A mother rabbit and kit

I saw this rabbit with its baby in front of my apartment when I came home from class, I was able to get lots of photos of the two of them. I've seen this rabbit at the same place before but I didn't know it had a baby and I haven't had a chance to photograph it until today.

Hummingbird moth

Here are some photos I took last week. I found this hummingbird moth near the canoe launch ramp near the Edward Ball Nature Trail. I think it's interesting how such similar behavior and anatomy can arise in animals as distantly related as birds and moths.

 

Damselflies in Pensacola

 I recently moved to Pensacola to go back to school and I've only started to explore the nature trails around here. This morning I went to the Edward Ball Nature Trail, which is right next to the UWF campus. There's a nice boardwalk through the woods there and it leads to a place for people to ride their mountain bikes, which I haven't been to yet.

The first six photos here were taken with my 105mm macro lens in P mode, which tends to choose a low F number like 2.8. I found I got better photos of the skink with a higher number, such as 13 though. The nice thing about P mode is that if you don't like the settings the camera chooses, you can roll the click wheel and get different settings that should have the same level of exposure.

I took a number of photos of the damselflies on this trail. These metallic blue ones are larger than the ones I usually see in South Florida.

 

Skinks like this one are very common on this trail. I mostly just heard them running through the leaves when I approached, but this one stayed put long enough for me to take a photo.

These photos of this slow-moving stream were taken with my 18-55mm zoom lens, which was the kit lens that came with my camera.

A Magnolia flower. I tweaked the colors a bit in Photoshop for this one.

Box turtle

This box turtle came out last time it rained. We don't see box turtles very often, the gopher tortoises seem more common, especially since we have several with their burrows in our backyard.

I used my telephoto lens for this photo. It's useful for taking photos of shy animals.

Birds at Pepper Park

A couple weeks ago I went to Pepper Park with my mother, who painted there. I took some photos of birds. There were lots of royal terns and a few other birds. These were taken with my telephoto lens.

There were a few sandpipers poking around the Sargassum weed that had washed up on shore. I took a number of photos that didn't turn out very well because they were between me and the sun. This photo was taken with the sun to my back, so it came out nice.

Royal terns. They look a lot like cartoon characters.

A dove near the parking lot.

My mom painting. You can see what she painted here.

Quarantid meteor

I went out on the neighbor's dock around 3 AM during the Quarantid meteor shower. It was very cold for this part of Florida and the ramp going down to the dock was covered in ice, so going up and down the ramp with an expensive camera was dangerous.

This is the only meteor I was able to capture on my camera, even though I set up a timer so that it would repeatedly take 30 second exposures. I used ISO 1600, thinking that a short-lived meteor might not expose properly at a lower setting. I probably could have got away with using ISO 400 or lower. The high ISO setting is the cause of the graininess of this photo. I used a wide angle lens to get as much of the sky as possible. Telescopes and binoculars are useless for seeing meteors, it's best to use a camera or the naked eye.

Meteor showers like this one occur when the Earth passes through clouds of sand-grain-sized particles that are ejected into space as the surface of a comet sublimates when they pass near the Sun. These tiny meteoroids enter the atmosphere at great speed and burn up in the mesosphere from friction and from the heat caused by compressing the gases below them as they fall at many times the speed of sound.

Little Blue Heron 2

Here's that little blue heron again. It was slowly walking back and forth between two docks looking for food. I used my telephoto lens for this photo, and I waited underneath one of the docks for it to walk by.