Nature

I recently couldn’t help but notice that one of the shrubs in our back garden had been reduced from something like this: To this: ...

Adriana and I were out with friends at Markham Park in Broward on Sunday. It’s a pretty cool park that has a model airplane field, mountain bike trails, areas for jet skiing, a shooting range, and a Jamaican guy with a van that had a fully sick subwoofer, a couch, and 420,000 miles on the odometer. I got distracted by a very active jumping spider, which was indifferent to my efforts to try and get it to ‘sit’ still. When you only have a depth of field of several millimetres as I do with my macro lens at its closest focus point, shooting a moving object can be frustrating. Having a speedlight handy gives some extra light so you can increase the f-stop and get a much larger depth of field, so I was happy I brought my whole kit along. ...

So, Razzi and the ducklings have now left the shelter of casa Kristian y Adriana. This is the last photo I have of them at their condo abode: I’m fairly impressed, and relieved, with how Bropey has stepped into the role of protector and is looking after Razzi and the ducklings. We’ve also noticed how brown he is getting, after having either black or dark green feathers only a couple of weeks ago. ...

They have arrived. We were starting to wonder when they were going to hatch, if ever. As it turned out, we were a week off of when we thought Razzi actually started sitting on the eggs. To see the first duckling appear this morning was absolutely amazing. To see another breaking out of its shell was incredible. At the last count there were ten ducklings. ...

One of the Muscovy ducks that hangs out around our place is called “Razzi”. Meet Razzi: I noticed one day that the calla lillies in one of the planters on our patio were all flattened. I uncovered a bit of debris from the flattening and found two duck eggs. Anyone who knows farmer boy PK could guess that I was absolutely over the moon! A week or so later, the planter looked like this: ...

I found this gem earlier today on my BBC youtube feed, and I just cannot stop watching it. The ’look’ on the bird’s face, the awesome Englishman commentary… it’s just fantastic.

Here are photos of the six hermit crabs I’ve been looking after, along with a photo of the setup I used to take the photos. ...

While my friend was away on vacation, I got the opportunity to look after his hermit crabs. I had also recently purchased an intervalometer for my DSLR camera, so I could do time-lapse photography. The video below shows a rough test of that, with each frame 8 seconds apart. There are quite a few things that need to be fixed for my next attempt. I have to fix the depth of field so more of the tank is in focus, the ambient lighting could be a bit better, I have to cut down the reflections on the front of the tank (perhaps a light source from behind), fix the white balance, and not move around when the photos are being taken. That final point is what makes some frames darker than the rest. ...

This post was wrong. I was surfing Wikipedia and found that a damselfly’s wings run parallel to its body. A dragonfly’s wings are perpendicular, like on the one I found out the front of our place a while ago: