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Desert Elephants in a dry river bed in the Damaraland, Namibia
November 2015
Happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.
All rights reserved. © Thomas Retterath 2019
This Butterfly keep come and go everyday to my front yard. Today I took picture and share it with my Flickr friends.
Thanks for viewing :)
Tune ♥
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj_VidtyaOc
Credits ♥
Adriana
A U R U S - Adriana Bento Nails -Maitreya & Slink
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Sintiklia - Hair - Eleonor
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I had some fun with this one and learned some Photoshop tricks while I was doing it. As soon as I get another boarder staying here I'm going back to the coast. Just seems like there's just a lot of cool adjustments I can do to coastal shots.
Click on image
It is a good thing that Northern Cardinals do not migrate and they don't molt into a dull plumage. The majority of our migrating song birds and hummingbirds have headed South. We can enjoy the beautiful Cardinals all winter!!
The Kitt Peak National Observatory is a United States astronomical observatory site located on 2,096 m Kitt Peak of the Quinlan Mountains in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert on the Tohono O'odham Nation, 88 kilometers west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona. Wikipedia
Here's another colourful butterfly that I found at the butterfly exhibit a few weeks ago. Its natural habitat range is from Central America to the Amazon.
Thank you for viewing and for leaving me a comment! Have a great day!
There was a big swell on the morning this was taken, and some of the waves that came in were big. I waited with other photographers for the larger waves to come and when they did, what was heard was 'here it comes!!!"
Switzerland, May 2021
My best photos are here: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/ticino-best-photos-of-southern-...
My latest ANIMAL VIDEO (warning, it's a bit shocking): www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2-Xszz7FI
You find a selection of my 80 BEST PHOTOS (mostly not yet on Flickr) here: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/western-green-lizard-lacerta-bi... (the website exists in ESPAÑOL, FRANÇAIS, ITALIANO, ENGLISH, DEUTSCH)
ABOUT THE PHOTO:
So this photo is a bit of a novelty for me - at least here on Flickr, but it's also a journey back in time in a sense. I've always loved b/w and sepia photography; already as a very young teenager I would go out into the woods with an old Pentax Spotmatic (which I had nicked from my father) whenever it was a foggy day to shoot b/w compositions of sunbeams cutting through the ghostlike trees.
I used films with a sensitivity of at least 1600 (for those of you who remember what that means 😉 ), and the resulting photos had an incredibly fine grain which I loved; I blew them up to the size of posters and hung them on the walls of my teenage man-cave next to Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Slash.
But then I abandoned photography altogether for 20 years, and when I finally picked up a camera again, it was one of the digital kind. Now neither film nor grain played any role in my photographic endeavours - let alone b/w compositions: because the reason I fell in love with shooting pictures once more was the rare and incredibly colorful lizard species that had chosen my garden as its habitat.
It's this species - the Lacerta bilineata aka the western green lizard - that my photo website www.lacerta-bilineata.com/ and also my Flickr gallery are dedicated to, but I've since expanded that theme a bit so that it now comprises the whole Lacerta bilineata habitat, which is to say my garden and its immediate surroundings and all the flora and fauna I find in it.
I like that my gallery and the website have this clear theme, because in order to rise to the challenge of portraying all aspects of a very specific little eco system (which also happens to be my home of sorts), it forces me to constantly explore it from fresh angles, and I keep discovering fascinating new motives as my photographic journey continues.
Which brings me to the horse pasture you see in this photo. This playground for happy horsies lies just outside my garden, and it normally only interests me insofar as my green reptile friends claim parts of it as their territory, and I very much prefer it to be horseless (which it thankfully often is).
Not that the horses bother the reptiles - the lizards don't mind them one bit, and I've even seen them jump from the safety of the fly honeysuckle shrub which the pasture borders on right between the deadly looking hooves of the horses to forage for snails, without any sign of fear or even respect.
No, the reason I have a very conflicted relationship with those horses is that they are mighty cute and that there's usually also foals. The sight of those beautiful, happy animals jumping around and frolicking (it's a huge pasture and you can tell the horses really love it) is irresistible: and that inevitably attracts what in the entire universe is known as the most destructive anti-matter and ultimate undoing of any nature photographer: other humans.
Unlike with the horses, the lizards ARE indeed very much bothered by specimens of loud, unpredictable Homo sapiens sapiens - which makes those (and by extension also the horses) the cryptonite of this here reptile photographer. It's not the horses' fault, I know that, but that doesn't change a thing. I'm just telling you how it is (and some of you might have read about the traumatic events I had to endure to get a particular photo - if not, read at your own risk here: www.flickr.com/photos/191055893@N07/51405389883/in/datepo... - which clearly demonstrated that even when it's entirely horseless, that pasture is still a threat for artistic endeavours).
But back to the photo. So one morning during my vacation back in May I got up quite early. It had rained all night, and now the fog was creeping up from the valley below to our village just as the sky cleared up and the morning sun started to shine through the trees.
And just as I did when I was a teenager I grabbed my camera and ran out to photograph this beautiful mood of ghostlike trees and sunbeams cutting through the mist. There had already been such a day a week earlier (which is when I took this photo: www.flickr.com/photos/191055893@N07/51543603732/in/datepo... ), but this time, the horses were also there.
Because of our slightly strained relationship I only took this one photo of them (I now wish I had taken more: talk about missed opportunities), and otherwise concentrated on the landscape. It was only later when I went through all the photos on my computer that I realized that I actually really liked those horses, even despite the whole composition being such a cliché. And I realized another thing: when I drained the photo of all the color, I liked it even better - because there was almost a bit of grain in it, like in the photos from my youth.
Since then I have experimented quite a bit with b/w and sepia compositions (some of which I will upload here eventually I guess), but this photo here is the first one that helped me rediscover my old passion. I hope you like it even though it builds quite a stark contrast with the rest of my tiny - and very colorful - gallery. But in the spirit of showing you the whole Lacerta bilineata habitat (and also in the spirit of expanding my gallery a bit beyond lizards and insects), I think it's not such a bad fit.
As always, many greetings to all of you, have a wonderful day and don't hesitate to let me know what you think 😊
Lily flower taken at Melbourne Botanical Gardens.
Hope you enjoy the instrumental hit " Lily Was Here " by Candy Dulfer and Dave Stewart.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SfSQ3lQmJw
Many thanks for your visit, comments , invites and faves..it is always appreciated..
HMBT
Ingredients:
1) Speaker 2) Apple Slice 3) Ice
4) Strawberry Slice w/Apple Pits
Directions:
1) Apply wavy filter to speaker composite layer.
2) Add Apple Slice and Strawberry Slice w/Pits.
3) Blend until happy (again with the Difference setting).
Happy Slider Sunday - HSS
🎼: Here I Go Again ~Whitesnake~
I don't know where I'm going
(But I sure know where I've been)
Hanging on the promises
In songs of yesterday
And I've made up my mind
I ain't wasting no more time
(Here I go again)
Here I go again
Lot about Trent, let's have a look at you, come on!
Come on!
Though I keep searching for an answer
I never seem to find what I'm looking for
Oh Lord, I pray
You give me strength to carry on
'Cause I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams
As the August evenings and nights darken, the Northern Lights are visible again. I stood by the lake waiting for them. And they came, not dancing like in winter, but in a calm, beautiful arch, staying in place for over an hour. An orange crescent moon also rose into the sky. All the colors of the sky were reflected on the surface of the calm lake. Otherwise it was very quiet. I will keep this memory in my heart.
Puumala, lake Saimaa, Finland.
👱♀️🎧Wish You Were Here ( Pink Floyd, David Gilmore )
Since so many recognized my referenc eto the Band a flock of Seagulls on a recent shot thought I would use this shot to refer to one of there well known songs, This Gulls seems to have ran fron the flock
Comments appreciated, Constructive critique even more appreciated, best way for me to learn
better on B l a c k M a g i c
!.. عيني آنآ بعينهآ ۈآلقلـۈب آبعآد آخشى هدب عيني يلآمس هدبهآآ
Say Mshalla PlZz ,,
model al7ob Nawari <3
part 1
www.flickr.com/photos/mjnonk/4310665761/in/photostream/
part 2
Tessin
My best photos are here: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/ticino-best-photos-of-southern-...
Whole PHOTO SERIES about my garden on my blog: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/post/western-green-lizard-lacer...
My latest ANIMAL VIDEO (warning, it's a bit shocking): www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2-Xszz7FI
AUDIO (if you want to hear the sounds of my garden in the early morning): www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfoCTqdAVCE
ABOUT THIS PHOTO:
Partly out of fear to bore the Flickr community with too many lizard photos, I thought it would make for a nice change - yet in keeping with the main theme of my gallery - to give interested nature and reptile fans the opportunity to get a sense of the lacerta bilineata habitat where I photographed all the animals on this page.
So this is the second of a (as yet planned) series of pictures (if people like them there will be more) that will show you where all the reptile "action" took place: my garden in the beautiful community of Monteggio in the Malcantone region of the Ticino, Switzerland.
The pictures were taken over a period of over a decade, so there were obviously some changes in the garden during that time, but If you focus on the palm tree - which has grown considerably over the years but is visible in all the photos I plan to upload - you get a sense of the geography of the place.
In summer, which is when this photo was taken, the micro-climate in this particular area of the Ticino can be almost tropical in the sense that it's hot and very humid with frequent thunderstorms and heavy rain, and I often refer to my garden (half-)jokingly as my "little Swiss rainforest". I guess you can see how animals - particularly lacerta bilineata and other lizards - would feel at home in this "tropical paradise" of mine :-)
Apparently - as I learned in the comments here on Flickr - the occurrence of this particular lizard species is a very good indicator that an ecosystem is intact, and my family and I always took great care not to interfere too much in our garden and let nature roam as free as possible.
In return, over the years we were rewarded for this "calculated inaction" with a wide variety of species of plants, insects, lizards and snakes visiting - or by now residing permanently in - our little nature refuge, some of which I managed to capture on camera.
As mentioned before, if people like these photos or are interested in other flora and fauna from my private jungle, I'll upload one every once in a while between lizards, so let me know in the comments if you're interested in seeing more of these or if I should stick to just reptiles ;-)
As always, thank you so much for your interest and feedback, stay safe - and have a great week everyone!
Lacerta
.:LAVAROCK POSES:.Fem Bento Pose-80 (pose adjusted slightly in BD)
MP: marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/105657
Mainstore:
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TRUTH hair - Twisted
Lunar - Joss bra, sweater and panties
Foxcity - Cozy Balcony
a new member in our family, born in spring. He looks at his brother (who is not in the shot)…/ Aquí esta Walter, nuevo miembro de la familia nacido en la primavera; mira a su hermano (que no se ve en la foto)…/Här är Walter, ny medlem i vår familj, född i våras (han tittar på brorsan, som inte är med på bilden)...
a rockface of multiple small waterfalls coming down a tremendously high mountain (Hestur mountain) in Hestfjordur along Iceland's Westfjords. The whole scenario looked so enchanting I thought this had to be a natural bathtub destined to offer dryads and nymphs a refreshing bath ;)
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