This Flower Made my Day

Cannot even say why, but seeing this yucca flower in a roadside ornamental planting made my day. Did you know they grow for years, the bloom once in such splendour then die? Of course, there are always young ones who remain.

Whimsical Photographs

If you’re looking really close, faerie is never far away…

Critters of the Week

I’ve not got that much new stuff to show, so here are a few pics I took during the last two weeks, dokumenting the creatures I chanced upon.

A rather battered butterfly, maybe that also was the reason why the poor thing ignored me while eating, allowing me closeup photographs. It was tiny, only about 2 cm, the pic is enlarged 2fold.

This is a spider, it was so satisfied with the world that it didn’t bother to eat that other bug.

I met this pidgeon at Munich main station. Isn’t he beautiful?

This dragonfly hatched at the garden pond, we took it inside to dry and learn how to fly so that the sparrows won’t ear it.

The last one is a male bee (I think). I saw it late in the evening, on my way home, so it was cold and slow so that I could photograph it close up.

Finding Beauty

I love fall, strange as it seems. These days I seem to see beauty everywhere. These shots where taken during some lunch break about three weeks ago, now I finally found time to sort them and shrink some for my blog.

a walk in the woods

I finally got round to compiling the pictures from last weekend into a post-worthy form. I am so obsessed with my new camera! I know these shots are far from good, but it is not easy to concentrage on complicated menues and capturing life animals at the same time. please be patient, my next post will be about fiber again. Promised! Click on the pictures for enlarged versions.

The first one is a dead snail and a few bugs busy eating it. This one saw no editing exept shrinking and sharpening. With Gimp, you usually have to sharpen the pics after shrinking them.

The next one is a crayfish, my mum is holding it into the camera. It is not very big but very “pregnant”, the stuff under the tail is eggs. Of course we let her go again after taking the pic. It was shrunk, sharpened and somewhat brightened.

The next one is the best imho. I think this little fish is called bullhead in Englich (German: Groppe). It is about as long as a thump. It was somewhat cropped abd heaviely edited to make the fish more visible because I couldn’t get so near, and there are ugly reflections from the water. I didn’t want to drag a fish out of the water just for a picture, so I had to wait until it came out under the stones and take a picture through the water.

The last one is ugly on so many levels. It is a bad photograph, because obviously it is hard to take pictures from something in the water, and quite far away. The turtle it shows is an American species that has no business swimming in the ponds here, eating all the fish and frogs. Some dumpass has dropped their turtle there after it got too big. Or it is already a descendant of such animals. It is sure not the turtle’s fault, but it is bad anyway.