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The Secret of Making Progress is to Get Started
- Mark Twain
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I spotted this Tortoise and his Human Pal taking an ocean-front walk along the cliffs of Palos Verdes California. One thing about California, you will usually find something interesting or unusual, even when you're not looking for it : )
The Tortoise:
Tortoises are "cold-blooded," meaning their body temperature varies with the surrounding environment. They are also herbivores, meaning they eat plants. Tortoises are found in a variety of habitats, including deserts, forests, grasslands, and swamps.
There are over 300 species of tortoises, and they come in a wide range of sizes. The smallest tortoise is the speckled padloper tortoise, which is only about 4 inches long. The largest tortoise is the Galapagos tortoise, which can grow to be over 150 pounds.
Tortoises are long-lived animals. Some species can live for over 100 years. The oldest known tortoise is a Galapagos tortoise named Jonathan, who is over 190 years old.
Here are some interesting facts about tortoises:
Tortoises have been around for over 200 million years.
The largest tortoise ever recorded was a Galapagos tortoise named "Johnathan" who weighed over 500 pounds and was over 190 years old.
Tortoises are very good at conserving water. They can go for long periods of time without drinking.
Tortoises are not very good swimmers.
Tortoises are very social animals and enjoy spending time with other tortoises.
Tortoises can be very affectionate and make great pets.
-Google Bard
(Sony, 200-600 @ 241 mm, 1/3200 @ f/8, ISO 4000, edited to taste)
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 😊
☠TuNe â˜
Sade - Smooth Operator
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS7Va0sBYAM
☠In this picture â˜
Swimsuit: StarOutlet. NEW Release!! Sia Crochet Swimsuit White (Tysm 💋)
Gyazo Rear view
gyazo.com/0845d29e8829b332934e14d56f93c6e9
Mainstore
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/TSO%20Restoration/61/209/23
Marketplace
marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Star-Oulet-Sia-Crochet-Swims...
Flickr
www.flickr.com/photos/starfashionsl/49970702436/in/datepo...
Adams County-Washington State
I have photographed this barn in previous years but now see that it appears to be going downhill rather quickly.
The Gäuboden is a region in Lower Bavaria in southern Germany without any clear geographic or cultural boundaries, that covers an area about 15 kilometres wide south of the River Danube and the Bavarian Forest, beginning opposite Wörth an der Donau and stretching as far as Künzing. The largest town in the region is Straubing, which is often called the centre of the Gäuboden. The Gäuboden is one of the largest loess regions in southern Germany. The farmland is nearly flat, no field borders or trees that might hinder the usage of huge machines.
This image was made near Schierling
Text adpated from Wikipedia.
Starting to appear in good numbers at a number of former colliery sites in Nottinghamshire (UK) (2570)
Where it all started, or where you can find out how it started.
There are stories that should not be forgotten... Well, perhaps we should never forget. From memories, from the past and from our history we learn. Today I begin to record the result of my investigations. A task that has taken me a year, a long year of wandering between the shelves of the Carnelian Archive, where all the Fairlands chronicles are kept. The dust, the smell of leather, paper and history have been my faithful companions in this search, which is now over. It was something personal, yes. It has already been lost in time and in the silence of my relatives over the years, but I needed to know the truth. And the truth, like a polished diamond with countless faces, is not as simple as they imagined. There is no good or bad, but a mixture of the two whose balance maintains the Universe. Anyway, this is not the time to ramble. I think I should pick up the scattered fragments, hinted at in these flickr posts, and tell the whole story, though maybe not the whole truth, who knows....