Marty May 29th, 2007
Common Green Darner - female
Anax junius
Ever since I saw my first one of these huge dragonfly beauties (they measure about 3"/80mm in length), I’ve been trying to get a good shot. The closest I’ve had before this was a flight shot, which you couldn’t really tell what it was. It turns out that the reason is that they rarely perch at all, and their flight speeds reach upward of 55mph (about 85kph). No wonder they’re hard to get in flight.
Continue Reading »
Marty May 28th, 2007
After working until 1 a.m. Friday night and then again Saturday from about 10:45 a.m. until nearly 3:30, I needed a break. I really wanted to get out birding, but it was a little late for that. We did have a bunch of nice birds in the yard, but it wasn’t until I went over to our rosebush to look for aphids that I started seeing a them and a bunch of other cool things. Continue Reading »
Marty April 20th, 2007
On our last day in Texas, we were a little bummed - the trip had been just too short. But we had planned it that way - I was still new at my job, so taking a lot of vacation wasn’t a great idea, and we wanted to skimp and save on costs where we could. In retrospect, both seemed short-sighted, LOL. Continue Reading »
Marty March 14th, 2007
We are having a small art exhibit at work, and I am submitting a few pictures to be displayed. I can have two pictures and I know that I am going to use my shot of the Amur Leopard as my first, but I’m trying to figure out what the second should be. Alternately, I could print smaller versions and combine them into an 8×10 collage. Continue Reading »
Marty March 11th, 2007
Red-Tailed Hawk
Buteo jamaicensis
Today, Shari and I took the dogs out to celebrate our being together for 6 years and well, because it was a beautiful day. Our trip to Tinicum was well-rewarded, because at the very beginning of the trail, two red-tailed hawks were perched within 20′ of the trail. Continue Reading »
Marty February 13th, 2007
A good weekend This weekend was pretty fun and mostly relaxing, despite the fact that I spent most of Saturday working. But it was for a good cause - my wife. She’s the admin of a photographer’s group on Flickr, and they wanted to put up a complimentary blog to go with the Flickr group itself. So, my wife was tasked with getting the blog up - which meant that I was tasked with helping her do it, ’cause I’m a nice guy and all. 
Anyway, she is very technically savvy and could have figured it out on her own, but she really didn’t have the time to figure out the a)content, b)new domain management software (from GoDaddy.com), c)WordPress interface, d) CSS AND e) PHP all this weekend. So, I offered/agreed to help her do it. All in all, it wasn’t so bad once we got through a few technical glitches:
Once we had all of that squared away, it was just a matter of educating Shari on the differences between the POST categories and the LINK categories so that she could figure out how she wanted to have her content placed and to work. Once she determined that, I put in all of her categories, made the changes to the code to make sure that they displayed the way she wanted (the theme actually removed most of the ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality of WordPress for stylistic purposes, making the settings in Link Categories moot), added a few widgets, installed some much-needed plugins (including the all-important Spam Karma 2). She reviewed it and then I went to work in fixing some of the CSS stuff (clean code but not the most usable in my opinion - lots of px sizes, some places it could be condensed, added some CSS here and there, played with the images a bit and finally got it up and running by about 10p.m. All told, about 12 hours of work to make sure that everything worked the way that she wanted, making changes to fit her vision, etc. But in the end, she was very happy and I wasn’t feeling too shabby, either. Of course, I didn’t get as much done on the updates I wanted to do to my site, but c’est la vie. On Sunday, my reward was not having to work at all. Instead we went to Tinicum and FDR Park in Philly to go birding and do some photography. Well, Tinicum was more about the dogs getting out after a week of doing very little, but we still saw a couple cool things, including this heron 
. It was great to get out and get some exercise, let the dogs wander and run and frolic and burn off a lot of pent-up energy.
But it was FDR Park that was a lot more fun for us/me. I knew that we would have a lot of waterfowl there, and was hoping that I might get a shot at some of the more uncommon ones. I hadn’t, however, expected that the only open water on the pond to be right where we were going to be standing, bringing in a lot of species that we rarely or never get to see within only a short distance. Besides the boring Canada Geese (unfortunately, we didn’t find the supposed Cackling Geese in the flock), here are the highlights (click on the an lightbox icon (
) to see a larger image from the trip).
- the best views I’ve gotten of the species.
- my first sighting of this new addition to my lifelist.
- which strangely, I never had any decent shots of the male 
before this.Marty February 11th, 2007
Great Blue Heron
Ardea herodias
He just looked so … disappointed at what he found at Tinicum. Another birder mentioned that their local blue heron was found dead this morning. As frozen over as the lake was, I hope that this guy is finding some food.
Maybe I’ll stop by the fish market to throw him out some morsels…
See it on Flickr
Marty January 29th, 2007
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to get out and take any pictures. The weeks have been full, and the weekends have been pretty ucky - and when they weren’t we had things we had to do which meant that I still couldn’t get out to take pictures. So, finally, this weekend we were able to get down to Barnegat and Forsythe NWR and do some birding/photography. Continue Reading »
Marty January 26th, 2007
I just got this from the nice folks at the Calgary Zoo. They had asked if they could use my image from the Philly Zoo on one of their signs, which I of course agreed to. Here was the final product, on display now (as far as I know).
You can see the original image, which you’ll notice was flipped for use on the sign. Oh well, next time I’ll have to get both side profiles.
Marty December 25th, 2006
This is what happens when you combine a non-studio photographer with the urge to do something artistic - Gummi Art.
Merry Christmas to everyone!
