Woosday Pics

TNmike

Our daylilies are a bloomn'. Mike

Village Idiot

I put my Woosday pictures on my website. Galveston lost more than 40,000 oak trees (most over 100 years old) in Hurricane Ike from the saltwater surge. Some residents have had tree art made out of the stumps. My wife and I went last weekend and took some pics.

Here is the link: http://willsononline.com/treeart

Here is a sample.

2Fategghead

Thanks Gary. That is some very intersting carvings. Tim

fishlessman

cherries are just getting ready up here, most are too high up, will be good for the birds :laugh:



picked from the lower branches this morning



what i dont like to see in my favorite salmon fishing spot, glad they mostly use it at night. really ruins the scenery :ermm:

:laugh:

Beli

What a great loss, I had no idea it was so big, the art is beautiful though, TKS for sharing Gary

Village Idiot

Tim. I talked with one of the owners. His sculptor had come from Indiana, and left for Oregon after doing his trees. He said it wasn't cheap. I bet. :ohmy:

Ripnem

Gary,

Very nice finds

2Fategghead

Gary your right I bet they weren't cheap.

Back 30 years ago I worked in the woods a lot helping my logging friends get trees out of the woods and even working in saw mills. Well I went to a lot of logging Conventions. Anyway, I have seen where people good with a chain saw could make sculptures out of stumps or large chunks of wood. I also seen where they would cut the log across the grain and take that but cut and carve with the tip of the chainsaw and make things. People would pay a lot of money for these sculptures. I also seen if they were left outside very long in the sun they would dry out and check open and some would even fall apart because the grain of the wood would open up. I seen the sculptures you showed were all treated. That's good. The pic's you have sent me back in time and let me revisit good old memories. Thanks Tim

Boatman

Found this strange looking couple in the garden :woohoo:

Gator Bait

Hi All,

We missed Woosday last week, I guess we can make up for it this week. :woohoo:

I have been photographing a couple Burrowing Owl nest sites this year and once a week or so I visit them. I think Cape Coral Florida has the largest population of them this side of the Mississippi. The town's people over the decades have developed a very strong love for these birds and should you be lucky enough to have them choose to nest in your yard I think your property values just about double. LOL. They have replaced lawn jockey's and pink flamingos. There is a group in town called Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife. Their web site has a lot of good owl information on it. The owls are quite sociable and will get to know people, a friend of mine lives 2 doors down from one of these nests and is landscaping his property extensively. The owls have gotten to know him so well they will sometimes fly over and visit him and have no fears of him approaching the burrow. It has not taken them long to get used to me photographing them. I put my camera with long lens on a tripod and have a small folding chair I sit quietly in. I look the same to them every time I am there and try very hard not to stress them in any way.

This female looks P.O.'d with me! . . .


. . . fortunately it was just a big yawn.


Even the kids get bored with me . . .


Mom ruffling her feathers, from the looks of it I bet that feels great. Can you imagine being able to make all your hairs stand on end! LOL.




The kids are looking well fed, some juvenile birds get so they weigh more then their parents in their meteoric growth spurt. I would hate to wear that down in the heat and humidity.


This is the female at the second nest I have been photographing. I had been there for over an hour and it was a very hot morning with little going on. The chicks were in the burrow and Mom was on her favorite perch (a man made T provided by a neighbor) just to the left of this picture. I was thinking of calling it a day when she flew (jumped, hopped?) down and lay in the entrance to the burrow with her wings stretched out. I have never seen an owl do this before or since. She was looking at me but I was old news and not seen as any threat. I don't know if she was providing shade for the nest or what. Those eyes are incredible!


I have yet to I.D. this pretty wildflower.




A sure sign of summer here in the tropics, the Royal Poinciana's are in bloom. There is an older neighbor hood not far from my house where there are many of these, they are also scattered all over.




This monster out of an old horror flick was on a bush I was pruning. I have seen a few others like it so I got out the camera with the close up lens on it. The Leafhopper (I think) is about 3/16" long at the most. He didn't want to star in a horror movie and soon crawled away.


Have a great Woosday,

Gator

 

Gator Bait

 
Great photos TNmike, your daylilies are beautiful, thanks for sharing.

Gator

 

Gator Bait

 
Great post Gary, lets hope the hurricanes stay far away for another year.

Gator

 

Village Idiot

Gator Bait wrote:

 
lets hope the hurricanes stay far away for another year.

 

Or 10. Thanks, Gator.

eenie meenie

:laugh: :laugh:

Village Idiot

Nice shots, Gator !! Very crisp. What lens were you using on the first owl pictures, and did you Photoshop out the background? Nice !

Gator Bait

 
Hi Gary and many Thanks. My long lens is actually my spotting scope.

Here I was shooting the "Blue Moon" last New Years Eve. Nikon made (I'm not sure if it is still in production but they are around) an adapter that replaces the eye piece on the scope and the camera mounts just like a regular lens. The scope has a fixed aperture (one f stop) of f13 and everything is done manually. The scope is a Nikon Fieldscope ED 82, the camera is a Nikon D90 and the adapter is a Nikon FSA-L1. It took me a while to get the hang of it and for focusing, the closer to a subject I can get the better. Focusing errors seem to get worse with distance. I do use photo editing software like Photoshop but 99% of the time just to correct exposures and to tweak the focus. Resizing images for emailing or the forum is very hard on the focus. The background is the pavement of the street just the other side of the nest. It is not unusual for the owls to nest close to the road. The scope is equal to a 1500mm lens when mounted on the D90. A Nikkor 600mm lens is over $10,000! this is much, much less and much more powerful. If there are other photographers around they are often getting in my way as I don't have to get as close to the wildlife as they do and I get more natural looking photos because I don't need to crowd the subject.

For close ups like the photo of the Leafhopper I can go to the other extreme.

The Nikon D90 with a set of extension tubes (increases magnification), a 105mm Micro Nikkor lens and a Nikon R1 Close Up Speedlight Remote Kit which gives me two strobes out in front of the lens with no lens shadow. I don't have a lot of money to spend on camera gear so this gives me great flexibility with the scope and my regular lenses. For normal photography I have a Nikkor 18-200mm Zoom and a Nikkor 35mm which is like a 50mm lens on an old film camera.

Basically, if I can see it I can probably get a pretty good picture of it. :cheer:

Gator

 

Beli

Blair, aren't those Poincianas beautiful, we call them Flamboyant, I tried planting some here but the frost got them, I could have a whole forest of them if I could.. you are very lucky

Village Idiot

Wow. Nice setup, Gator. Yep, it looks like you've got the whole range covered. It looks like that Power of 10 slide show that went around awhile back ... showing a micron to trillions of miles out in space.
http://www.powersof10.com/index.php?mod=watch_powersof10

I have a Sigma 500mm, but I haven't used it since the cheerleader across the street moved away. :(

Beli

Wowwwwwwwww Blair great gear.....at least I've got the same camera :laugh:

2Fategghead

Dern Gary that's some deep sheeeeeee stuff. Anyway, can I use your camera. That cheerleader moved in across the street from me. :woohoo:

BENTE

i walked out the house on saturday to go to the event in augusta and seen our rose bush withone in full bloom. and since it had rained the night before i had to snap the picture

Boatman

Those are awesome pictures. I have seen them first hand in Cape Coral Thanks.....

Gator Bait

 
Thanks Gary, I love the web site, that is very cool. It makes one feel very small . . . er . . . big . . . er . . . insignificant? LOL.

That 500mm Sigma should be a great lens, the trouble with Florida is that most of the cheerleaders are 70 years old or more! :pinch:

I wanted to put together as versatile a camera system as I could on a limited budget. This works very well.


Gator

 

Gator Bait

 
Congratulations my friend, that is a great camera for the money. I don't want to sound like a Nikon commercial, that is just what I have and there is very little bad to be said about them. I have always been fond of Nikon optics.

Lets see some pictures! LOL. You always have some great ones of your little corner of Paradise. :cheer:

Blair

 

cookn biker

You, Gary, are soo funny!!

Gator Bait

 
I agree Beli, the Royal Poinciana are amazing. Here in south Florida they drop all their leaves for the winter, our dry season, which is too bad. In that respect they are messy. If they would stay an evergreen here I would plant a couple.

Another tree we see here is the Jacaranda, with it's incredible lavender/blue flowers at the same time of year. They have been getting scarce and I was not able to find one with a lot of blossoms on it. I found one but there was no place to stop and photograph it. Next year.

Blair

 

cookn biker

Blair, I've never seen trees like that before. Just wow!! Wonder if they'd grow here?

Gator Bait

 
Thanks Boatman, they are fascinating birds and we are very lucky to have them. They reward my patients and I will probably photograph them in the years to come.

Gator

 

Gator Bait

 
Hi Molly

I should get out and take more photographs of them. I would hate to take them for granted, I make a point to enjoy them every summer.

I am afraid they are to tropical for Colorado, I'm not even sure if the grow much further north then here. I know where there used to be one with yellow blossoms but do not know if it has survived the storms. I will have to check, it means talking my way past the security at a retirement community, maybe if I look old they will let me in. :laugh:

Blair

 

Gandolf

Awesome!

Gator Bait

 
That is awesome BENTE! I love roses and used to raise them for my mother when she got to old to do all the work. We had a dozen hybrid tea's for cut flowers. At their peak she could have 60 blossoms or more in her condo. They are pigs and like their food and water. Here in peninsular Florida they like an iron supplement as there are elements not found in our soil. This stuff worked very well. If you live where the soil has washed down out of the mountains at some point you probably don't need it. Here in Florida we are to far removed from the mountains and our soil is more calcium carbonate, old shells and coral.

Gator