PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.
I was recently in Pinellas County, Florida visiting my Mom and Step-father and I did some birding too. While birding I always keep my eyes open for other things in nature like this Dragonfly.
I think it’s a Tawny Pennant-Brachymesia herbida. It’s in the Tropical Pennant family. If I’m wrong and you know what it is please let me know!
PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.
Here’s some of what I’ve been up to lately starting at the beginning of the month with a birding walk up in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. The wildflowers were in bloom. Here are a couple of favorites I saw.
There were all sorts of juvenile birds being taught how to forage that morning. I saw Young Cassin’s Finches begging their parents for food, and the parents trying to encourage them to forage on their own, and young White-crown Sparrows foraging with their parents, but the highlight for me was the juvenile Rufous Hummingbird perched on a branch. That was a first for me.
On Monday I got up at 2:45AM to go on my back patio to see if I could spot and photograph any Perseid Meteors. I very nearly went back to bed as there were still clouds from the day before in the sky.
I saw 3 great fireballs streaking across the morning sky, but one was completely out of my frame. One just looks like a streak with no fire ball that was disappointing, but it has a green tail, and one was just partially in my frame. The others I photographed are pink and green. Which I think are from the Aurora Borealis that was visible here. I missed the peak of that. I slept through it.
Here are two images of Perseid Meteors I photographed.
Look how close that fireball came to being in my frame! See it left side bottom edge? There’s another meteor below center as well.
And, I’m still painting. I just finished a big painting for me at 9×12 inches of the Le Moulin de L’Abbye in France. I used a photo from a book called Hotels de Reve en France that I picked up years ago from a Little Free Library. I’ve been sketching from this book for years, but have been afraid to actually add paint out of fear of messing it up. I drew it freehand which took me hours, because drawing is so hard for me, but I am improving! Practice really helps. Anyway, I transferred the drawing to drawing paper so if I did mess it up I could half the drawing time by tracing it. This time I was determined to add paint!
Here’s that painting.
watercolor painting
The reference photo from the book Hotels de Reve en France.
I also made the boys some little handmade sketchbooks. I hope they fill those pages up!
The weather is cooler and the smoke from the Calif. fires has cleared so I’ll be out birding later this week and getting my morning walks in outside.
This is getting long so I’ll close with I hope your week is going well.
PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.
It’s that time of year when I yearn to be out imaging and gazing at the night sky. A friend and I went back down to Mono Lake to do just that. Thankfully, we didn’t have any clouds to worry about.
Milky Way the Great River in the Sky
The lake is really high eliminating a lot of the beach area we learned from our camping trip last month so, we knew to take our tall boots because standing in the lake might be our best bet for imaging. We scouted in the afternoon and found this spot. When we were leaving for dinner we ran into a Ranger who told us she would be giving a talk on the summer sky and constellations that evening on the beach and invited us back to attend it. We said we’d be there. The talk was a fast 2 hours. It was great hearing the stories the Native Americans tell about the stars and how they named the constellations and how to find them . The talk ended just after 10PM which was perfect as the Milky Way was already visible and we had some time to get to our spot in time for the Galactic Center to rise. The Galactic Center is the central region of our galaxy. The best months to photograph the Milky Way in the Northern Hemisphere are from May to August when the Galactic Center is highest in the sky and the weather is usually better in the warmer months.
We were standing in water to photograph this scene, but it wasn’t very deep, and the waves were gentle so we didn’t have to worry about a big one coming along and getting into our boots. 😊
I got home about lunch time yesterday, unpacked, got the car washed, and then started getting ready for a visit with my son and daughter-in-law. I’ll be on and offline for a bit. I hope your week and summer are going well.
PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.
Last week I was making my way around a big loop birding and at one stop I happened upon a Classic Car group just as they were starting to pull out. I hurriedly grabbed my other camera with a wide angle lens and ran to a place near the exit to get a few images. I wasn’t fast enough to get an image of all the cars, but I did get a several. Here are some of my favorites.
Classic Car in Cream.
This one is just so cool. Is it a muscle car? I’m sorry I didn’t get there earlier to note the makes and models of all the cars. Look at that engine though.
Classic Car Yellow with cool Engine ExposureClassic Car in Yellow
The drivers were pretty cool when they saw me with my camera they slowed down and let me get some nice images. 😊
Classic Car Pontiac I think. I love the sun guard over the windshield.
Look at those white walls with red accent stripe. Nice.
And last, but not least my favorite Red car of the lot.
Classic Car in Red
That was a fun surprise.
What wasn’t fun was waking up yesterday morning to the “DREADED BLACK SCREEN”! My computer was good and truly looking dead. Thankfully, He-Man found a way to get it back up, but it required a whole new start from my backup system. So all my documents, and files are here, but all my apps have to be reinstalled and all my preferences reset. My Photoshop Actions are all gone so I’m starting from scratch remaking those and slowly adding my presets and apps back in. It’s been a chore, but I’m so grateful for having a backup system in place. I highly recommend one or two if you haven’t got yourself one already. In the meantime I think it’s time to start shopping for a new computer desktop tower because this one might be on the way out.
I hope your week is going well and there are no unpleasant surprises in it!
Circadianreflections Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.