View allAll Photos Tagged Texas
Canyon Lake, Texas
Thanks for taking a look. As always, I appreciate your visit. Hope you all have a safe and fun weekend.
When I took a trip to south Texas in February one of the snakes I most wanted to see was the Texas Indigo snake. These are one of our biggest non-venomous snakes. They eat other snakes, frogs, lizards and a variety of other things. On my last full day of the trip I travelled to a location that a friend told me these beautiful snakes could be found.
Here is a youtube video of the search followed by the written account below.
I arrived at the location in the afternoon. The habitat consisted of farmland and scrubland which was intersected by a deep sided ditch. Waterways are often the best places to spot reptiles and amphibians so I searched carefully along the ditch hoping to see a big black snake somewhere in the vegetation or under a rock or at the mouth of a burrow. I was walking along one side of the ditch when I looked over to the other side and couldn't believe my eyes. There was a big Texas Indigo snake sitting there in the grass next to a shrub on the edge of the ditch. I was recording some video at the time and took my camera out to try to get some pics and it disappeared. The ditch was too wide to jump across at that point so I went down stream to where I could cross over a bridge and back to the spot I had seen the snake. I looked all around where I had seen it and it was unfortunately no where to be found.
As I stood in the spot where I had originally seen the snake in the grass, I thought about how close I had come to catching that beautiful snake and wondered if I had even gotten it on video. I thought that the snake had gone down a rodent hole or something. As I stood there in a mixture of emotions I happened to glance into the water and something dark caught my eye in the water in the undercut bank on the opposite side of the ditch where I had first seen the snake. As I looked closer, I was amazed and elated to see that the long dark object was the Indigo snake hiding there in the water under the bank. I think it had seen me and then dove into the water and decided to hide under the bank. I wasn't going to lose it this time so I decided I needed to jump the ditch. I got as much of a start as I could on the steep downhill next to the ditch and made my jump. I barely made it safely to the other side, ran over to the bank where I saw the snake and reached in to make a grab. I was overjoyed to pull this beautiful snake out of the water.
Indigo snakes are very gentle and this snake never made any attempt to bite but it did flatten out its neck as a threat display.
After a little photo session with this beautiful snake I returned it to its habitat along the bank of the ditch. I was very grateful for the opportunity to see this snake on my visit to Texas.
Note please don't confuse the Texas Indigo snake with the threatened Eastern Indigo snake which lives in the SE United states. They are closely related but the Texas Indigo snake has healthy populations in Texas and Mexico and is not threatened or endangered and is thus OK for me to catch, photograph and release. If this was an Eastern Indigo snake that would not be allowed without a permit.
This began with a self portrait by Cris_Garota-Carioca (Flickrname) who gave me permission to insert a background. I chose a seascape since Chris lives in Brazil and is close to the sea. Here's the link to her original self-portrait:
The sign of Amarillo, Texas’ legendary Big Texan Steak Ranch rises into the clear, blue sky of the Texas Panhandle.
While visiting my sister in Victoria, Texas April 2021 we did some touring of wineries that were close by. Along the way we stopped on the roadside when we saw a potential photo shoot. The wineries of course had their own scenic landscapes with the grape vines and the river close by. Photo Images credited to Vickie Lynne Klinkhammer of Vickielynne Photography and Designs.(VLP&Designs) Photo images may appear on wearable art or home essentials. View at www.vlpdesigns.com
Early 1900s abandoned homestead somewhere in East Texas. Might have been in San Jacinto or Polk County. I believe those are Canada Geese behind the house.
Scanned photo circa 1987.
One from our trip last week to Montgomery Texas. I know it's winter but it was mostly warm and trees hadn't twigged to it yet.
Have a good Christmas week.
A common butterfly species in the south. In the Monarch family (Danainae), this species uses milkweeds as the host plant and like the Monarch migrates to Mexico in the fall.
This restored movie theater is located down the street from the Hill County Courthouse in Hillsboro Texas. The building was orginally the 1891 Orrenbaum's Hardware Store. In 1936 the store was converted into The Palace Theater. Later under the direction of Manager C.W. "Crispy" Taylor, it become the Texas Theater. Mr. Taylor remodled The Texas in 1942 and built the current facade. During a storm in June,2006 the facade collaped. The facade and the rest of the theater has since been restored as seen in this photo.
Howdy!
Well I’m back from a series of travels (Keswick, Pitlochry and Texas so hopefully I can be a bit more active on Flickr than I have over much of the year. My new mancave is complete and I ‘just’ need to kit it out with furniture and move my printer and computer in it then Mrs P is optimistic she won’t have me under her feet as much!
As a number of you know I normally have quite a backlog of editing and the last few weeks has only made this worse! Anyway, I’m not going to complain but please forgive my absence and lack of comments. I won’t say I’ll catch up but I will try to be on her a bit more regularly and I’ll ask for your understanding and forbearance. Retirement is hard work!!
Anyway, decided to skip Lakes & Scotland for a bit for my recent Texas trip. A number of you may know Sapna Reddy as she has a high profile in the photography world and has given up her white gown to go pro full time. I booked myself on her workshop in Caddo Lake, texas after seeing various photos of the cypress trees there. Now there will be a number of photos of those coming but I wanted to start off with something a bit different both in terms of what I shoot and the type of bird it is…..well for us in the UK it’s rather unusual.
As part of the workshop we had a number of boat trips out on the Bayou to shoot the trees and wildlife. ‘Unfortunately’ for much of the time the weather was too good so the light became harsh really quickly after sunrise and stayed harsh until just a few mins before sunset. However, that did mean we went searching for wildlife and seeing a Bald Eagle is something that I think will stay with me forever. Initially it was perched in a tree obviously watching for food and Togs on boats so eventually it thought it would give us some excitement and flew between trees. I was lucky enough to have my 100-500mm lens on and hit the shutter button more in hope than expectation. I managed to get about 10 shots with the bird roughly in focus and decided this one with the wings outstretched and the light on it was the one to post.
It was shot at ISO 3200 so I have run it through DXO Pure Raw 4 and then the ON1 Photo Raw 2026 version of its Resize AI application. I know from some of the other workshop participants that they can take far better birds-in-flight shots but I’m pretty chuffed with it as it’s not my area of expertise and was shot from a moving boat.
More tales/shots to follow pardners!
© All rights reserved to Steve Pellatt. Please do not use this image on websites, blogs or any other media without my explicit written permission.
Stormy weather in Texas Canyon in Southeast Arizona. Taken with a Nikon D300 and 24-120VR Nikkor lens. All my published books, available world wide, can be viewed here:
www.amazon.com/stores/Paul-Moore/author/B0075LNIO2?ref=ap...
When I took a trip to south Texas in February one of the snakes I most wanted to see was the Texas Indigo snake. These are one of our biggest non-venomous snakes. They eat other snakes, frogs, lizards and a variety of other things. On my last full day of the trip I travelled to a location that a friend told me these beautiful snakes could be found.
Here is a youtube video of the search followed by the written account below.
I arrived at the location in the afternoon. The habitat consisted of farmland and scrubland which was intersected by a deep sided ditch. Waterways are often the best places to spot reptiles and amphibians so I searched carefully along the ditch hoping to see a big black snake somewhere in the vegetation or under a rock or at the mouth of a burrow. I was walking along one side of the ditch when I looked over to the other side and couldn't believe my eyes. There was a big Texas Indigo snake sitting there in the grass next to a shrub on the edge of the ditch. I was recording some video at the time and took my camera out to try to get some pics and it disappeared. The ditch was too wide to jump across at that point so I went down stream to where I could cross over a bridge and back to the spot I had seen the snake. I looked all around where I had seen it and it was unfortunately no where to be found.
As I stood in the spot where I had originally seen the snake in the grass, I thought about how close I had come to catching that beautiful snake and wondered if I had even gotten it on video. I thought that the snake had gone down a rodent hole or something. As I stood there in a mixture of emotions I happened to glance into the water and something dark caught my eye in the water in the undercut bank on the opposite side of the ditch where I had first seen the snake. As I looked closer, I was amazed and elated to see that the long dark object was the Indigo snake hiding there in the water under the bank. I think it had seen me and then dove into the water and decided to hide under the bank. I wasn't going to lose it this time so I decided I needed to jump the ditch. I got as much of a start as I could on the steep downhill next to the ditch and made my jump. I barely made it safely to the other side, ran over to the bank where I saw the snake and reached in to make a grab. I was overjoyed to pull this beautiful snake out of the water.
Indigo snakes are very gentle and this snake never made any attempt to bite but it did flatten out its neck as a threat display.
After a little photo session with this beautiful snake I returned it to its habitat along the bank of the ditch. I was very grateful for the opportunity to see this snake on my visit to Texas.
Note please don't confuse the Texas Indigo snake with the threatened Eastern Indigo snake which lives in the SE United states. They are closely related but the Texas Indigo snake has healthy populations in Texas and Mexico and is not threatened or endangered and is thus OK for me to catch, photograph and release. If this was an Eastern Indigo snake that would not be allowed without a permit.
Texan T1 from RAF Valley lifting out of low level at ‘The Bwlch’, Mach loop. To view some of my aviation videos with still photos then click in the YouTube link here youtube.com/c/DafyddPhillips. Thanks