Janet Brien's photos with the keyword: black

(+5 insets) (Please click! Wonderful crow details await!) (Sscroll down to "Today's Image" for photo info) Notes Written on the Road: The Elderly Gentleman On my walks I often encounter folks along the way, and sometimes I run into them again during the same stroll! One fellow brings a smile to myself when I think about him. One morning I was walking up North Harris Beach and I noticed a person standing stock still at the base of a craggy boulder where the waves were creeping up with the tide. Hands held at his side, he was staring intently at something where the water hit the rocks. As the waves sank back, he crept closer, penguin-style. If the waves got too close he waggled backwards. What a funny sight! By the time I made it to the rock he'd been scooting back and forth on, he'd backed away from his tenuous position and disappeared up the beach. I couldn't help wondering what he'd been looking at. Later I trekked up the trail that winds around and leads up to the small but impressive Harris Butte which overlooks the coast and boasts a fabulous view. (I shared a picture in my last presentation) On the way, who should I meet but the fellow I'd seen on the beach! As we passed, I had my opportunity to quell my curiosity and after wishing him a good morning, asked, "What were you looking at down there on the beach?" He smiled widely, remembering where he'd seen me and reported proudly, "I saw two starfish, one purple, the other orange! I thought there was another one but the waves kept coming in and I didn't want to get soaked." I congratulated him and told him that I might try looking myself another day. I would see him for three more days on this trail and each time we said hello as we passed one another. I loved that he was so active and interested in the beauty of Harris Beach and wondered how he came to be there and if he was a full-time traveler. It would have been fun to have a chat with him. In the end, I never did check out the side of that rock down at the edge of the water but I can picture the starfish that he saw. (I wish I'd gotten a picture of him at some point but it wasn't in the cards.) A Note to Introduce Today's Picture Harris Beach State Park is unique because it has two wonderful beaches: North and South. Between them sits a boulder-glutted area and a very large, healthy tide pool--all of which can be scrambled around when the tide is low. Further bi- and trisecting the beaches, a number of creeks empty out into the ocean in several places and create lagoons or busy streams which snake down to the water's edge. Crossing them to continue walking along the beach can be a simple wide stretch with some momentum, a careful hop or a running leap. Alternatively, one may choose to abandon any decorum whatsoever and splash across or, for those who really don't want to get soaked, the adventurous can climb over the cobbled driftwood and rocks that collect at the tops of the beaches where the streams come down the hillside. The streams running down to the ocean are very popular with the local birdlife and there are usually a cluster of seagulls hanging out, bathing, or hunting for a meal. Plovers, oyster-catchers, and sandpipers are also regular visitors too. Today's Picture One day I walked to the edge of one of the streams emptying out into the ocean and watched a crow with something in its beak. It would toss it in the water and then pick it up again. Then it would walk to another spot and do it again. I wasn't sure what it was up to but I think it was washing the sand off of its goody! The main picture shows this crow eying its morsel. (Please see this picture at full-size, it's best viewed large!) Today's Insets Along with the crow image, I'm including a few more: • a portrait of the crow that shows its treat (a slice of ham? Pastrami?) • a shining abstract of charred driftwood • the a driftwood still life that includes the charred driftwood • beautiful lines showing rippling stream water • a collage of images to show the pretty millipede I saw on the beach Thank You For Your Visit, Comments & Stars! What fun to read what you have to say about my latest presentation! It's so enjoyable to learn a tidbit that relates to you or if you have a favorite image. Likewise, I really love to hop around the world through the lenses of your cameras to see what you're sharing today, and to let you know what I think too! :) Hope you had a wonderful weekend and crossing your fingers that this coming week is great too! Explored on 11/21/21; highest placement #4.

(+14 insets...7 from now, seven from my last "Medicine" theme) :D ENJOY!! :D Today is Macro Monday! I've been looking forward to working on the topic, "Medicine," since it was announced last week. Funny enough, the group I was involved with a few years back (Bokeh Thursday) used the same topic (I've included insets so you can see what I came up with back then)! One thing I remembered was that there's just no end to the fun pictures you can take of pills and various forms of medicine. I spent a while on Sunday playing around with various ideas and ended up using spills for my pictures (A spill is when you pour a number of items onto a surface and allow them to fall as they like). I love the organic feel of this kind of picture and the wonderful bokeh that happens with anything sitting in the background. The medicines I used were actually vitamins, considered to be medicine depending on how you feel about this sort of thing. That's enough exuse for me, and we have plenty of them so I went to town with pills from our daily doses! Multi-vitamin, vitamin D, wheat grass, fish oil and Quonol...all of them were great fun to shoot! I ended up with 7 current insets, 7 insets from my past project and my main image which features Vitamin D gel capsules! (Two of them are other versions of vitamins I already shared so I played with their colors in red and purple…PRETTY!!!) Pam, I am sure you're no stranger to medicine. The older we get, the more junk we need to add to our systems it seems. Oddly enough, Steve and I don't use much medicine since we changed to a ketogenic lifestyle...we don't get colds, we don't get sick. Our aches and pains basically went away. (did you know that most of us have a lot of unknown inflammation which causes this?) I know that removing carbohydrates seems impossible to a lot of people but once we learned how to cook foods that ended up being a much tastier alternative, it was an easy transition. The health benefits are remarkable and for those who suffer from pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, keto is known to reverse and eliminate it! There are many other remarkable life-changers but many people do keto to lose weight...Steve lost 45 pounds and I lost 17. Keto is also great way to remove medication from your life, but in regards to brain injuries, I did find an article from a woman who suffered a stroke and keto helped her a lot. I wonder if it could help you? Here's the link: Healing from a stroke I am thinking about you every day! *BIG HUGGGGGS* from southern Oregon!

Week 9 of 10 of The Color Wheel project features the darkest color of them all: black. Black is both the absence of light and the complete absorption of light. This project is part of the ipernity group, "10-Week Picture Projects" . We'd love you have you join us! NOTE: If you are part of the Color Wheel Project, would you please take the time to visit the discussion about what project we should do next? There is a poll for you to place your vote, and I would love to know what you have to think! Please visit this link: Time to Vote on our Next Project! This week, I carefully poured out all of my black beads onto the mirror I'm using for my Color Wheel set, and then carefully looked them over to remind myself of what was there. Marvelous large, shiny baubles, tiny seed beads, plastic cones and spirals, stone and wooden tube shapes...so many to ooh and ahhh over!! And then I saw this lovely polished stone. When you see a rock like this, it's a bit difficult to believe. The bands of white, the little section of brown on top, yet black overall, I found myself just staring at this one, and was really happy when I got a nice picture to share! How nice it is to be settled in to my job. After having 4 days off for Thanksgiving weekend, I was really excited to get back to it. A super day awaited me and a feeling of contentment because I feel so at home here. :) 10-Week Picture Projects has 269 members now with an endless stream of beautiful pictures! Great fun, great talent, and easy to participate in because your picture can be from your archives or current. This can be a nice way to showcase a picture from the past that screams a certain color! :) Explored on December 2, 2014. Highest placement, #6.

1 more picture above in a note! :) While I was looking around for the little pink flower I was planning to photograph, I noticed something dark fly down and try to land on...one of the pink flowers I was looking for!! Instead of landing on the little flower, which was small even to this beetle, it crashed into the flower and fell off the other side and into the grass. With an amused grin, I creeped closer with hopes of taking pictures of it crawling up to the flower. Unfortunately, the beetle was several feet from the flower now, but its antics were great fun to watch! If a beetle could act annoyed, this one was doing a very convincing job! It was trying to fly but kept bumping into grass or stems and getting knocked down again. Then it would try crawling up a stem and fall off because of its fairly large and heavy size. I could see a fun challenge awaiting me if the beetle could manage to crawl out of the jungle below and afford me a good vantage point for a picture. As you know, I am always practicing to take pictures of fast-moving insects or fleeting opportunities which require quick judgement, fast aiming and steady hands while aiming for that one chance for sharp focus. I watched with baited breath as he finally clambered up a very shaky stem of wild grass with the intentions of flying from the top. As it crawled over the tiny tines of the top of the grass, I got three pictures, and amazingly, I got focus on all of them!! Then he was in the air and off to crash into a flower somewhere else! :D Of the three pictures I got, two of them were just a big shallow of dof for my liking and the angle wasn't optimal. But when I saw this picture I laughed out loud with a gleeful, "YES!!!" I couldn't have asked for a better outcome! Now, for those of you who are saying to yourself that you'll never get a picture like this, I'm saying the same thing!! So much of getting pictures like this has to do with luck and opportunity, but also lots of practice. Honestly, do what I do: practice every single time you have an chance to chase a bug around. You'll get better and better, and with time, you'll get much calmer and steady with the camera, and your results will improve. You have nothing to lose, and it's a fantastic game to play!! Come on!! SHOW ME YOUR PICTURES!!! :)

I wanted to crop this beetle to 1024 x 1024 so you could get a better look at this lovely fellow! One of the things I'm so happy about is that black insects are not easy to photograph. The details are usually lost or totally blown out where the sun reflects. But in this case, the sun was diffused by an overcast sky and it was hitting him at just the right angle, and he's properly exposed! HAPPY DAY!!! *snoopy dance*

This is one of those lucky pictures where you see the opportunity, aim, take a picture, and the second you do, the critter disappears like it was never there in the first place! :D I didn't actually think it would come out. What a surprise to look at this on my computer and find this bee in mid-air, in crisp focus! WOW! And then I laughed out-loud because the poppy head seems to be very alarmed at the bee! So funny! :D Thanks to Art (Leapfrog) for helping me to identify this as a California Carpenter Bee! Sure looks like a bumblebee to me but it's not surprising that I'm confused: did you know there are over 20,000 bees in the world?!! Carpenter bees aren't even close relatives of bumblebees, though they do share the same family. There are over 500 species of carpenter bee compared to 250 species of bumblebee. From Wiki: These bees get their name from the fact that nearly all species build their nests in burrows in dead wood, bamboo, or structural timbers (except those in the subgenus Proxylocopa, which nest in the ground). If you would like more information about Carpenter bees, Wikipedia has a nice source here: Wikipedia: Carpenter Bee

Today when I went out into our smaller meadow, I saw a black beetle fly by and land on a daisy. It was so intent on gobbling pollen that I was able to get several images before it took off and flew away! I usually have trouble with black beetles because it's so hard to see their eyes, but I think this one turned out quite well! Hooray!

This image was taken at Pheasant Field Farm on Saturday, October 22, 2011.

This beautiful fellow was walking around very close to me, confident and unafraid. I was delighted to get the chance to take its picture! This image was taken during my trip to San Francisco during September 12-15, 2011.

I found this gorgeous fellow walking boldly around the grounds outside the Conservatory of Flowers. Isn't he cool?! I've never gotten close enough to take a good picture of one of these before! This image was taken during my trip to San Francisco during September 12-15, 2011.

This image was taken at the Josephine County Fair on August 20, 2011.

This image was taken on my property in Southern Oregon in July, 2011.

Shadow is a Poodle-Chesepeake Bay Retriever mix and she is one very cool, mellow dog. Here she is, frolicking in the snow. She was wonderful to hike with and I hope to get the chance to do that in the future! :D

I wanted to see what would happen if I massaged this image into a black background, and now I am really REALLY wishing that I had my Mark II with me that day!!!

When Steve and I moved up to the countryside of southern Oregon years ago, I was excited that we would be living in the midst of so much wildlife. However, in the first month of living here, I got a horrifying surprise when I saw a very large, inky-black spider under the stairs in our garage and discovered that it was, indeed, a Black Widow spider!! That one was the largest I have seen, with an abdomen of nearly half an inch in diameter! Since then, I've been extremely careful about putting my hands in dark places. I've found several Black Widows, including a couple of tiny males, one of which was in our downstairs bathroom!!! Since I got my new camera last November, I've been keeping my eyes open for Black Widows but they were nowhere to be seen, which was a little bit annoying because I know they are very common here. However, like many spiders, they are nocturnal, very shy, and run away at the first sign of something big and scary like a human. About a week ago I went over to our shop and when I turned on the light, I found a large black spider moving across the floor and trying to get out of the light. I quickly found a container, carefully coaxed it in, popped a lid on and brought it to the house for a better look. As I watched, it climbed around the sides of the container and I saw what I was looking for! The classic hourglass markings on the bottom of the abdomen, showing this spider to be a female Black Widow! YES!! I put her into a clear glass jar with the idea of taking pictures and then...what? Steve wanted to kill her immediately but I told him no--I want pictures! The internet sided with Steve; even those who like spiders draw the line at spiders which pose a threat to humans. Fair enough. But still she sat, lurking in her jar, awaiting her demise, as one day turned into three. I realized that she must be hungry, and even though she was sitting on death row, perhaps it would be fair to give her something to eat. So, I found a cucumber beetle that had wandered into the house and carefully popped it into the jar. A few hours later, the spider was feasting happily. Steve decided that our new guest was interesting too, and presented her with a beetle, which was captured and eaten with relish. Then for a real bit of fun...a wasp was buzzing around in the kitchen. A good whack with a fly swatter to disorient it, Steve grabbed it with a paper towel and stuffed it into the jar. Was that delight on his face when we found her chowing down an hour later? I know that was the expression on MY face! Time to get serious. It was time to get back to the plan...pictures and a swift death. However, I discovered that taking pictures through curved glass doesn't work very well at all. Distortion from the curve of the glass ruins the picture and using a flash amplifies problems. What to do, what to do...ah yes! Let's put her into a square glass container! I found a plant seedling tray with a clear plastic dome, cleaned it up and lined it with white paper towels as a better contrast. I then eekingly (yes, that's a new word!) transferred her into it, popping the dome on top as she began scurrying to the edge of the tray! Make no mistake: I know EXACTLY what I'm dealing with here, and use great caution when there's nothing between me and this spider! With the lid on, I sat and watched her as she crawled over to a corner. This should work well for pictures, I thought, and noticed that the plastic dome had two vents which slide open like little hatches...perfect for popping insects through! Let's try it out! Bouncing up, I grabbed the fly swatter, went out to the trays of water we have for the birds, and smacked a wasp balanced on the surface tension. Before the drenched wasp could crawl out and fly away, I flicked it into a cup, covered it with the fly swatter, went inside and got the wasp through the opening into the dome, where it buzzed around in a fury, trying to find something to sting. I watched with a mad gleam in my eye...why, this was the best gladiator event ever! It didn't take long...the wasp would fly down to the floor and trip a few strands of the spider's web, and she should come running over. The wasp would climb up to the dome, out of harm's way, and she would return to her corner. But then it happened! The wasp flew down to the ground and wandered over to her corner, laden with sticky strands. It got stuck and tried to free itself, but before it could, the spider ran over and began throwing invisible strands over it here and there. The wasp tried to sting her, straining against the sticky web, trying to reach her with its stinger. It was no use. The harder it struggled, the worse it became stuck. All the while, she dashed in and out, busily tossing more strands, securing them here and there, and then, she moved off to the side and just waited. This was a surprise to me because I thought she'd just run in and bite it for an instant death, but she didn't. The wasp slowly exhausted itself, always straining that stinger and hoping desperately to find a target. Finally, when it was so immobilized and tired, she moved in and killed it instantly. An amazing battle, but an easy victory for this deadly foe. As you can see, I've taken a picture, but it's not a good one. We've also discovered what fun it is to feed her wasps. So, we'll be keeping this spider for a while longer but I've decided that I would like to release her far from home, because the fact is that there are hundreds of these spiders all around our home, though we cannot see them. Her death would not make a difference in the number of these spiders, and frankly, I don't feel right about killing her. After all, this is her home. It is our job to be careful of the wildlife here, but it wasn't her fault that she found her way into our shop. (I'll be posting another picture or two in the future, along with more information about these spiders.)

This is one of our more common beetles. Tanbark Borer Beetles are fairly large, about 1/2" in size, and are in a group of beetles called Longhorn Beetles for an obvious reason! We have many types of these beetles on our property, which are native to Eurasia, but are now found here as well!

As Kool and the Gang would say, "There's a party going on right here, a celebration to last troughout the years...so bring your good times and your laughter too, we're gonna celebrate your party with you!" Ok, ok, their party lasted about 5 seconds but I was singing the whole time! :D

"The EZ Snack 2000! No fuss! No muss! The fast and easy way to get insects served to your web with no effort on your part! This fabulous spider-friendly habitat is spacious, clean and comes delivered and ready to move into for the low, low price of just $29.99! ORDER TODAY!!! 1-800-EZ-SNACK" **Some assembly required, willing human slave not included, offer void where prohibited by arachnophobes. Here's a picture of my Black Widow spider with two paper wasps, wrapped and ready for snacking! What a life she has these days! All she has to do is relax in style, and out of nowhere, more insects appear in her habitat!What a deal!! It has been fun to watch her chowing down on the wasps that are swarming around this summer. Steve put seven wasps in a couple of days ago and there are only two left this evening, what a little piggy!! (Her habitat is a seedling tray with a plastic dome on top, lined with white paper towels. The dome has two sliding hatches on top that open and close securely, and the dome is taped closed to ensure she doesn't get out! :D) I have read that these spiders bite their prey and then wait for them to stop moving before moving in to eat, but this particular spider does not do that. When she's ready to eat, she'll run over to a wasp that's alerted her and quickly begin tossing swaths of sticky silk on it. She ties off strands here and there, and the insect is quickly immobilized and soon can barely move. After waiting a few more minutes for it to become exhausted, she then goes in and bites it behind the head, causing it to die almost instantly. A Black Widow injects a powerful neurotoxin that affects the nervous system, quickly paralyzing and then killing the insect. (Warning: gross details ahead!) Once their prey is dead, they go to the bite site and begin chewing the area, releasing digestive enzymes that liquefy the animal's insides, which are then sucked out. After my spider is done with her feast, she carefully detaches the insect from her web and lets it fall to the ground. She will sometimes pull the insect husks into a pile, where they sit like gruesome trophies! This will be the last Black Widow spider picture for a while. I plan to take a couple more before I release her far, far, far, far, far from my house, but I think we've all had enough creepy pictures for now! I hope you've enjoyed these! It's been so much fun learning about these spiders and sharing the information with all of you! Thanks for your great comments and encouragement, you guys make me feel GREAT! *hugs* :D