World's a lot bigger...

A Quick Note to Carchex.com -

One of your employees has a bad habit of being named John Wrinn on the internet and using your most certainly expensive internet connection to spam blogs with moronic and useless links to "advice" about this, that, and the other thing.

Either that, or your entire company is a sham - a prepurchase inspection for the remarkably low price of $99.95???

Conversing

This catbird was absolutely intrigued by me. Someone else approached from behind it, so it freaked and left, but before that, it was singing very softly and watching what I was doing, so I got closer and started meowing at it, so it hopped up onto the stonehenge thing.

Baby Sparrow Season

Jon probably would have had me kill it had I gone for the "pick it up and hold it for a while."

I could have done so, though.

Nowhere near as cool as the fish crow I could have carried around for a while...

Point of humor

We received two orders worth of dell crap today (total of 7 Optiplex 745s), shipped via FedEx.

The guy came in and started asking about the pictures on the walls, who shot them, so on and so forth.

One of the questions: "Do you shoot Canon or Nikon?"

I'd be sad, too

Who, Me?

Oh no, they saw me

It started eating faster when it realized what I was doing. Jeff said that shoving that french fry down its throat should be the squirrel equivalent of dual-wielding chipotle burritos, vanishing them in all their rice, bean, and meat glory in fifteen seconds time.

Ah, squirrels.

Handwritten thoughtfulness

Find the otter slnew?

Monochromatics

1) Today, I saw a small vireo or warbler or something I cannot identify. Very small, like carolina wren size minus the roundness, almost entirely gray/brown/olive, a mixture of those three colors so that it appeared to be gray in the light, with a darker cheek patch. I cannot figure out what it was and it's driving me nuts.

2) I took a picture of some trees to try out monochrome conversion that wasn't a simple desaturation. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Channel mixed:


Simple desaturation:


???

There are a couple more images here.

I think I'm not very good at this photoshop thing and should stick to taking pictures.

Raindropped Bushflower

I found that this morning. Actually, I found the flowers yesterday, but since it rained yesterday, there was enough moisture in the air and on them to make it a bit more interesting.

And yes, I know there's exciting dust on my sensor.

Office Kitty

I know you guys aren't into the fisheye, but "omg it is so adorable lol."

Plus I think pets through wide angle lenses are awesome. Neener neener.

Sun in the back yard

It's not a special plant, but it was sunlit in a compelling fashion.

Incidentally, I notice that I'm generally using much lower ISOs than I used to have to. Why? I'm using wider angle lenses for "stuff" and trying to stick to better lighting.

Why was I using high ISO before? Because I liked taking pictures of stuff at a distance. I still do, but I don't do it as much because I figure "that's enough squirrel for now."

If I go back to doing that, I'll start using high ISO again. Or I'll get a 300mm f4.

Scheduling Nightmare

That's the last terrible schedule I'll have to deal with for a while.

Hey, GMT - if you want to see the definition of abuse of oracle calendar, remind me to dig up my email to our calendar administrator with the screen cap of last tuesday in it.

ow ow ow

Good news - this evening, in an attempt to learn some new music, I screwed up my right hand middle finger.

Also, I wore out the muscles in my hand and forearm.

I think that means I need to practice more, but hopefully it doesn't mean I can't use my camera.

Linguistic tidbit of the day: the German equivalent to "the lap of luxury" is, according to dict.leo.org, "wie Gott in Frankreich." If speakers of English live in the lap of luxury, do speakers of German live as God in France?

Should I be concerned by the fact that I find that amusing?

Visitor

Waxen Towers

a stuffs!

That squirrel was in the back barking at nothing while the cardinals had an argument. Of course I was compelled to photograph it.


Here are some acorn remnants. Too bad about the giant streetlight (hexagon) in the background.


... and the fisheye dog begins.

They continue here, along with the cardinals in the back yard and one of the neighborhood doves.

Ding!