All My Blogs

Paulina Falls are located at Newberry National Volcanic Monument in Oregon. When it comes to landscapes, few things excite me more than waterfalls.  While exploring them from a safe distance, often with a safety fence and possible platform installed, which has my wife's approval, I love climbing around in the lower falls area, photographing the surging waters upstream.  And few places are as exciting to explore as the waterfalls found at Newberry National Volcanic Monument. It is often not possible to get to the lower falls areas without breaking local laws and safety guidelines, but fortunately, the falls here are relatively easy to explore.  Steep cliffs, friable and unstable rock surfaces, and hazardous slopes all spell potential doom for those who disregard posted warnings.  However, with caution and sure-footedness, one can move easily among the boulders.   I needed my ultra-wide-angle lens to capture the scene before me.  The above image does not...

Tree swallow feeding a chick in a nest box in Maple Ridge, 2006. If you plan on putting up a bird house, the time to do it is now.  Well, for where I live, which is in the Okanagan in British Columbia.  It is the middle of March and I have noticed that a lot of birds have started nesting.  Not all of them, of course, as the swallows haven't come back yet, but many Passerine bird species have begun claiming territory.   Nest boxes should have a hole the size for the birds you want - or more specifically, too small for the birds you don't want.  Larger holes will be sure to get starlings, while slightly smaller holes will suit house sparrows fine.  To keep both of these species out, make your hole no bigger than 1-1/8 inches across.  This will allow chickadees, swallows, and house wrens access.  Even if you have larger holes and one of the desirable species takes up residency, they are at risk of being killed by larger birds such as the aforeme...

Thirty second exposure on slide film using flash and second curtain sync. Second curtain sync, also called rear curtain sync, is a flash-related feature found on many SLR, DSLR, and mirrorless cameras.  It allows the user to fire a connected flash unit at the end of the exposure, rather than at the beginning, as is the norm.  It is useful in certain situations as it produces a more natural-looking exposure when timing is an issue. So, what's with this 1st-curtain/2nd-curtain stuff anyway?  This doesn't apply to global shutters, leaf shutters, or electronic shutters, but only the good, old-fashioned focal-plane shutters so many of us are familiar with.  I've created a diagram for the process of how 1st and 2nd shutters work that is posted below. Movement of 1st and 2nd curtain shutters for focal-plane shutter cameras. There are two shutters in cameras equipped with focal-plane shutters.  The first one, called the first-curtain shutter, blocks light from reaching ...

The Point Atkinson Lighthouse as photographed in 2011.  There was still a caretaker there at the time. I have been going back through my old files, and I found a photo of the above lighthouse I took almost 15 years ago.  I keep all my old files that came straight from the camera.  This image was shot as a raw file and I opened it with my modern 2026 edition of Photoshop.  Digital imaging has come a long way since then. Originally built out of wood in 1875, a lighthouse has stood guard at the entrance of Burrard Inlet.  The wooden structure was replaced with a concrete one in 1912 and stands today as it did 114 years ago.  The original lighthouse was built as part of the agreement to bring British Columbia into federation.  It's interesting to think of Canada as it was back then. The lighthouse has had someone living there from its inception until 2020, when it underwent full automation.  The lands around the lighthouse have been saved as a park; L...

There were six of us at the demonstration on Tuesday (March 10, 2026) this week.   I decided to park some distance away from City Hall, where we would be demonstrating the road development through Munson Pond Park.  After all, it was important, and I understand there are about 6,000 signatures on the petition regarding the same thing.  As I rounded the corner, I detected a large group of about 100 people carrying placards with a news reporter and video cameraman setting up.  I thought to myself, "What a great turnout!" As I got closer and the signs began revealing what was written on them, the name of Munson did not appear at all.  The demonstration was about saving a golf course that was up for partitioning.  There were 200 people there.  I didn't know much about their cause, but where were those in support of my cause?  It was a moment later when I found my group; four people huddled around a tree in the center of the golf course protest....

Sericomyia militaris - The narrow banded pond fly - its larvae are rat-tailed maggots Well, I learned something new today.  I have known about a fly larva called a rat-tailed maggot and I knew about hover flies, but I did not know that rat-tailed maggots were the larvae of hover flies, also called flower flies.  Now, not all flower flies have this kind of larvae, but those that belong to the group of syphids (family Syphidae) in the tribe  Eristalini do.  If you want to see a photo of a rat-tailed maggot, click here . The interesting thing about rat-tailed maggots is that they can thrive in polluted water.  And we're not talking about mildly polluted water, but heavily polluted, stinks to high heaven, filthy, disgusting water.  That's because they don't get their oxygen from the water, but rather from their "rat tail," which is a breathing tube that extends above the waterline.   The water itself, which can actually be more of a mire, contains org...