Justfolk's photos

I was pretty lucky today to get this shot of the flicker flashing his underwing feathers at me. He was jumping around, looking this way and that, and his wing was just coming back into place when I took the picture. He then tucked into the remains of the suet.

She wanted to sleep but couldn't stand the light. So she covered her eyes. Very sensible.

I took this picture one night a week ago. It's a thirty-second exposure of the sky, thirty seconds because, even though I knew I would get star movement, it's the easy long-shutter-speed to choose with the Fuji X100 camera. It is looking at the SW sky a couple of hours after sunset. There was a plane starting to drop towards Torbay airport, about 100 km to the SE. It cruised across the image for almost fifteen seconds -- you can count its one-second flashes of the wingtip and tail lights, looking like three-toed animal tracks, and as well see for a few seconds the steady lights on the fuselage. Unlike the stars, of course, the flashing lights of the airplane don't show any sidelong motion. Much less obvious in the image than the plane's lights are some other sharp marks: about a half-dozen short lines all moving in the same direction (from upper right to lower left) and all ending in a brighter light. The easiest to see is immediately below the centre of the airplane's bright unbroken lines: make a rough equilateral triangle down from the steady lines and look at its apex. The others are the same length and sharpness and all have a bright spot at the end; they seem scattered through the image. I am completely puzzled as to their nature. When I saw the first, I thought "Meteorite!" but having five or six identical ones puts the boots to that theory. Because all of them are so similar, differing in brightness only, they may be each a separate reflection of one thing, but I cannot figure out what. Got any ideas?

This feral cat comes around every day, checking out the places other cats have been, or birds, or mice, or herself. Perhaps that's what she's checking out here -- her own presence the day before. She's using that mouth-open type of sniffing, using that sniffer that we poor human beings don't have. In the original picture, she practically disappeared in the snow and grass. I bumped up the contrast and she stood out more, and the snow looked more late-wintry, too. ------------ EDIT, next day: I grew up calling all cats "she" and I see today I did that yesterday about this one. But I suspect this one is a tom; she has a tom's face. :)

I took dozens of pictures of the small flock of pine grosbeaks that visited us on the weekend. I didn't get a lot of good shots of the males but here is a shot that is at least clear, Two are males (left and middle) and one is a female (right). They are hanging out in a cherry bush, finding enough to eat there to make the stop worthwhile.

Not much fruit left around on March 26th. Still lots of snow everywhere. The pine grosbeaks get what they can.

The first time I remember seeing pine grosbeaks was a Christmas Day almost twenty years ago. I thought, "My god, we have parrots in the tree out back." Of course, they weren't parrots, but I'm still pretty excited whenever I see them. These were part of a flock of about twelve of them that were checking out the last of the dogberries in Ganny Cove this past weekend. (Here they are in a little cherry bush.) Yesterday I was working in the yard when they came back and, true to their reputation as mopes, one stayed at the dogberries for ten minutes while I slowly walked in closer, "pish-pishing" at him. He finally flew to another tree when I was two or three metres from him, seven or ten feet. I didn't have my camera then so I have no close-ups.

Last night a bunch of us got together to eat, drink, tell stories and peruse a collection of 45-year-old school yearbooks. Lots of fun. Before some of us left, the hostess (at the right edge) asked for a scowlery. All were glad to comply. I took three pictures and none of them was perfect, so I took the liberty of using bits from all three. This is the result.

Two or three redpolls have been hanging around the feeder the past few days. This was today's visitor. He doesn't have as much black mask as another male who was here yesterday. This image is reduced somewhat for posting. In the original, you can see drops of water on his beak from the snow he's been picking seeds through.

My father always called these birds snowbirds; it was only sometime in my adulthood I started hearing people call them juncos. They are the after-snow maintenance guys -- first in at the feeders, shovelling the new snow away. Other birds seem to follow them once the paths are made.

My old friend Charlie, now in his nineties, tells me he knew these birds as pitchy-pees before he ever heard the word chickadee. My father used to say he could get them to land on his hand and I have tried for decades unsuccessfully. Last year my nephew sent a photograph of a chickadee landing on his palm. I am jealous. This pitchy-pee was outside my kitchen window this afternoon sitting calmly while the snow blew around him.

A different shot of the same twa corbies and the same turkey bone.

This was on my neighbour's roof just after the midday mealtime today; it appears someone threw a turkey bone from their Sunday dinner out to the crows. These two and a third crow were negotiating its disposition but this guy got the best of the deal. He'd had it between his feet a minute before, picking at it with his beak, and just after I took this he flew away with it. I hesitated posting this because I'm getting to be a one-trick pony with birds and my long lenses. I need to find time to take different pictures. :)

I've been testing a new lens. I don't like zooms -- they are generally slow and heavy. But this zoom lens is (stuck at) f/2.8 so it's not that slow. And it is very sharp; that fact can make up for the weight which is substantial. It's the heaviest lens I have ever used, I think. We'll see how much I use it or whether I keep it for that matter. The lens is clearly good for birds out my back window. This junco turned his back on me and I got a decent shot of his tail and back feathers.

I've been looking for opportunities to take pictures of crows for a couple of years. I still haven't taken the picture I've been imagining. But today I got this one when I aimed the camera at a perched crow who immediately took to flight.

We've been getting fair numbers of pine siskins at our feeder. This morning there were a dozen or so.

A bunch of relatives went out to eat last weekend and afterwards I took some pictures. These are my two oldest sisters (I have five of them) each with her granddaughter. The mothers were present too, but I didn't get them in this shot.

My office door is across the corridor from this office, that of the department's student society. Now and again I stop by to take a picture. This picture was a month ago, taken with expired Kodak 200 film in my Ricoh Elnica 35. I took four shots and this was the last, with the two in the middle in paroxysmic laughter. I'm not sure why the colour was so off and the grain so large -- the film isn't particularly old (expired 2013 or 2014). But the C41 lab had just been shut down for a couple of weeks and perhaps their chemicals or temperatures weren't fully back to normal.