Stuff

I do actually take out my camera and a give it some exercise between trips to museums and zoos. It’s just that those photos wind up being categorized under miscellaneous and no one sees them. There’s no reason that anyone should. They’re not very good, don’t have a theme, and are in my mind devoid of merit for publishing. But they do exist.
The first few here are just of a pair of jewel-winged flies that were buzzing around my livingroom ceiling around midnight, interrupting a perfectly dull movie. The orientation of the shots has been normalized for your viewing pleasure. It was mostly just a challenge as the flies reacted faster to the sound of the shutter than the shutter did in capturing the image. I found it impossible to capture the iridescence of their wings. And they adapted this ‘wings forward’ posture when I got the lens too close.
The next set is of a spider that’s been hanging out (literally) next-door. Just in time for Halloween, it makes this fantastic web and sits in it at sunset for me to try to capture image-wise. Of course, I’m battling my latent arachnophobia the entire time but I think I did okay. Some spider-ologist could probably tell what genus it is. That’s success in my book.
And the last pair of pairs is just the Hunter’s Moon to prove to myself that I could in fact take a decent picture of the moon. I just didn’t know last month that my D7000 had a lens auto-focus compensation setting. The same lens that couldn’t focus on the moon last month (Nikkor 70-300mm zoom) had no problem once I dialed in a +5 compensation to it. The next pair of moon shots is because I hang with a guy that knows what I have, and what my lens arsenal can do. better than I do. He said, “Why didn’t you brush the dust off that Nikkor 300mm f4 prime and slap your 2X converter on the back of it?” So that is exactly what I did. Good call.