Watched the Starship liftoff and then headed over to the Garden Club. Dave the Plant Man was there and we got some plants and some tips. We put in five tomato plants, but I'm afraid they won't be bearing fruit before we leave for New York this summer.

In addition to the tomatoes, we put in some sugar snap peas, pole beans, some spinach-thing I can't spell or pronounce. The bush beans are still producing so we're leaving them in, as with those leafy broccoli plants. One has gone to seed and we're going to let the pods mature and dry and then hang onto the seeds and see if we can plant them.

Still very little idea what we're doing, but we got some tips about where to plant each type of plant in the bed. Spread some Black Cow soil amendment over the whole thing. We'll see how it goes.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:54 Thursday, 14 March 2024

Yesterday, after I'd shot the kite in flight and checked the image, I was excited to notice the anole in the bird's beak. I started hustling up to the corner to get around to a more open area over the preserve to maybe get some more shots.

A thought crossed my mind, unbidden, "Don't get greedy, be grateful." I slowed a bit and sure enough, when I got to the more open area, there were no birds to be seen. Would there have been if I'd hustled? I don't know. But I wasn't disappointed, I was looking forward to checking the images on the iMac when I got home.

And a couple of opportunities came up on the way home anyway, and I was happy for those too.

So this morning I didn't expect much, because yesterday was such a good day. Sure enough, no kites over the preserve. Nothing until I got to the clubhouse area where I'd seen a rabbit last week. I looked for a rabbit along the walkway but didn't see one where I expected to and decided that I wasn't going to get a bunny today either.

And there it was.

So, "let go" and "be open." Or just relax and enjoy the walk.

Brought the same combo this morning and I'm glad I did. Guessing there are two nesting pairs in the preserve nearby. Go to Flickr and watch the sequence (arrow-left) as it transfers the anole from its talon to its beak.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:32 Tuesday, 12 March 2024

The orange blur at the top of the frame is my big giant head, because I always forget how wide the fisheye is.

A lot of satellites, but you probably not big enough to see in this post. Larger version at Flickr.

Kind of a nothing shot (with the OM-5), except for the story it tells. I'm sure the guy must go to larger retention ponds where an air boat isn't as absurd. At least it's a small one, and very quiet.

But what he's doing there is spraying chemicals into the retention pond to control (prevent) the growth of algae and unwanted aquatic vegetation which thrive because of the fertilizer we spray onto our lawns.

It's a self-licking ice cream cone for the landscape and chemical fertilizer and herbicide industries.

<blockquote>But you tell me over and over and over again my friend Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction</blockquote>

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:29 Monday, 11 March 2024

Before I had my breakfast, this wood stork had its. Brought the OM-1 with the 75-300 this morning. It was 50°F, so I wore a sweatshirt and my vest, which has nice pockets, into which I stuffed the OM-5 with the 14-42mm EZ pancake zoom. Fits well. Double-OM morning.

Kind of a "cheese sandwich" post, almost literally, for any who recall what those were.

I'm a creature of habit, so I don't have to think too much. I have this nearly every morning as long as I'm not in a hurry or out of something. It's two extra-large Eggland's Best eggs, a few sliced baby bella mushrooms, a large handful of spinach, black beans, turmeric, black pepper, avocado and hot sauce.

Basically, sauté the shrooms and the spinach (you can just put a cover over the pan, it'll take a while) while you're mixing the eggs, turmeric and black pepper in a bowl. The turmeric will clump up and stick to the side of the bowl, but the spinach takes care of that. Add the beans, and after the spinach is reduced and bright green, put it in with the eggs and stir well.

Pour that whole thing back into the same 8" frying pan, cover and go slice your avocado and do some cleanup. By the time you're done slicing the 'cado, washing the bowl and spatula and putting those away, it's probably done.

Slide it onto a plate, add hot sauce and eat. Might need to let it cool.

I used to make it with shredded cheese, but I decided that was unhealthy so I substituted spinach. It tastes great and ensures I don't get hungry until after noon.

Did a late walk yesterday, in the afternoon. There were several birds overhead, including a vulture and a swallow tailed kite, but these wood storks are always impressive. Only had the 14-150mm on the OM-5 with me. I'm just going to start carrying the 75-300mm with me from now on. Maybe stuff a compact in a pocket if anything wider looks appealing.

Lovely day yesterday.

Yesterday I learned about this site, and now I have several bookmarks in my Climate bookmarks folder.

The peak of our civilization.

I went out this morning with the E-M1X and the 40-150mm/f2.8 Pro with the MC14 1.4x teleconverter mounted. There was one swallow tailed kite, but it was pretty far away. It seems like the teleconverter adds a bit of chromatic aberration. Shot wasn't compelling enough to share it.

Thought I'd be shut out when I saw these cedar waxwings flock to this tree. Had kind of hoped I'd get a shot of them all going airborne, but they didn't seem like they were in any hurry and I wanted to get home.

It's a much heavier rig than I normally carry, so I used the Cotton Carrier G3 vest. At least I got more of a workout. I couldn't have carried this setup for 3.3 miles on a sling without getting a painful knot between my shoulder blades. As it was, I felt it a bit in my quads, and toward the end in my calves. I wasn't booking along by any means, but I wasn't sauntering either.

Whelp, I guess I should learn to just go with my first instinct.

I thought about bringing the 40-150mm/2.8 Pro with the MC14 teleconverter mounted, which would have given me a 56-210mm/f4 (112-420mm efl), which would have been useful for birds. I'd seen a few yesterday with the 14-150mm/f4-5.6 and it's not ideal for birds.

Well, it was getting cloudy and I thought I might have better luck with something as a landscape composition. Dumb move.

As I got toward the end of my street I heard some birds calling that sounded vaguely like ospreys, but not same as an osprey. It wasn't a "chittering" call either, which might have been bald eagles. I finally saw them above the trees and they were swallow-tailed kites!

I think I've only seen them twice before around here, and then just a single bird. Here were three or four! And all I've got is the 14-150! The 100-400mm zoom would have been best, but I don't do my morning walk lugging that thing around.

So, "The best camera is the one you have with you," rules applied and I did the best I could.

The low angle light makes for some interesting shots. This is "society garlic," and it is kind of stinky.

Absolutely gorgeous morning today. Air was cool and crisp and sweet. I got started earlier than I have recently and there were no lawn mowers or leaf-blowers, few cars, low angle light. Saw this rabbit and it was quite accommodating with having its picture taken. Then I noticed the other one. It's not uncommon to see rabbits here, though I haven't seen one in quite a while. Perhaps because I wasn't out early enough.

Overcast today. Uninspiring. Brought along the Oly TG-6 and shot a bunch of frames with the "Grainy Film" filter, might put a couple up at Flickr.

This caught my eye. Used the OM-5 with the 14-150. SOOC.

Mostly this is to verify the workflow again. It's installed where the AppleScript calls it, and I've already checked to see if it moved the image to the correct folder, and it did. The real test will be in 2025, but at least I'm not getting any errors.

I'll be working in the Blog Test Platform TBX today. I have a few Buckaroo Banzai gifs that I'd like to post from time to time, so I'm going to borrow an idea from Jack Baty and see if I can get that set up in the BTP today and then bake it into the marmot.

Guess that's about it for now.

The weather's been crap, so I haven't taken any pics, and I didn't want to write about Automator, which I both love and despise, and, oh what it might have been.

Anyway, I was thinking about the E-M10 Mk4 the other day because I'd just ordered another copy of the lens that I shot this image with. ("Never end a sentence with a preposition," I hear Mrs. Peretta in my head, every time.) It's the mZuiko 45mm/f1.8 prime.

I just got another black copy from KEH.COM for about a third less than I could get a new one from OMDS. I have a silver one, which is what I used for this shot, that I bought in January, 2012. (I paid $3.99 for faster shipping. Pre-Prime I guess.) I bought a black one back in 2021, which I gave to my son with the E-M10 Mk4. I bought it for the E-M10, because a silver lens on an all-black body looks dumb.

The silver one looks fine on all of my PEN cameras, I shot that pic with the PEN-F. (Northern Ireland, April 2018)

Since I used "Sparks Joy" on the last post in February, I didn't want to use it again so soon. But this lens does exactly that. It's a tiny thing, not as long as your thumb, smaller than a shot glass. 90mm effective focal length, into the telephoto range. At f1.8 it's very bright (and just don't start with the "equivalence" bullshit), and at that focal length, when you get near your subject, you get excellent background separation. I won't speak to the quality of the bokeh (or the "toneh"), well, actually I will. It's excellent.

Anyway, I wanted another black one for the OM-5, which is all black. The combination makes for a very small setup. Unobtrusive. You can get some great shots.

I've got the 45mm/f1.2 which is by all measures a vastly superior lens. But it's also bigger and heavier. You're not going to get away with slyly grabbing a candid. When that honking barrel swings your way, you notice. It's not huge by any measure, and by full frame standards, it's positively petite. But it's big enough that I'm much more comfortable shooting with it on the bigger bodies with a substantial grip, which makes the whole thing a much more imposing proposition.

Which is why the 45mm/f1.8 sparks joy. It's just this tiny little thing that punches way above its weight. If I could have only one lens, it'd probably be the 14-150mm super-zoom. Gets me maybe 80% of what I like to shoot. If I could have a 3-lens kit, it'd be the 14-150, the Lumix 20mm/f1.7 (another lens that sparks joy, although it can also break your heart being slow to focus), and the 45mm/f1.8. But I wouldn't be too sad if I could only have one lens and it was any one of those three.

That shot is SOOC ("straight of the camera"). Looking at it on the 27" monitor, I'd probably add some sharpening, but not much, and maybe go with a 3:2 crop. It was bitterly cold that evening, with a stiff wind. A better photographer might have stuck around for some smoother water on the beach and more of a reflection, but I was cold.

The weather's been crap, so I haven't taken any pics, and I didn't want to write about Automator, which I both love and despise, and, oh what it might have been.

Anyway, I was thinking about the E-M10 Mk4 the other day because I'd just ordered another copy of the lens that I shot this image with. ("Never end a sentence with a preposition," I hear Mrs. Peretta in my head, every time.) It's the mZuiko 45mm/f1.8 prime.

I just got another black copy from KEH.COM for about a third less than I could get a new one from OMDS. I have a silver one, which is what I used for this shot, that I bought in January, 2012. (I paid $3.99 for faster shipping. Pre-Prime I guess.) I bought a black one back in 2021, which I gave to my son with the E-M10 Mk4. I bought it for the E-M10, because a silver lens on an all-black body looks dumb.

The silver one looks fine on all of my PEN cameras, I shot that pic with the PEN-F. (Northern Ireland, April 2018)

Since I used "Sparks Joy" on the last post in February, I didn't want to use it again so soon. But this lens does exactly that. It's a tiny thing, not as long as your thumb, smaller than a shot glass. 90mm effective focal length, into the telephoto range. At f1.8 it's very bright (and just don't start with the "equivalence" bullshit), and at that focal length, when you get near your subject, you get excellent background separation. I won't speak to the quality of the bokeh (or the "toneh"), well, actually I will. It's excellent.

Anyway, I wanted another black one for the OM-5, which is all black. The combination makes for a very small setup. Unobtrusive. You can get some great shots.

I've got the 45mm/f1.2 which is by all measures a vastly superior lens. But it's also bigger and heavier. You're not going to get away with slyly grabbing a candid. When that honking barrel swings your way, you notice. It's not huge by any measure, and by full frame standards, it's positively petite. But it's big enough that I'm much more comfortable shooting with it on the bigger bodies with a substantial grip, which makes the whole thing a much more imposing proposition.

Which is why the 45mm/f1.8 sparks joy. It's just this tiny little thing that punches way above its weight. If I could have only one lens, it'd probably be the 14-150mm super-zoom. Gets me maybe 80% of what I like to shoot. If I could have a 3-lens kit, it'd be the 14-150, the Lumix 20mm/f1.7 (another lens that sparks joy, although it can also break your heart being slow to focus), and the 45mm/f1.8. But I wouldn't be too sad if I could only have one lens and it was any one of those three.

That shot is SOOC ("straight of the camera"). Looking at it on the 27" monitor, I'd probably add some sharpening, but not much, and maybe go with a 3:2 crop. It was bitterly cold that evening, with a stiff wind. A better photographer might have stuck around for some smoother water on the beach and more of a reflection, but I was cold.

Mitzi and I went to another talk in the Florida Forum series on Monday. Same series that we saw Woz at last month. She drove, so I shot this with my iPhone from the window of our car. It's a pretty skyline in the golden hour.

We went to hear retired Admiral James Stavridis. He lives not far from here, in Ponte Vedra Beach. I've been reading or listening to Jim Stavridis for almost 50 years (48 or 49, I don't recall if he was Brigade Commander first or second set.)

Before there was blogging, there were journals. Jim was always getting published in Proceedings, the journal of the United States Naval Institute. I can recall that he was very highly regarded at the academy, which is saying something. He went on to a very long and distinguished career, including Supreme Commander of NATO. A little bit goes a long way with Jim, and you're never going to get just "a little bit" of Stavridis. He does seem to like to hear himself talk.

As I suppose I do, as I "hear myself" as I'm writing.

Anyway, it was a good talk. He threaded some very fine needles in commenting on current events in the Middle East and in domestic politics. He was on the short list for VP if Hillary was elected according to some friends who know him. Maybe it was SECDEF. I can't see a guy with no domestic political experience being a running mate. SECDEF makes more sense, so maybe I'm mis-remembering. But that gives you an idea kind of which way he leans.

Basically, he took the audience around the globe and talked about "challenges and opportunities for leadership," and it was mainly geopolitical. Nothing really about climate. Nothing about uncontrolled growth and system overshoot. Which is fine. Not exactly in his wheelhouse, so to speak.

He had some things to say to the audience about how they might help. "Read more." Well, it's an expensive talk, (a fund-raiser for Wolfson Children's Hospital) so the audience that perhaps really needs to be encouraged to read more probably wasn't in the seats that night. "Listen to each other," was the other. Yeah, I don't know about that one. People don't "listen," around here, so much as "wait to speak." So maybe the advice was good, but I don't think anyone heard it.

He had some kind things to say about Jacksonville, which was polite, I suppose. Although he called Jacksonville natives "Jacksonians," and I've never hear them referred to that way. It's either the neologism "Jaxsons" or "Jacksonvillians." His wife is a native, so that was kind of an inexplicable slip.

He said that people are "so nice" here. But it's Florida, a part of the former Confederacy and "southern" nice is a different kind of nice than, say, New York nice. New Yorkers may be abrasive, but there's seldom hostility; and if there is, it's right in your face.

This is "bless your heart" country. The myth of the genteel ways of "Old Dixie," dies hard. They'll smile to your face, but stab you in the back in a heartbeat, and do so gladly. And it won't be "personal." It'll just be one of two things: business or politics. But, "nothing personal."

Also bear in mind that Florida is really two states. One Florida is of and for the privileged, mainly white but all relatively wealthy people. The other Florida is the ignored. The people in the margins. The poor, immigrants, people who aren't cis-gendered. The people Florida's generation-long Republican rule won't expand Medicaid for.

They used to be just "the ignored." Now, under DeSantis and Republicans like Randy Fine and Dean Black, they're the openly attacked. So, yeah, if you're among the privileged, I suppose people seem nice.

All of that "southern hospitality" and "civility" was a mask for one of the most brutal cultures in history.

Which I think is why hate has found such a welcome home here. It never left. It's not Jim Crow pervasive yet.

But give it a chance, and it will be.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:02 Thursday, 29 February 2024

Another shot from yesterday morning. Wood storks are just amazing to me. They're huge in the air, and they look almost prehistoric on the ground.

On the last part of my walk when I do the 3.25 mile loop, I'm headed south, so everything in front of me is pretty backlit. I thought it worked for the feathers. This is at 150mm (300mm effective on a full frame body), so I could have tightened up the framing with the 75-300. But I wouldn't have gotten something like this with a normal zoom, like the 12-45. That's an ibis on its right. There were quite a few different wading birds all next to each other.

On my walk yesterday, I was carrying the OM-5 with the 14-150mm/f4-5.6 superzoom. It's not a birding lens, really, but it can give you some reach. And I was in aperture priority because I'd been using shutter priority for Live ND shots. (I could switch from aperture priority into shutter priority and Live ND would still be active.)

Anyway, spotted this egret flying low over the pond and figured I'd give it a try, not expecting much but a lot of blur. Turned out better than I expected, but still an otherwise unremarkable image.

Except, what the hell is going on with that bird's breast? I'm assuming that it has a "crop" and that it's holding a rather large fish.

I have never seen anything like that before. Now I have, and you have too.

Been awake since about 0230, writing blog posts in my head while trying to go back to sleep. Eventually, I gave up and got up. Stuck my head out the door, there was the moon. Took the MC20 teleconverter off the E-M1X and put the MC14 on it. Less reach, but I'm shooting at f9 versus f14. Dropped the ISO to 200 and leaning against the porch pillar I could stay steady enough to successfully get a handheld hi-res shot, even though the moon was pretty high. (It's harder for me to hold the camera/lens steady when I'm pointing it nearly overhead.)

Anyway, the moon "sparks joy." I wish to share it.

Ok, looks like the Automator application works again. It's not optimal, because I'm just pointing it to the Images folder in the 2024 archive. This means that in 2025, I'll have to point it to another Images folder.

There's a "variable" I can use, and I'll be exploring that as I go on. For now, I just wanted the overall automation to work so I can post pics while I continue to update and modify the workflow.

It's perhaps a "nothing" image, but I've been playing with the Live Neutral Density Filter option on the OM-5. I've used it before on my other Olympus/OMDS cameras, so I basically know how it works. But I want to get more familiar with it, so the fountain is just a target of opportunity. We don't have much in the way of dynamic water here in the neighborhood. I could go to the beach, but then I lack any foreground interest.

I feel as though I have to point out that if we had any conception of what was coming, we'd turn all these things off. There are many things we can't turn off, but continuing to consume energy for utterly superfluous reasons ought to be criminal.

One day, it might be.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 12:46 Tuesday, 27 February 2024

Although I'd intended to do some work on the marmot, I got distracted by the moon. I had tried a different method of editing the moon recently, and I liked the result. I'd followed some guidance in a YouTube video, and naturally I can't recall what the process was, or which video I watched. Shame on me! Take notes!

Anyway, I also have to fix the Automator action that moves images after export, so I figured I'd first verify it was broken on the iMac as well. It is.

So, off to play with Automator!

Sorta kinda works.

The problem right now is that the folder the image is moved to is hard-coded in the Automator action. I started futzing with Hazel and then went back to Automator. The AppleScript it ran was just to set the file path for the Images folder by constructing it with the current year from the computer's clock.

If I just select the folder as I'm building the Automator action, there's no problem with it being in iCloud.

I'll figure it out later. For now, it works well enough to demo if I need to tomorrow.

I've been getting the 14" M3 MBP set up, which has taken a bit longer than I expected. Another project today is to collect all the license and registration codes into one repository. Seems like a good job for Tinderbox.

I've been walking 3.25 miles each morning, and adding another walk in the evening. The nice thing about the evening walk is that the sun is on the opposite side. Birds are active in the early morning and early evening. In the morning, they often backlit; not so in the evening. They were relatively scarce yesterday, but I liked how this bluebird turned out.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:57 Thursday, 15 February 2024

I was sitting in the office, going over Medicare and Tricare EOBs, as one does, when I noticed my glass was empty. I went back to the kitchen for a refill and saw a red sky through the trees.

I skipped the beverage and threw a battery and memory card in the DJI mini 2. These things only last minutes. Got GPS lock pretty quick and managed to get aloft while the show was still underway.

It was pretty damn red.

"Sailor take warning," and all that.