All My Blogs

  My daughter, Leanne, visiting us on the week of my birthday.  So much to be thankful for. The photo says so much about the things happening in my life.  Living in the Okanagan, a nice house with a great view of the neighbourhood, my dog, and my beautiful daughter enjoying another sunny day.   I turn 66 years old in two days.  My health is pretty good, although my issues with diabetes haunts me a bit.  I have a beautiful wife who plays cards, attends church with me, likes camping, and loves her children and grandchildren.  She even goes kayaking with me occasionally.   I have many friends, some I have known for almost 50 years and others who are more recent but devoted to our relationship.  Although stuff tends to not be too important, I have all that I could ever want. But the thing that I have, more than everything else, is my relationship with those I love. Family, friends, and God.  I don't talk much about my faith in my b...

Six-spotted orb weavers. Left:  2020, Clearwater BC.  Right:  2026, Wabamun AB I must see a thousand-plus spiders over the period of a year.  Many of them are familiar.  The long-legged cellar spider (they give me the creeps), jumping spiders (at least 3 species at my home), wolf spiders, and those funnel weavers (barn-funnel spiders) are commonly witnessed.  I can usually spot most of them any time I go into my garage and look around.  I have even found a few black widows ( click here) , but none in my house, thankfully. But, it's nice to know that they aren't the only ones.  This morning I saw a European-cross spider, and as you can see above, I photographed a six-spotted spider recently on a trip to Alberta.  I also saw and photographed a spider I had never seen before last week while in Didsbury (Alberta Jewel spider - click here ). The interesting thing about the six-spotted spider is that it is the second one I have seen/photographed....

Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Olympus, Pentax - film cameras and lenses for sale. Yes, I have quite the collection.  Some are mine that I used back in the good ol' days of film.  Many I have collected over the years as people hand unused equipment to me.  There is a lot; I have 25 lenses for sale too, ones on the camera bodies and many more that are not.  Nikon, Pentax S, Canon, Minolta.  I even have a Bronica medium format camera for sale. While it is true that film is somewhat passe, the truth is that many out there still use it.  Partly out of nostalgia, partly because film is still a viable medium, with a dynamic range that beats many a digital sensor.  And then there is darkroom work.  Although all my prints are done using pigment and ink-based printers, I fondly remember my days in the darkroom. I will be posting my cameras on Facebook Marketplace soon.  They will be listed at fair prices.  Looking forward to the response. Thanks for read...

Main:  Common grackle (male), Airdrie, Alberta.  Inset:  Great-tailed grackle, Arizona While visiting Alberta this summer, I came across some common grackles.  They look similar to Brewer's blackbirds initially, but closer inspection shows that they are both larger and more colourful than them.  They belong to the same family (Icteridae) as their smaller cousins.  There are three species of grackle that live in North America: the common grackle (main), the great-tailed grackle (inset), and the boat-tailed grackle.  Only the common one can be found in Canada, and they are only found east of the Rockies. The male grackle's breeding plumage is striking, with its bronzed-iridescent body feathers and deep blue/purple head.  The female, as is the case for all female Icteridae, is a mottled brown designed to prevent unwanted attention.  Unlike the male, the female does not have the bright yellow eyes. Grackles are the number 1 pest of corn crops in ...

Helmcken Falls in 2016 (left) and 2026 (right).  Notice tree growth near the bottom of the image. When you go to see a waterfall that you have seen before, you usually don't expect to see anything different.  Afterall, the falls don't go anywhere during our short time on the planet, and the basin, bowl, river, and canyon all seem about the same too. Helmcken Falls was first seen by (non-aboriginals) a Canadian government surveyor in 1913.  Twelve years later, in 1925, the first photos of the falls was taken ( click here to see site).  It is an amazing thing that the spectacle has only been recorded for just 100 years.  Since then, there seems to have been little change.  Yet, if you could measure specifics accurately, such as how much erosion has taken place at the lip of the falls, the size of the bowl, and certainly the vegetation around it, you would find significant change. For my two photos, you can see that the trees at the bottom of the bowl have gr...

Long-horned flower beetle on oxeye daisy, Yoho National Park, BC. Identifying a species can be a laborious process.  What makes it a challenge is the number of organisms that are similar (yet different) to it in the same taxonomic group.  Even looking at taxonomy involves a basic understanding of how organisms are grouped.  For beetles, it goes Kingdom (Animalia), Phylum (Arthropods), Class (Insects), Order (Beetles - the Coleoptera).  That may sound basic, but it gets insane after that.  There are over 160 different beetle families, over 30,000 genera, and more than 400,000 documented species of beetle on the planet.   Thankfully, Canada has only about 7500 species of beetle, and we whittle it down in BC to about half of that.  Even so, it can be hard just nailing down a genus, let alone a species.  However, there are a few things that help in the process.  I typically go through a series of inquiries before I define something, and even...