Backlit Flowering Tree, Clinton River Park, Sterling Heights, Michigan
I have always thought there are two paths of exploration when it comes to photography. The first one being in the field, in the moment. The second is post capture and where the image guides you. It is in those post capture moments where you may or may not connect with subconscious processes that were going on during the first path.
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Red-backed salamander photo, Image #SM-9566, St. Clair Nature Sanctuary, Michigan
Sometimes the smallest wildlife encounters can give the biggest joys, and this was the case this past weekend. (more…)
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NOAA sky cover forecast - socked in gray!
I was anxious last night because I wanted to get up early today and head up to Lake Huron to hopefully do some long shutter speed blurs at the shoreline during twilight. However, the weather forecast didn’t look like it was going to cooperate with my intentions. One of my favorite tools for checking the weather is the NOAA Graphical Forecast. I like this particular forecast tool because it offers a lot of different overlays to show you what the conditions are going to be like, in addition to temperature, rain, etc. I like using it to check forecasted sky cover to see if a morning twilight might have a chance of some nice colors.
While I haven’t learned the secret formula yet for colors, I have learned that if it shows solid gray across the state, your chances are pretty much ZERO. Even a bit of rain wouldn’t bother me if the tool showed it moving past quickly and clearing the sky before dawn. Still, it was worth checking early this morning to see if things changed overnight. (more…)
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Bullfrog in Duckweed pond
I learned an important identification tip this morning in processing this image. I wasn’t quite sure whether this is a Green Frog or a Bullfrog. I have a number of ID books on frogs, but the first one I turned to wasn’t very good in giving the key hint to telling them apart. I am glad I went further and turned to the net. I came across this nice site by Nick Scobel on Michigan’s Frog’s and Toads. He gave me the key tip. Look at the skin fold / ridge that extends from the eye going behind the eardrum.
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Like floating in a water stream ... you never know where you will end up
A week or so ago, I had a new person follow me on Twitter or Google+, I don’t quite recall which one, and can’t find them now. The person had a last name that prompted me to go “hmmm…” That last name was Medvedev. As someone who tends to follow global news, yes, I knew Medvedev is also the last name of the President of the Russian Federation. It isn’t a name you come across very often here in the US, except in the news, so it poked at my curiosity. I have also had to block more than a few dozen or so hacking attempts to my site from that region, so I thought it was worthy of some further investigation.
Now, I am not assuming it was THE President of Russia, but the same last name nonetheless. (I simply can’t picture the President of Russia sitting in the Kremlin surfing grafphoto.com 
) I thought – “Wouldn’t it be interesting if he was a cousin or something?” So off to Google I go, and I end up on the Wikipedia page for the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev. I was more or less scanning the page for the name of this follower if he was a relative or something. No such revelations.
However, the Wikipedia page for Dmitri Medvedev revealed not only about the man’s rise to the Russian presidency, but a bit about him personally. The first thing that I thought was pretty cool was that he is an avid Led Zeppelin / Pink Floyd fan, collecting all the records of Deep Purple since when he was young, despite them being black-listed in Russia. I also, of course, picked up on that he is a photographer – and quite a good one!
Read More http://t.co/1xjuh7fT - posted on 22 hours ago
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