View allAll Photos Tagged brooding
Een redelijk maaltijd op zich, met een paar mandarijnen na voor de vitaminen, Het was een van de broden die je kon kiezen.
A side view of the Brood Queen. It should be noted this is the smallest BAF I ever seen, still i like the head/mouth movement.
My Mama and her kinfolk. From L to R: - Aunt Beryl (1922 - 1985), Aunt Mary (b. 1942), Cousin Desmond (1940 - 1959), Grandmother, Aunt Cynthy (b. 1939) and my Mother (b. 1935).
Cap Cod Massachusetts. The clouds blew my mind this evening. So deep, moody and menacing. I only wish I had a model to send down the lonely road.
This piece was fun but came out differently then I expected it would. It is the way the arcane me phone app takes the light and manipulates it to give a very different image in the face then what you start with. This feels so surreal to me, a very brooding Victorian gentleman.
Model: Myself
Pose and setting: Myself
Photoshopping: Arcane me phone app
And here it is! My first picture of a Seventeen-year cicada from Brood XIII, which is just now emerging from its long slumber.
"Say, Clint," you might be asking if you don't watch Chicago Land news and aren't in the middle of a great plague of insects of your own. "What's the deal with the cicadas? We get cicadas every year. They spend half the summer screaming at me. Why are you making a big deal out of this particular cicada right now?"
Well, friends, it turns out there are lots of different types of cicada, and some cicadas have life cycles that are really weird. There are, of course, normal cicadas, who come out every year, make a bunch of noise, then have sex, lay eggs, and die by the end of summer so that it can all happen again next year. These cicadas tend to be small, though, and while you can hear them, they tend to stay up in the trees so you can't really see them.
But you also have certain sets of special cicadas with life cycles operating on spans longer than a decade. I'm not a cicadologist, so I only know of two varieties, 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas. These cicadas are born in the trees some summer, then they fall to the ground and burrow beneath the lawns, where they sit for either 13 years or 17 years. Science has no idea how they settled on those time spans. But once their time is up, they emerge in great hordes, shed their underground skins and turn into that little guy you see up there. That guy's about an inch long, though they get a little bigger than that. Once they look like that, they climb up into the trees and spend a couple of weeks screaming, and then they all hook up in a great cicada orgy that fills the trees with cicada eggs. And then they die, and their bodies coat the suburban lawns for a while. Also, I'm assuming the crows eat well this summer.
Not all the 13- and 17-year cicadas are synched up, though. The cicadas in different regions come out in different years, and each collection of cyclical cicada is called a brood. You can see a cicada brood map here. The cicadas in Chicago Land and the rest of northern Illinois are part of Brood XIII, and they last emerged in 2007. This was three years into my Chicago residency, but we lived in the city, and cyclical cicadas haven't survived well in urban environments, so we didn't see any around us. I did get a few pictures, right around this one in the photostream, but I had to drive out to Brookfield Zoo in the suburbs to do it. But we live in the suburbs now, in the middle of cicada territory. They will overwhelm us. I expect there will be lots of cicada pictures before it's all over.
Editor's Note: That cicada picture from the 2007 emergence of Brood XIII came early in my Flickr career, and is No. 192 in my Photostream. I've long wondered what number this picture would come in at. The answer is No. 21857. I can't help but wonder whether I'll still be posting pictures on this site the next time the brood comes out. That will be 2041 -- just three years before that eclipse in Montana and four years before the one in the South -- and I'll be 68 years old. So here's hoping a cicada picture comes in around No. 43,520.