May is Blooming and Croaking

The FEST team challenge for May is “bloom.”

My entry can be found here.

In the spirit of spring, I also had to post this little guy.

Alligators & Anhingas Part 2

The 35mm film has returned from the photo finisher.  I still have to drop the 120 off, but that requires a special trip.  I know, I’ve heard all the pluses of digital, but I also know that spending hours on Photoshop trying to make something look like film is silly.

It’s sad, but I must report that the relatively-new zoom lens for my 35mm is not keeping its focus in the 180-300 range.  It was a bright, sunny day.  I tried it on manual focus and auto focus.  Almost everything shot at that range is nasty kinds of blurry.

On the other hand, my “new” rangefinder from the 1960s worked beautifully.

Anhingas and Gators

Sunday, the girls and I headed off to the Everglades again.  I still need to drop the film off, but while we wait:

^(Shot with an honest-to-gawd Polaroid.)

I love the Everglades.  It’s much more of an intellectual park than Yellowstone or Grand Canyon, but it has its subtle beauty and elegance if you look closely.

While down there, I found a book at the visitor center at Anhinga Trail.  I read River of Grass many years ago and I thought it was great — a bit like a rambling conversation with a very wise granny.  So far, The Swamp has been more like Steven Pinker — readable and entertaining, but adequately researched and informative.

My introduction to the Everglades, personally, came years ago when my husband worked for an environmental engineering company and his coworkers, including Everglades expert Dr. Thomas Lodge, used to go camping there from time to time.  It’s one thing to visit such fabulous wetlands on vacation and it’s another altogether to watch a man who knew Marjorie Stonemen Douglas as a close friend (not just “that lady a school’s named after) set up his ancient tent that looked like something out of an Arabian Nights movie shot in the 60s.

Trail Blazing

This morning started off getting down and dirty in the tree preserve near TYE Studios.  The goal was to get rid of as many noxious “potato vine” seedlings as possible, but we also cleared a few new trail areas to connect to existing trails.  It’s a very neat little area and one I usually find myself taking macro ground-level shots of (maybe because I’m often crawling around on my hands and knees looking for “potatoes”).

These are more snapshots of the area than proper “photographs.”  The area itself is rather astounding.  There are several habitats in there and we’ve seen all sorts of wildlife.  This time, I found the remains of a wild “snack.”

“potato”

Some macro shots from the tree preserve:

And finally, I have the best “coworkers” in the world.