This morning's birds are these mourning doves.

Dew point was reasonable and the sky was clear, so I pointed the EM-1 Mk3 to the sky with the 8mm/f1.8 fisheye mounted. Not a lot of excitement. Seems to be more satellites visible, I'm guessing those are mostly StarLink. Maybe an "Iridium flare" or something like it, or possibly a meteor. If I weren't a lazy man, I'd get up early and go to the beach and try to capture the comet. Bigger version at Flickr.

Put the drone up this morning. On the flight back from Miami, Mitzi had the window seat so I only got glimpses of a spectacular cloudscape. But I do have a drone.

Unremarkable photo. What is remarkable, and disturbing, is this is only the second bird (the first of two) I saw this morning. As I got toward the back pond, I realized I wasn't even hearing any birds. I normally hear mockingbirds, mourning doves, woodpeckers, hawks, whistling ducks, ospreys and bird calls I can't identify. Not all of them, but usually at least a couple.

Just before I got home, I heard a mockingbird, and then spotted it on the roof of a house. The only one I saw. As I'm typing this I'm hearing some kind of crane vocalizing outside.

Can't be good.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:33 Wednesday, 6 September 2023

Very pleasant morning today. 67°F! Supposed to get over 90° later today though. Still, I'll take it. I opened the windows the morning to get some fresh air in the house. I have a CO2 monitor and it's consistently over 1200ppm, which doesn't seem to cause any overt effects; but has been shown to cause measurable cognitive deficits in controlled tests. It won't matter, because I just closed the windows and it'll be over 1000 again shortly.

If I weren't laboring under those cognitive deficits, I'd look into plants or some other mechanism to reduce the interior CO2 levels.

Anyway, no birds this morning. I don't really understand it, and it's troubling. A few mockingbirds, a couple of doves and a woodpecker, but that was it. Nothing standing still long enough to photograph.

Spotted this green anole, which I don't see as often as the ubiquitous brown ones, when I was shooting some flowers. It'll have to do.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:00 Tuesday, 5 September 2023

Pretty pleasant this morning! 74°F, though the humidity was still rather high. It's fine until you start sweating, then it's just damp, not hot.

Went just before sunrise so brought the E-M1 Mk3 with the 12-100mm/f4 Pro. Wasn't sure if I could get the moon in the frame, and the star of this is the cloud. Overall, a nothing-burger, but I liked it.

This morning's moon. Had a glitch yesterday, posting the handhelds. Everything seemed fine at Marmot Industries, but the cross-posting to micro.blog seemed to go awry, with the image not posting. It picks everything up from the RSS feed, and that looked ok in NetNewsWire. So this is kind of a test post.

This is another handheld high-res shot with the E-M1X. The moon is almost directly overhead, which is the most challenging way to hold the camera and lens. I took three images, and even with Olympus' highly regarded image stabilization, you still have the hold the camera pretty still so that enough images of the subject are within the capture window to result in a satisfactory stitch. I normally get better with subsequent images when I'm pointing the camera nearly horizontally. In this case, I get worse. All three images stitched successfully, but the third one had more visible artifacts and softening.

Anyway, the clouds cooperated, I wasn't sleeping anyway, so here's the moon.

<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2023/Images/IMG_7326.JPG" alt=“From front to back, TI-74 BASICalc, HP-71b and HP-75 mounted in “the Pod”">

I will say the keyboards are much nicer on the 71 and the 75. I've missed keystrokes on the 74, but if I take my time, it's fine. "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 16:33 Saturday, 2 September 2023

Started walking at 0700, so it was still pretty dim. Brought along the E-M1 Mk3 with 12-100/f4 mounted. Tried to do something "artsy" with the setting moon over my suburban cookie-cutter landscape and failed. The tree is really the subject here, the osprey is just a bit of eye candy.

Idalia passed well to the north of us. All we experienced in my area were some clouds and gusty winds. I'd expected (and hoped for) a couple of inches of rain, but we got less than half an inch through the whole thing. We're pleased and grateful, and we know a lot of people weren't as fortunate.

I know these full moon shots aren't terribly interesting as photographs. Not close enough to reveal impressive levels of detail, and there's nothing terribly interesting in my bourgeois suburban Florida neighborhood, where the horizon is seldom farther than the house across the street, to put in the foreground. But I do retain some feeling of wonder that I can get a shot like this by holding a device in my hands. This is a handheld high-res shot from my E-M1X with the 100-400mm zoom mounted. Lately, my go-to camera for moon shots.

Little luck with birds the last few days. Stuck my head outside to look for the moon last night though. Wasn't disappointed.

Went out to get the paper this morning, and it actually felt nice. Almost cool. That's because the temperature was ~73°F! Humidity was still high, but you can deal with that. So I walked a little early, before the sun was over the trees. As a result, it was a little dim for photography. I wouldn't usually shoot in this light, but I figured it might be the only bird I'd get this morning, so I tried. Turned out ok, I think. Snowy egret.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:03 Friday, 25 August 2023

This morning's (non)bird: St Johns County Mosquito Control District airborne asset. Heard a helicopter lingering nearby but out of sight. Figured it was the sheriff's, but then it flew into my line of sight. Glad to see them. Little buggers have been thick and aggressive lately.

Hey Jack! Spotted this on my (birdless) walk yesterday. It made me chuckle. Figured some osprey had dropped its breakfast. Funny enough for me to grab a shot with the phone.

Hey, it's not a bird!

Shut out on birds yesterday and today. This morning the second of Mitzi's three bird of paradise plants flowered. She's had these plants for two years, and this is the first time they've blossomed. The third plant had a stalk(?) that would have become a flower, but it seems to have died. Two out of three ain't bad, I guess.

Shot this with the E-M1 Mk3 with the 75mm/f1.8 in 25MP handheld high-res mode, which is why the framing is a bit off. Should have backed off a bit to allow for camera motion and the frame blending.

This morning's bird. I took some shots from farther away, unsure if it'd let me get closer. This is straight from the camera.

Spotted the crescent moon last night and had to take this. Used the E-P7 with the 25mm/f1.8. Already posted it on mastodon, but I'd posted an earlier crescent moon this month, so I figured I'd post this one as well.

We haven't had any rain in over a week. Seems to keep falling all around us!

No birds this morning. Well, a couple of vultures. Gator though.

This morning's bird, a green heron. Cloud cover made conditions somewhat dim. I heard one across the road, where I'd seen one yesterday. I looked for it in the trees, but didn't see it. Spotted this one next to the pond shortly after. Unremarkable image, but we do what we can.

Didn't see much this morning. A green heron, but it was a little too far away. Shot it anyway. But the bluebirds are always nice to see.

With the slightly cooler temp, I walked later yesterday morning, with enough light to carry a telephoto zoom. Spotted this cattle egret looking a bit uncomfortable standing in front of a neighbor's garage. I don't see them often around here.

It's been about a week now where the morning low is 79°F or higher, with the humidity above 90%. The heat index is only a couple of degrees higher than that, but you can add 10° to that in direct sunlight. So if you want to walk at something approaching a "vigorous" pace, you want to do it before the sun gets very high.

This means it's pretty dark for birds, so I've been carrying the Olympus E-M1 Mk3 with the mZuiko 12-100mm/f4 lens. It's got a little bit of reach for tight cropping, but not enough for closeups. Mostly I use it for landscapes, or flowers.

But I've been playing with handheld high-res lately. I've been making 50MP images, because that's what I'm accustomed to with the moon. I'm a little embarrassed to admit you can make 25MP jpegs from HHHR as well. You may be asking why, given that the sensor's native resolution is 20MP, what's the advantage of a 25MP image?

You gain better noise and dynamic range, by a couple of stops at least. Not that this exposure shows that. I've put some pics up on Flickr that similarly don't really exhibit that, because I'm just playing around right now, getting familiar with the feature in this context.

Dad was on occupation duty in Japan immediately after the war. While it was clearly the desire to achieve an immediate surrender following the use of the atomic bombs, the Allies were by no means prepared to undertake an occupation of the Japanese home islands. So sailors from the amphibs were used as occupation forces, and Dad spent some time in Japan and made it up to Nagasaki. How or why, I never found out. There are more pics around here somewhere, but they're pretty grainy. This is one of the better ones. I'm not certain of the date, but I can probably find it if I look hard enough.

Perhaps this might help with regard to the previous post.