great photos of butterflies sitting around.

A white peacock butterfly (Anartia jatrophae) rests in a Lantana bush.

Another white peacock, on the leaf of a hurricane flower plant(Billbergia pyramidalis). Notice the four legs. Your fourth-grade science teacher lied to you when she told you insects all have six legs. Many butterflies do have six legs, but for the Nymphalidae, the front pair of legs remains undeveloped. These butterflies have six legs in much the same sense that humans have a tail.

There are some wild grape vines in the backyard, and sometimes flies, like this one, cling to the dead vines. Up close, their metallic bodies cause them to hardly look alive, more like some robot that someone made.

An ant looks for food on a rubber tree fruit.

A Cassius Blue butterfly (Leptotes cassius). These tiny, hairy butterflies are about the size of a fingernail. If you click the image, to see it in higher resolution, you can make out individual scales in its hindwing eyespot. Those fragile scales give butterflies their interesting coloration.

Here we see a long-tailed skipper, Urbanus proteus, taking nectar from a Lantana flower. These butterflies were abundant today in the backyard.

Life on a Lantana bush

A couple of months ago I found a nice 105mm Sigma macro lens at a pawn shop. It's great for taking photos of bugs and small things like that, especially using its very smooth manual focus. Here are some photos I took today using that lens on my T1i, which I supported with a monopod.

I edited them a bit (crop and resize, mostly) in Irfanview and Photoshop.

This butterfly was drinking nectar from Lantana flowers before a thunderstorm.

If you view this image at full resolution, you can actually see some mites on the butterfly's proboscis.

This snail was taking advantage of the damp conditions after the rain.

On a different Lantana bush after the thunderstorm, I found several mosquitoes. Some of them bit me, while others were more interested in immature Lantana flowers. 

First Post

Welcome to my blog! I plan on using this blog as a place to distribute my photos. Most of them are taken with a Canon EOS Rebel T1i, which I've had for about a year now.