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all creatures great and small

birds and bees,flowers and trees, dogs and cats and things like that...
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In all my years of photographing with slide and print film back in the day, I never managed to capture a butterfly. My luck would turn this day as I decided to stick one of my close-up lenses in my bag on my trip to the Staten Island zoo in case I spotted some nice flowers. Lucky me as I started to take pictures of the flowers this monarch happened to flutter by.
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In all my years of photographing with slide and print film back in the day, I never managed to capture a butterfly. My luck would turn this day as I decided to stick one of my close-up lenses in my bag on my trip to the Staten Island zoo in case I spotted some nice flowers. Lucky me as I started to take pictures of the flowers this monarch happened to flutter by.

summerMonarchStaten Island ZoonaturebutterfliesStaten Islandzoosld2NYCinsects

  • dsc_5473 Sally's flowering bushes
  • I wanted to find a group of Irises in a spot that would place this wonderful looking Torii behind it. When I found a good grouping I opened my lens to it's widest aperture to create a nice soft background and waited for a duck or two to pass by at just the right spot. Waiting for moments like this to occur is one of the most therapeutic and relaxing things I do. I literally feel the stress of the work week drain out of my body while I peacefully wait for the right moment.
  • At the Staten Island Zoo the peacocks have the run of the place, and you can find them walking around almost anywhere like this female here in the bushes next to the road near the back gate. And nope, I've never seen one walk out the zoo!! It's a great place to bring your children.
  • dsc_3213 cormaran perching
  • I often like walking through Clove Lake Park after leaving the zoo, and today that decision landed me this picture. However shots like this made me determined to get my old 300mm Nikkor and matching 1.4x teleconverter repaired. I thought fungus had I completely ruined my old manual focus lenses. But having to heavily crop all these shots from my 55-200 Nikkor zoom was not giving me great results either. If I had taken this with my old 300mm f4.5 & TC-14b converter, I wouldn't have had to crop this shot at all, and it would have definitely looked better. <br /> <br /> Still the quality of this shot sure wasn't bad. But ever since I got my manual focus telephotos back from getting them cleaned I have been thoroughly delighted with the results.
  • DSC_4025 honeybee foraging
  • In all my years of photographing with slide and print film back in the day, I never managed to capture a butterfly. My luck would turn this day as I decided to stick one of my close-up lenses in my bag on my trip to the Staten Island zoo in case I spotted some nice flowers. Lucky me as I started to take pictures of the flowers this monarch happened to flutter by.
  • As I was running around trying to capture the monarch in the previous shot I spotted this Swallowtail. Choosing to divide and conquer, I tracked down the monarch first, then went after the Swallowtail. He was a lot tougher, as it mostly stayed on flowers waaaaaay up out of reach. But I'm nothing if not persistent.
  • After spending the afternoon at the Staten Island zoo, I could have walked out the back entrance to the bus stop 3 minutes away. But I decided to take the long route home through Clove Lake to the buses on the other side on Victory blvd. 40 minutes away, since I thought I could use the extra fresh air and exorcise. It was more than worth it. Besides the great health benefits from walking around in the beautiful sunshine, I got several nice pictures as well, this was one of them.
  • Three months before I captured this unusal shot, (which I could have only captured in the wild with the current equipment I own) here at Clove Lake, I saw this same bird, on a rock on the other side of this brook at the base of this same waterfall at Clove Lake. My friend Joyce from New Hampshire knew it was a Black crowned heron. It's nocturnal, which probably explains why I never saw it before. I read that they will feed during the daytime during the breeding season when they need extra energy for nesting. Someone more knowledgeable that I can tell me when their breeding season is, but regardless there he was, and I raced down the brook and hopped over the rocks then slowly walked up the brook in an attempt to get a shot of it with the waterfall as a nifty backdrop. But birds are impossible to sneak up on and it flew away as I got some fuzzy shots of it taking off from the rock. (Would have been great shots if they were sharp.) <br /> <br /> Then this day I saw it again on the same side of the brook that I was on. I snapped off some shots right away and then VEEERY slowly worked my way down the slippery embankment, taking pictures every few feet. It obviously had become more tolerant of people since our last encounter, and I was able to get amazingly close before I dared not move any closer. How close?? I used my 55-200mm zoom and this shot WASN'T cropped. A small group of mosquito's had a field day with me as they seemed to know I couldn't lift a finger to stop them or the bird would have flown the coup. It was maddening but worth it. Thanks Joyce for the I.D.!!
  • The peace of my afternoon lunch listening to the Met game in my backyard was interrupted when I heard what I thought was a twig hit one my deck chairs. I turned when I heard a loud buzzing and saw it was one of those cicada's that knocks you silly when they fly right into your head. I couldn't figure why it was having such a hard time righting itself and when I went over to investigate I immediately saw why. Flying into the house I grabbed my camera, a CF card, and a micro lens and tore back out less then a minute later. As I guessed it was too late to record the one sided battle, but I did get several good shots of the hornet carrying it's prize away. Here in this shot you can see the cicada's thorax vibrating madly as it vainly tried to free itself.
  • After climbing straight up my chaise lounge with it's incredibly cumbersome load, the hornet stopped to rest and groom for a moment or two, then it flew off to my back fence and amazingly climbed up through all the vines and leaves on my fence to reach the top where I was waiting for it.
  • One of the last shots I got of the wasp, as a few seconds later with the cicada securely in tow, it flew off into my neighbors backyard looking like a military helicopter carrying a jeep under it. It was simply amazing to watch. I just wish I had gotten a clean shot of it as it flew away, but this shot is a bloody good consolation prize. And it's a good reminder to me of how blessed we are to be at the top of the food chain instead of somewhere below that, where most of the rest of the planet resides.
  • It was the last day of august in 1984 and I had left the Bronx Zoo after a day of shooting there, crossing over Fordam road so I could enter the expansive NY botanical gardens. It was my habit on nice afternoons to top off a days shooting at the zoo with a walk through the 250 acre woodlands adjacent to it. Back then it wasn't anywhere near as picturesque as the Brooklyn botanical gardens, but it was still a very pleasant place to walk through. Plus being so huge there was always a new path to discover.<br /> <br /> It had been raining while I was still at the zoo but by now it had stopped. The grass and leaves had that fresh rain smell, and as I walked up a stone road with a modest incline, I looked around in the trees for some birds to photograph, then looking down ahead of me I noticed a lollipop fallen on the ground, that the rain had already started to melt into the pebbly road. A group of yellow jackets could be seen flying to and fro from it satisfying their sweet tooth. But I found it odd that a lollipop could attract that many yellow jackets, as meat and insects were more their tastes. When I got within a few feet of it and looked closer I could see why there was so many yellow jackets buzzing about, it was no lollipop, it was a caterpillar.<br /> <br /> Dropping my camera bags to the ground I pulled out 105mm micro lens. But at the magnification I wanted I would need a very small aperture to get enough depth of field for the composition I desired. Under the dense trees and still cloudy sky available light shooting would have made that impossible. So I pulled out my flash. But it would have made for horrible lighting with harsh detail hiding shadows, if I pointed the flash directly at them. So I pulled out my tripod set up the composition I wanted, then attached my flash via a foot long auto extension cord and set the flash on the ground near the caterpillar. I then pulled out a white index card, turned the flash head up so it would fire the flash up into the air basically in my direction then I angled the index card so it would redirect that flash burst back down onto the ground bathing the caterpillar and bees in soft yet directional light.<br /> <br /> Having done this many times to shoot ground hugging flowers I was quite a pro at doing this ad hoc lighting setup, and it took much less time to do then to explain. But even as fast as I worked setting up this shoot the yellow jackets, carrying off chucks of caterpillar in each jaw full, reduced their hairy full sized prize from an almost fully intact caterpillar to nearly hairless yellow stub with some white fluid pouring down a crack between it's lifeless pair of big black eyes, by the time I tripped my shutter. As I Iooked at the sight unfolding before me, I was reminded that unlike man, nature doesn't let anything go to waste.<br /> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /> Nikon F3<br /> Ectachrome 100<br /> nikkor 105mm f4 micro<br /> 1/80th sec.<br /> F22<br /> nikon SB-16 flash
  • Snow monkey's at the Central Park Zoo. I must come back in the winter, after all what's better than getting a picture of a snow monkey when it's snowing?
  • DSC_5703 grass skipper
  • DSC_5688 grass skipper
  • This is one of the first photo's I downloaded to my first ever online gallery, which I actually started in PBase. However during the time I was working on my gallery there, someone who's gallery I was admiring, mentioned that his photo's looked much better to him on Smugmug. I found I liked SmugMug much better as well, so I decided to bring all my pictures here instead.<br /> <br /> I took shots of this butterfly feeding off my Lavender plant one afternoon in the early fall when all my other plants had withered and lost all their appeal to the insects that regularly visited my yard. I'm especially impressed with the toughness of my lavender plant as for all the world it looked dead to me after the harsh winter we had in 08'. But the people I hired to do the original landscaping said it was still very much alive and just needed pruning off the dead parts, and sure enough when the weather warmed up it shot out wonderfully fragrant flowers just like the year before. This experience helped teach me that judging whether something has enough left in the tank to be worth saving is a task best left to the experts (the spiritual application to this little story was certainly not lost on me to be sure).
  • Redtailed ratsnake on display in the renowned snake house at the Staten Island Zoo. Renowned in zoo circles that is. Though most people don't know it, this tiny zoo has been known for decades to have one of the finest collection of snakes in the world.
  • Snake in the grass

  • Arnold Dubin

    on April 14, 2011

    K-man- Excellent image of the Monarch Butterfly, ADubin

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