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Leica M-E / Carl Zeiss Biogon ZM 2/35 mm

Snowy Sunday

Today is stormy

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[BODY] Athletic Meshbody (Legacy)(m) (1.0)

GUILTY 055 SumBoss Pants FATPACK

GUILTY 055 SumBoss Shirt FATPACK

[Rezz Room] Box Panther Animesh (Companion)

[Rezz Room] Pack Chihuahua Holdable Animesh (Companion) RARE

cYo Linden Dollars in Elastic

BILLIONAIRE MOTORS MULLTAYGA (BAKED BLACK)BW2 BOXED

Well, not a man, just a little pecker head. The aggressor almost went along with him, too, LOL

Smile for Saturday Theme: Man Made Leaves

Jim Backus creation

The green man sculpture,carved by a local man called scouse Dave from Llanberis.

 

Llanberis is a village, community and electoral ward in Gwynedd, northwest Wales, on the southern bank of the lake Llyn Padarn and at the foot of Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales.

View looking over Man Tor In Castleton, In the Peak District Derbyshire...

Thank you for the views and lovely comment's my friends...

Best viewed large...

"Will you grace me with your presence here?

In your room of dying light

Beyond the reach of everything

In the sanctuary of the night..."

Sivert Høyem - Sleepwalking Man

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_WFYLxywyc

Candid street photography

 

Ultimo, Sydney

 

November, 2020

Sergeant Man in the Central Fells, a subsidiary summit of High Raise.

I and Bilbo (my new animesh bulldog)

Does anyone see anything wrong with this boat?

That is right ... Where is the Li’l Woman? In the kitchen cooking perhaps?

Most boats are named after women. I guess this could technically be called the Miss Li’l Man, but the owner evidently decided to take all feminine touches off the boat. Perhaps it was a bad divorce where he only got the boat. Maybe she nags him about using the boat too much.

There are so many possible stories here. Whatever the story, however, breaking the feminine name protocol is a no-no!

Eurasian Jay (Garrulus glandarius)

 

My best photos are here: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/ticino-best-photos-of-southern-...

 

More TICINO/TESSIN Wildlife Photos (all taken in my garden in Monteggio/Ti, Switzerland): it.lacerta-bilineata.com/ramarro-occidentale-lacerta-bili...

 

If you're interested, you'll find a more detailed closeup here (it's the 8th photo from the top): www.lacerta-bilineata.com/western-green-lizard-lacerta-bi...

 

My latest ANIMAL VIDEO (it's very brief but pretty unusual: a tiny wall lizard attacks two young great tits): www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQqkSsyrm7E

 

THE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO: MY LONG AND ARDUOUS JOURNEY TO BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY

If you've set yourself the challenge of exclusively shooting the wildlife in your own back yard, you might find - as I did - that bird photography is really, really hard.

 

It's not that reptiles are easy to photograph either, mind - but at least the ones in my garden stay (for the most part) on the ground, and one can learn how to carefully approach them with a camera. They're also clearly egoists, which from a photographer's point of view is is a great character trait: if a lizard detects a human in its vicinity, it's only interested in saving its own skin, and it won't alarm its buddies.

 

But birds... oh man. Over the years, my feathered friends and I have developed a lovely routine that now defines our peaceful co-existence. As soon as I as much as open a window (let alone the door), I'm instantly greeted by an eruption of panicky fluttering and hysterical shouts from my garden: "SAVE YOUR WOMEN AND CHILDREN AND FLY FOR YOUR LIVES: THE HAIRLESS, PINK MONSTER IS COMING!!! (Yes, I speak bird, and I know that this is exactly what they are shouting 😉).

 

Needless to say, with the exception of the redstart I already showed here, all my efforts to get the kind of detailed shots I usually strive for with my nature photography ended in complete failure and utter disillusionment. I was ready to give up on stalking the winged misanthropes in my garden altogether, but then winter came - and changed everything.

 

One day this past January I observed my neighbor Signora P - a kind, elderly Italian lady - putting something on the low garden wall in front of my house. At first I thought she was just putting some treat there for her cat Romeo; the young tom patrols that wall constantly (it's his favorite spot in the garden, and during the warmer months he usually lurks in the thick foliage next to it to prey on lizards).

 

But once I detected a lot of movement on that wall through my window, I understood she had put a little pile of bread crumbs there; she was feeding the birds who soon arrived in flocks. This was certainly well-intended on my neighbor's part, but her noble action came with a catch, and I'm afraid quite literally.

 

When I took a stroll through my garden the next day I discovered a suspicious amount of feathers on the ground next to the wall. Romeo had apparently switched from his low-calorie summer diet (lizard) to more energy-rich meals consisting of "fowl" (it was winter after all, so from a nutritionist's point of view this made sense).

 

I would find fresh traces of Romeo's victims (mostly feathers, but also the odd wing) in my garden over the following days; so my first intuition that my neighbor was feeding her cat hadn't been that far off after all, as Romeo was now clearly being "served" fresh birds on a daily basis. And although the hungry visitors seemed to be aware of the danger and became slightly more prudent, they just couldn't resist the tasty snacks Signora P put on that wall - and neither could Romeo.

 

It was obvious that I had to act, but talking to my neighbor - who is as stubborn as she is kind - would have been futile, I knew that much. I pondered the matter long and hard - until a light bulb went off in my head. The idea was genius. If successful, what I had in mind would not only increase the birds' chances of surviving Romeo's appetite, but also greatly benefit my own photographic endeavors.

 

I started to enact my master plan the very next day by buying a giant bag of bird feed (consisting mainly of sunflower seeds) from the store. Then I dragged a huge piece of a tree trunk (approx. 120 cm in height) that we normally chop firewood on from the shed out into the garden and emptied almost half of the bag's content on top of it. Signora P's buffet for birds (and cats) was about to get some serious competition 😊.

 

My reasoning was as follows: not only would the birds be lured away from the fatally low garden wall to a place where they were safe from the cat - there was nothing around that tree trunk that provided cover for a predator, and the birds had a nice 360° view around it at all times - but I was also able to photograph them while hiding in the shed.

 

However, in order for my plan to work there was one little extra measure I had to take, and it was one that risked lowering my own life expectancy considerably once the owner of the property - my mom - discovered it. You see, our shed is completely windowless, so if I wanted to use it as a blind, I had no choice but to cut a hole into one of its wooden walls... which I promptly did (I figured all's fair in love - and photography 😉).

 

Granted, I have absolutely zero carpentering skills, and it showed. That hole was an ugly mess: the shed's wall seemed to have had an encounter with Jack Nicholson's ax-wielding lunatic character from the film 'The Shining'. Needless to say, I was incredibly proud of my work (I mean, come on: there now was a hole where before there wasn't a hole, and it was big enough for the lens of my camera to peek through, so it was mission accomplished as far as I was concerned).

 

Now all I had to do was wait for the birds to discover the tree trunk. In the meantime I started to mentally prepare myself for the inevitable confrontation with my mom and go through possible explanations for that splintering hole in the wall (it was either gonna be a rabid woodpecker attack or an emergency rescue mission with a feeding tube for a little kid that had accidentally locked himself inside the shed - both seemed valid options, though I slightly preferred the locked-in kid due to the involved drama and heroism 😉).

 

A whole day went by, and not a single bird visited the sunflower seeds. I had expected that it might take a few hours until the first of the ever curious great tits or blue tits would show up, but given how tiny my garden is, an entire day seemed excessive. Then another day came and went: the birds kept flocking to the bread crumbs on the wall, and my tree trunk kept collecting dust. To add injury to insult, a few fresh feathers on the ground were proof that Romeo was still feasting.

 

It was incredibly frustrating: I provided my winged guests with a much better view - plus a higher chance of surviving the cuisine - than Signora P's place; I risked (almost) certain death at the hands of my own mother (OK, the act of vandalism on the shed I had committed for my own benefit, but still), yet the birds kept ignoring me.

 

Then, after three days, just before sunset, I spotted a single blue tit on the tree trunk picking away at the sunflower seeds.

 

When I got up the next morning I immediately realized that the loud noise that accompanies each and every tit activity had shifted from the wall to the shed. At last the dam had broken: there was a flurry of movement around the tree trunk, and I counted at least 5 different species of birds feasting on the sunflower seeds.

 

From day 4 onward my plan worked beautifully: the birds now indeed mostly ignored Romeo's "snack wall" and kept to the tree trunk. And yes, I was able to play peeping tom from behind the shed's wall and photograph them!! 😊

 

Thus, dear readers, I finally managed to produce some acceptable bird photos, and I had even saved my feathered friends from a deadly foe in the process. All through winter and spring I took advantage of my new bird hide, and in late May I started mixing some cherries with the sunflower seeds. The idea was to attract a Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius), and as you can see, it worked!

 

It took me almost three weeks and more than a few tricks to capture that clever fella, but given how long I've been rambling here already, that's a story for another day. As for my mom, she still doesn't know about the hole in the wall, so please don't snitch! 😉.

 

I hope you like the photo and wish you all a wonderful weekend! Many greetings from Switzerland, and as always: let me know what you think in the comments 🙏 😊 ❤!

 

P.S. if anyone has their own funny tale about the obstacles we photographers are prepared to overcome for a desired photo, please write it in the comments: I love such stories 😊

I see the truth in your lie..

He spoke English and became the opening for my photos of the emigrants from Senegal. When they realized that they were getting the pictures I was taking of them, so that they could send them to the family in Africa, they willingly volunteered for photography.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds.

No it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour?

 

Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose of colour ...

 

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 

ƒ/5.0

50.0 mm

1/60

800

 

_MG_4988_pa2

Vintage portrait of a man in a neat suit reading a magazine (or possibly a catalogue of some kind) - taken at Hall photo studio in Borås, Sweden, in the early years of the 20th century.

 

The photo studio was run by two sister, Ellen Hall (1873-1956) and Ida Hall (1874-1955), which seems to have opened in 1903.

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