Long Legs

For tagging pictures, I classify birds sometimes by science and sometimes by something I make up. Cardinals and other songbirds are passerines, which is common shorthand for the order Passeriformes. Pigeons and doves are in the order Columbiformes. I call birds "waders" if they wade in water or look like or are related to birds that wade, even if they stick to land. The great majority of birds in this category that I have photographed have long legs. There are many small shorebirds, but I don't have pictures of them, so I haven't separated them from long-legged birds.

I didn't plan my tags much beyond bird / insect / mammal / reptile. As I have accumulated thousands of photos I've added categories and subcategories so that I can find, for example, long-legged birds.

saddle-billed stork (Cincinnati Zoo)

white-faced ibis (Columbus Zoo)

white-faced ibis (Columbus zoo)

Caribbean flamingo (Columbus Zoo)

hamerkop (Columbus Zoo)

sunbittern (Cincinnati Zoo)

killdeer (Columbus Zoo)

sacred ibis (Columbus Zoo)

Gary Shandling

 For some reason, my first thought was Gary Shandling.

Who's in there?

Franklin Park Conservatory

I visited the Franklin Park Conservatory for the butterflies, but I hadn't been there in years so I took in some of the other sights.

orchid

orchid (macro)

Chinese hawthorn (I think) bonsai. I tried to get artsy and failed.

Seed pod (macro). It's about two inches long.

I've seen wonderful pictures of glass. This isn't one of them; I'm trying to figure it out. The Conservatory has a collection of Chihuly glass.

Franklin Park Conservatory Butterflies

The missing gardener gave me a ticket to the Franklin Park Conservatory for use when the weather is crummy. I had reason to vacate the house Monday, so I used the ticket then. The Conservatory hosts butterflies for about three months early in the year.

I was bummed that tripods are not allowed--how could I get good macro shots of butterflies without one? It turned out that the rule is good. Some of the paths are quite narrow, and using a tripod would have been difficult and rude. As it was, my shots with a telephoto lens were better than many of those with the macro lens.

Blue morpho (macro). I focused on the head, and the wings aren't very sharp.

Blue morphos are rather famous for their electric blue wings, but their closed wings are beautiful, too.

blue morpho

It looks like the butterflies were Photoshopped-in, but they were really there, flying.

Postman, I think. If I'd had my wits and noticed the nifty red edge of the leaf when I took the shot, I might have framed the photo differently (I cropped it to get what you see).

As with some other animals, butterfly identification can be hard. There was a sign with a bunch of butterflies and their common and scientific names, but I did not see this one. (Also, only open wings are shown.) The only one with red and white on its wings was a postman. At home, a search for "postman butterfly" included pictures that matched both what's on the sign and the above. I found what some random person wrote on Facebook articles in Nature, a reference in PubMed, and a website devoted to the Heliconius genus. This one is a postman, a regional variation, a hybrid, a mimic, or ...

A postman, I guess

I couldn't identify this butterfly. Heck, it could be a postman.

Sometimes, the more I look at a picture the better it gets. I thought the one above was ho-hum. The butterfly is turned away, after all. Then I thought it was decently framed, with nearly all the green bowl included. The orange is sort of a contrast to the green, and, for once, I included more than just the animal. It grew on me. Viewing pictures on a large monitor helps me change my mind, too.

 

Uncertain (macro). Possibly a giant swallowtail in its former life.

 

Frozen

It seems to me that macro photographers mostly want to take pictures of bugs, flowers, and drops of water. I've had some success with bugs but only failure with drops of water. I did okay with frozen drops, though.

A frozen water droplet at the tip of a blue spruce twig

It's not fabulous, but I'm happy with it.

I no longer remember why, but I snapped a picture with the latest phone from Apple of which I'm aware: an iPhone 7.

It's not a macro shot, but I like it. A lot. The needles are too dark for a blue spruce, but it's a pleasing image. Here's approximately the same shot from my camera. The color of the needles is pretty accurate.

So...

The droplet, -1.0 exposure value

 

As with the eagle, I didn't make a mistake, but the picture is improved by taking out one stop of brightness. The original photo matches what I saw, but the manipulated image is more pleasing. The next time I take a picture like this, I'll use -1.0 exposure compensation.