Non-quality images

[Snakeadelic]

One of our local kestrels from a while back. Don't know how much longer we'll have our delightful little falcons for neighbors, because aquifer drainage for human use is killing all the big cottonwood trees they like to nest in; 6 have been cut down near me in the last few years because they like to nail moving cars to roadways with downer branches (there went all the big trees upside our county fairgrounds!).

[Snakeadelic]

Hope the bird shows up this time...

[Lamplighter]

Nice pic ... and it's interesting that you got the moon to move over
and stand behind the bird while you took the pic.

[Snakeadelic]

And for the record: I take pretty pictures and have some downright extraordinary ones, but I know zero about actual techniques or equipment.

My camera is a Canon PowerShot A720 IS with 6x physical zoom (up to 24x digital but boy howdy quality sucks at that limit). I use two settings, the shutter speed for most things and the very nice macro for small things that won't run away. I borrowed one from a neighbor I like years ago and got my own as soon as I could afford it. It was a factory refurbish and I put 120,000-ish images (yay for OCD in small doses!) through it before it freaked out. I think the shutter's sticking open, but in a county with a population of 30K or so camera shops are few and far between. We tried ordering a set of fun polarizing lenses, which showed up 1/2" bigger around than the entire lens assembly and with no means of attachment even though I used the camera details as my search string, so I don't put any fancy lenses on my little Canon. They're tough, though...I'm on my second one, the one I originally borrowed, and it's performing just like its predecessor.

I have shot the ghost town of Coolidge, a silver-mining outpost 9,000 feet or so up in the Pioneer Mountains, and I have shot sunset standing on Rockaway Beach, Oregon. When we drove to Billings to see Alice Cooper with Rob Zombie (rocked and sucked, in that order, tix said NO PHOTO so I left the camera in the truck and oh yes I was severely annoyed when the security dude with the bullhorn said still photos would be allowed but the line was already moving) I got a shot of a meadowlark on a fencepost in about 110 degrees Fahrenheit. I've shot bald eagles from my own balcony with the same camera at -15 F.

I'm religious about using my lanyard because my hands like to randomly just say "NOPE" and snap open, but that doesn't mean it's never fallen off anything (It has. A lot.) I broke a bone in my hand when the lanyard swung the camera back around on me once as I was slipping on ice, that was fun. I have a legend-worthy capacity for ridiculous injury. Didn't break the camera, just my hand.

I don't use processing software because I suck so badly at tech & software...just so badly. I use IrfanView to resize & gamma correct if needed and (seriously) Paint to crop. That's why I put my images here--I figured to be high-quality, the images would need to be much sharper and cleaner than they come off the camera, plus editing software might be difficult as my computer has a teeny brain because I keep all my images on an external that holds a terabyte. My image count, midway through a heavy archive edit to remove duplicate scenes (same bird, same buildings, only need so many poses) and focus fails and the like, is just over 143,000 as of today (more yay for manageable OCD!) but I still don't know how to use Photoshop or work with a RAW file.

On a (slightly) serious note, I have many, many photos of different types of minerals, everything from exotics at shows to rare jaspers "in the wild" and ranging in size from things that will fit on the nail of my ring-size-2-1/2-pinkie to entire mountainsides. Anyone needs pictures of stones is welcome to contact me to find out if my work will suffice. I don't take money. Photography is not a business to me--it's the creative outlet I took up when that snapping-open trick and the fact that both of my pinkies and ring fingers are largely numb for no evident reason combined to make sculpting tiny animals in polymer clays impossible after 19 years at it. I'm okay with barter and great with "pay it forward", but I do not want money.

The stone I hope shows is either slate or shale, tan with huge dendritic markings that are likely iron oxide or manganese oxide. The posted version is 25% of the full-sized image, resampled but not cropped. It's from about 40 miles west of Missoula, right upside I-90 near a town called Alberton where there are spectacular outcrops of this stuff in tan, greens, purples, and even a whole mountainside of reddish-pink.

Time for me to quit clogging up your servers and attempt to be a responsible adult about my day, which is set to include an hour of horseback physical therapy and then just enough time to shower off the horsehair before I go ask my doc why he stopped renewing my pain meds out of freaking nowhere...

[glatt]

I see you have uploading attachments figured out. Awesome! And good to see you.

If you want the picture to appear within the body of the post, instead of way down at the bottom after all your excellent commentary, you go back up to the paperclip a second time and click on it until you see "Manage attachments" and then you click on the attachment you want to manage, and it goes wherever your cursor happens to be. Like this.


It sounds complicated, but it's really easy.

And you can have up to four pictures within a post that way, and have commentary in between each one.

Edit: And I see in another post that you are "not a him" so I guess that dapper dude wasn't you.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Snakeadelic

And for the record: I take pretty pictures and have some downright extraordinary ones, but I know zero about actual techniques or equipment.

My camera is a Canon PowerShot A720 IS with 6x physical zoom (up to 24x digital but boy howdy quality sucks at that limit). --snip

Like this one?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Tree fire from a lightning strike.

[glatt]

Wow. I'd expect flames and smoke if there are hot coals like that and unburned wood present.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Not if there's no oxygen between the coals and unburned wood.

[Snakeadelic]

Lamplighter, the birds around here know me pretty well. The kestrels and the robins were the first to decide that I'm not dangerous. Using that mild OCD and the fact that I've spent my whole life training my eyes to lock on motion that doesn't match the environment, I've spent the last couple of springs chasing invasive European starlings out of the ornamental tree in front of my window. This year I've been rewarded--the cedar waxwings figured out only one tree on the block had any fruit left, and I got to see them learn that I only chase starlings. American crows are illegal to directly harass, but they do not like the range-finding light on my camera and they don't like being watched intently. Studies show that they can recognize human faces even with disguises AND they can teach their offspring which specific monkeys to avoid. No crow has perched within half a block of my apartment to bark about its territory in like 3 years now, a miracle of no small order considering we have a 20+ foot tall streetlight right across the road. That kestrel, the female of the breeding pair, just casually watched me out in a grassy field as I circled the tree to PUT the moon behind her . I have multiple moon-and-bird shots, but the real challenge is the magpies because those <unladylike words here> have a sense of humor AND don't like cameras.

[Snakeadelic]

BigV Indeedy! Exactly, precisely, 100% like that one (though your photo looks slightly vertically stretched when I hold mine up to the screen next to the pic). If I can't get another one when this one dies, I may cry a LOT.

[Snakeadelic]

glatt, I'm going to try that sometime when my brain isn't as broken as it is currently...ALL of my physical therapy just came to a crashing halt, with no replacement activities available. Meanwhile, a couple more images... like me hanging out with a celebrity of sorts! The skull is a scaled-down cast of Sue, the biggest and most complete T-rex we have.

Once a year in late summer or early fall we generally get one bitty bat hiding out underneath our porch, which is wooden planks with gaps between. I've rescued a few before other tenants could complain and lead to the poor thing having to be killed; watching nature documentaries for 40 years has given me a pretty good idea how to help, and the local wildlife rehabber says I do a great job when it's needed. For the record, if you need to move a single bat to a safer location, wear leather gloves, handle them very gently, and place them in a clean, dry container to transport. I use a small Sterilite bin with ventilation holes drilled in it, and when moving bats I fill it with dry paper towels--learned that when one WOULD NOT let go of a glove, so I stuck the glove in with and the bat climbed inside because the suede reminded it of being in a colony, surrounded on all sides. The rehabber took charge of that one and once it had recovered she even brought back my glove.

As might be implied if you recognized my shirt from the first pic, one of the earliest revelations about me is that OMG I AM SUCH A HUGE GODZILLA FAN. When I met my biker neighbor almost 7 years ago, he vaguely remembered loving old monster movies he'd watched long before the skull fractures and other injuries mangled his detail memory. I spend a lot of time functioning as a volunteer care provider for him, and now we watch tons of kaiju movies...so many, so often, that when his cerebral palsy required him to swap out his Dyna Street Bob for a trike, he wanted a custom plate. With all of Montana having a population less than Pugetropolis alone, he had no trouble getting the one he wanted. For those who don't zone out on Toho flicks, that particular MechaGodzilla (figurine) is nicknamed 'Kiryu' in the two movies it's in, and the IMDb trivia page says the nickname means 'mechanical dragon'. We're not gonna try attaching the figurine to the trike, but it would be SUPER AWESOME to find a local airbrush artist who could put the glowing sparkle-yellow eyes and red racing stripes on Kiryu's face on the trunk lid of the trike...

[Snakeadelic]

Since the edit function is giving me fits now, I want to add that the bolt visible near the bat is only 1/4 inch wide--this is probably a "little brown" bat from the genus Myotis, one of the more common bats and incredibly dinky.

[Snakeadelic]

glatt, sorry I didn't notice this part quicker, but you're entirely correct. That dapper dude in a suit is the lead singer of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, one of maybe a dozen musicians/groups I will still pay to go see. 2 decades together, all 6 original members still there, have played for 3 in-office Presidents of this country...not who you expect in a 140-seat high school auditorium, but WOW WHAT A SHOW.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Could this be Digr's car?