Month: August 2020

The Rhyme of the Ancient Butterfly Photographer

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This summer has been an unmitigated failure as a butterfly photographing season.  Whenever I’ve gone out with my macro lens and monopod the butterflies have been non-existent.  I think I’ve gotten a half dozen shots of a monarch or two.  But other than that it’s been the tiny butterflies or nothing.

So today at about 4pm I went out without my camera just to get a snootful of air and wandering by a garden that was in the afternoon shade I see this tiger swallowtail in perfect condition.  The wings are vividly colored and there are no tatters at all.  And maybe because it’s in the shade it’s completely unconcerned with my presence.  Usually butterflies constantly scan their surroundings and reposition to avoid threats or even leave suddenly if they feel threatened.  This one is unphased by my presence and I’m standing there behind it looking at the perfect shot of the flat open wings, without a camera!

I head back to the house mumbling and swearing about my lousy luck and I grab my rig and head back out.  And it’s still there.  But sure enough, as soon as I get into range it takes off.  More grumbling and swearing.  Now we’re in the more typical situation with the butterfly playing ring around the rosy with me, always keeping a flower between me and it.  Well, I had had enough.  Instead of my usual magnified view trying to get the perfect focus I set the autofocus to continuous and the trigger mode to multiple-hi speed and I machine gunned my way through hundreds of files while I actively chased that stupid insect around the yard.

Was I successful?  We’ll see.  But it was satisfying to use modern technology to defeat the annoying strategies of a creature whose brain is about the size of a poppy seed.

“That’s one small step for a man.  One giant leap for mankind.”

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”

Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro lens on Sony A7 III

20AUG2020 – OCF Update

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First off, apologies on that notification this afternoon.  There was no post.  Something odd must have happened with the software or maybe I’ve got a gremlin.  Hopefully it’s a one off.

Unfortunately the day job is really starting to interfere with OCF.  So I may have to quit the day job.  But bear with me.  Serving two masters (and a mistress if you count Camera Girl’s endless demands) is an impossibility according to the good book.  But that’s where I am right now.  And that is why the paucity of posting.  So I’m checking with the people who count up my pennies to see if retirement is in my immediate future.  If it is then all good things will be possible.  I’ve opened up a Kindle Direct Publishing account and might try my hand at some fiction writing.

Camera Girl is of course worried about her lavish life style evaporating, her mountain gorilla rescue colony on her private Hawaiian island, the Mozart cloning effort going on in Bora Bora, her five alarm chili cooking lessons.  I told her to cancel the chili lessons.

But I have many skills.  Looking through the want ads I saw an interesting opportunity for a rodeo clown.  That’s similar to my present job but with much more dignity and a better class of people.  After all, I don’t think the rodeo has started to kneel during the anthem or accused their employees of white privilege.

I feel a little guilty because I’ve skipped the Dem convention.  In my defense I have a weak stomach and probably would be ill if I watched that much stupidity, but from what I’ve heard it sounds pretty unwatchable.

I read an article by, I guess you’d call him an entrepreneur, living in NYC.  His thesis is that this time the city won’t be coming back.  His biggest reason is that there’s no longer a good reason to live in New York.  Culturally, all the advantages have been cancelled out.  The good restaurants, the theater, the stores are all gone and won’t be coming back, not soon anyway and only in a much more degraded fashion.  Commercially, the office buildings will never fill up again now that businesses have discovered that remote working is a viable and much cheaper option for almost everything except manufacturing.  Plus the retail stores have been looted and burned out of existence and have no hope of customers showing up for months to come.  And finally, the residents who can leave, have.  The loss of all the above plus the rampant crime and fear that it entails has made New York a decidedly unappealing locale for the upper classes.  And when they leave that will change the complexion of life in New York in a decisive way.

When I left New York thirty three years ago I did so because it had become a bad place to raise kids for anyone who wasn’t rich.  Now, unless you have a security fence like the one around the T Rex pen in Jurassic Park and a private helipad, even the rich wouldn’t want to live there.  Well, I’ve already made my peace with being a stranger in a strange land.  Any place that would enthusiastically re-elect Bill de Blasio deserves everything it gets and more.  I just feel bad for the small business owners and working class people.  But it will be a permanent object lesson for all of them about living in a place where marxists are in charge.

The weather has taken on a late summer feel.  Which is still plenty warm but definitely means that fall will be sneaking up on us before we know it.  It also means soon I’ll run out of flowers, plants and bugs to take pictures of.

And, of course, this going to be an election from hell.  We can expect the Democrats to pull out all the stops and break every law in the book to try and drag Creepy Uncle Joe over the finish line.  We’ll all need strong stomachs by the time this thing is over.

So stay tuned.

Will There Be a Last Straw?

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Lately, as the outrages pile up, I’ve been wondering about something.  Let me explain.  The Left is rioting and assaulting people for two reasons.  The first is morale.  All of these atrocities thrill and motivate the crazies on the Fringe Left and at the same time outrage and depress all the normal people on the Right.  The second reason is they are desperate to elicit a violent reaction from the Right.  They want National Guardsmen or federal agents called in by the President or the Governor of a red state to fire into a crowd and give them something they can call Kent State.  Kent State was the name of a college in Ohio that back in the 1960s had an incident where an anti-war demonstration got out of hand and a National Guardsman ended up firing into a crowd and four protesters were killed.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, a popular but politically radical music group of the time, used it as the inspiration for a song that had the refrain “four dead in O-hi-o.”  This song was the anthem of those times and in the same way I’m sure those psychopaths in Portland are hoping to trigger a federal agent into firing into a crowd when they throw Molotov cocktails at and point lasers at the eyes of these agents.  And that is why they put the women at the front of their crowds.  Their deaths are much more exciting for the newspapers and tv stations.

But besides the chance of a government incident, what are the odds that no one will reach the point where anger translates into a either a spontaneous or a premeditated reaction?  To be totally honest, with the level of provocation being provided on a daily basis, I’m sort of amazed it hasn’t already happened.  I figure eventually one of these “demonstrations” will attack someone who either has a gun or has had enough military training that one of the Antifa twig boys will end up at ambient temperature.  And when this does happen, I expect the blue city or state jurisdiction will prosecute the self-defender with the same rabid disregard for evidence and common sense that we saw with the Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown cases.  And I also expect an incident like this to trigger another spasm of looting, burning and killing.

Maybe it will happen in Minnesota or Washington or Oregon.  Or maybe it will happen in Austin, Texas or some other blue city in a red state.  And what the news will tell you is that a white nationalist went on a rampage.  Because of the pathetic nature of the Antifa groups I expect that at most one or two people will be shot and the rest will stampede away to get CNN to come and report on the “massacre.”  But regardless of the exact outcome that will give the Left what they want so badly, it will give them the white racist devil they so badly need to justify the madness they’ve unleashed since George Floyd became a very unlikely saint.

But unfortunately, time is running out.  November 3rd is ten weeks away and the summer is waning rapidly.  The really best rioting weather is in the heat of summer.  And now that the police won’t bother to arrest anyone for anything it’s getting harder to get attention.  This needs to happen before Election Day and preferably before school starts because Antifa is a creature of the campus.  For that reason, I expect to see an especially ugly next couple of weeks as the black clad losers pull out all the stops in their mission to get some of their useful idiots shot.

So, you see I’m of two minds.  I think it’s within the flip of a coin.  It’s almost a random event.  Will the most determined crazies finally bump into a guy that has had enough.  I’m almost not sure I’d prefer it didn’t happen.  A part of me wants to see the good guy make a stand.  I feel as if it would be a rallying cry against the madness we have descended into.  Even if it threw away the election for us.  It still might be the best thing.  Then I think again and say no.  Don’t let them provoke a response.  Win the election and then let our side look for the provocateurs and provide them with nice long jail terms.  Honestly, my head tells me one thing and my gut tells me the reverse.

What do you think?

Will the Provocations by Antifa and BLM Finally Lead to a Violent Reaction?

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