All My Blogs

From left to right:  Nora, Josh, Daisy, Chanelle, Emma I am proud of my son.  Without going into detail, he has made his way through his own share of trials to become the proud father he is today.  The road ahead itself won't be without its own share of struggles, but he has a good foundation upon which to build.  And he has a good moral center with lots of support upon which to draw courage and strength from.   I read a quote somewhere that, paraphrased, said, "Any man can be a father, but not every man can be a dad."  The difference between the two being fathering a child versus raising one.  To father a child is to be half of the equation to create life from a single cell to a living, breathing being.  To be a dad to a child is to be physically, emotionally, spiritually, and morally present as the young person grows up into adulthood, and even then, to be there as part of the family in some supportive capacity. My own father had a difficul...

Above:  Common loon pair.  Below:  Red necked grebe pair.  Photographed in Alberta. I have to say, both zooms and primes have their place in your kit.  They both have pros and cons and, as such, have a reason why you would chose one over another.  As nice as it would be to have both and pick the lens that fits the current need, the fact is that many people can only have one or the other, especially when it comes to long focal length lenses. Right away, though, I want to discount all-in-one lenses that give you a range from 28 - 300 mm, or in the case of some ultra zoom compacts, boast a zoom range of 24-3000 mm.  Although their range is legendary, the quality of the resulting images is generally poor, especially if you want to enlarge or crop significantly.  Professionals don't use them for a very good reason. The cameras I use my long lenses on are APS-C bodies with a 1.5x crop factor.  This increases the relative focal length to 750 mm for ...

Cedar waxwings.  Notice red "waxy" tips of secondaries (main & inset).  Insert: no "waxy tips". Waxwings don't actually make wax.  The bright red tips projecting off the secondaries of the wings are actually projections of the feather shafts.  They are actually made of keratin, a structural protein.  The colours come from bright coloured fruits that have deep red pigments (you can see berries in lower left inset image).  The berries contain carotenoids, brightly coloured pigments that are important precursors to certain vitamins and antioxidants.  The particular pigment is called astaxanthin .   These same pigments end up in the projected feather shafts of the waxwings.  If you want to see one on a feather, click here . There's more.  If you look at the waxwing pair in the lower left inset, you will see that the front one has no such red waxy tips, while the back one does ( you have to look closely).  They are born wi...

Song sparrow, Juvenile white-crowned sparrow, and adult white-crowned sparrows at Munson Pond. Many times when photographing birds, I will find more than one in my viewfinder.  A single bird is always relatively easy to shoot - focus on the bird (head if possible) and press the shutter button.  But what do you do when there is more than one bird? You basically have three choices.  You can focus on the closest bird, focus on the farthest bird, or focus on a point somewhere in between.  The best choice will vary a lot depending on the exact situation, but there is, I believe, a good general first choice. The best, general first choice is to focus on the closest individual.  The reasons are as follows.   the front individual will be larger and therefore have more detail than the individual(s) behind it. depth of field is so limited (I used a 500 mm with a 1.4x TC on an APS-C camera to give me a relative focal length of around 1000 mm) when shooting wide o...

Low tide near Birch Bay, Washington, 2013 It turns out that the moon is important to life.  The obvious assist is with tides.  The moon exerts a pull on the Earth.  This pull, due to gravity, causes the movement of water on the oceans, to such an extent that tides on the Bay of Funday have a range of more than 50 feet.  That's 100 billion tons of water, twice every day, up and down a 150 mile channel.  Regular tides are far less than that of course, but the idea here is that the moon moves a lot of water. High tide brings important nutrients and debris inland.  It also removes shoreline features through erosion which facilitates nutrient distribution and the rock cycle.  Low tide allows a great many organisms to feed on intertidal species.  The whole marine food web is greatly enhanced by tides. Then there is the fact that the moon stabilizes the Earth to some extent.  The moon's gravity holds the Earth's tilt in its current plane of rotation...

I believe this is an adult reed beetle - genus Plateumaris - on a yellow iris flower. Have you ever heard of an insect breathing underwater by using the air inside aquatic plants?  I have heard of it, but never researched it until now. Reed beetles, like the one above, have two distinctive habitats.  As larvae, the insect attaches to underwater plant parts such as the yellow iris in the photo.  They feed on the roots and stems of the host plant, but the peculiar thing is that they get their oxygen from the plant itself.  They tap into the  aerenchyma (air-filled tissue) of the plant using two spine-like hooks located on the abdomen.  This allows gas exchange to occur with the insects' breathing apparatus (malpighian tubules).  You can see the two spine-like hooks in the image below (lower left image).  Taken from  this source . Have a look at lower left image - reed beetle grub showing the breathing hooks. The adults live above water and look...

The Colorado River in the American Southwest The Colorado River is heavily dammed.  There are 7 major dams that produce reservoirs along its 1450 miles.  Along its tributaries, there are another 50 or so.  The largest of these include Parker Dam, Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, and Grand Valley Diversion Dam.  These store not only vast amounts of water, but they are also important for hydroelectricity and as a source of fresh water. It is the demand for fresh water that is causing the problem.  Irrigation, water for industry and public consumption, and evaporation all contribute to its depletion.  The river system supports some 40 million Americans and irrigates over 5 million acres of farmland.  Much of California, Nevada, and Arizona get their water from the Colorado River. The river basin provides water for about 10 percent of all the United States. Between the dams, water extraction, and reduced rainfall from global warming, the river is running dry i...

Jerusalem (sand) cricket I photographed in 2008 with my Nikon D70 and macro equipment. Neither from Jerusalem nor a cricket, this is a strange insect.  It turns out that there may be anywhere from 20 - 100 species of this unusual nocturnal forager.  Scientists aren't sure about the number because of the relatively small area each population lives in.  Genetic variation may show a high degree of overlap between groups, making species identification somewhat challenging. Being wingless and fossorial, they don't travel far from their burrows, only going out when it is dark to feed.  Although they are somewhat docile, they have a strong bite and can inflict an injury on anyone mishandling one.  They use that bite to capture other insects or to eat plant matter, or scavenge.   They dig their own burrows.  Their strong legs, strong jaws, and bulbous head all allow earthen material to be excavated and then moved to create a hollow.  These relatives ...

Whitetail dragonflies.  Center:  female.  Corners:  male.  (right one isn't my photo). Whitetail dragonflies are fairly common, one of the most ubiquitous in North America.  They live in all Canadian provinces and all US states in North America.  Their range is reduced in arid climates but they are still present where freshwater bodies exist.  As you can imagine, the variation in habitats over that range would likely affect the insect's phenotype (outward genetic expression).  One of the big drivers of adaptation and selection is temperature. As you can see from the above image, male and female whitetailed dragonflies do not look the same; mature adult males have a pronounced white abdomen (juvenile adult males do not) while females have white markings on theirs.  Another difference is in the wings, where the males' are relatively shorter, requiring more effort but also allowing greater manoeuvrability.  This comes in handy when the...

  "The van is easy to find.  There's an arrow on my front lawn pointing to it." OK, it's not an arrow, it's an anchor.  I photographed this in Nelson's Dockyard in Antigua.  But you get the idea that you can use lines to direct your attention to a subject or feature in an image.  The interesting thing here is that it's hard to "unsee" the anchor as being an arrow.  Would it look the same if the van was parked somewhere else? Some photos I have taken where lines play a large part in their impact. You can see the above images all have lines that deal with pointing to some degree.  You can use lines to frame, draw your eye, or enhance some aspect of a photo.  The images above all deal with pointing towards a subject.   Lines can be natural or artificial in nature.  They can come as single entities or multiple ones.  They can be of the same makeup or of many different kinds.  What they should have in common is the ability to s...

Kangaroo rat (added in post) in the Palm Springs Desert Water is necessary for life.  And yet, there are plants and animals that don't need direct access to it in order to thrive.  A good example of that is the kangaroo rat, a rodent that is neither a rat nor a mouse.  They live in arid regions of North America.  Although they are capable of drinking water, an individual may go its entire life without ever drinking.  That's because they get their water from somewhere you may not expect. As you probably know, photosynthesis involves turning sunlight into sugar by using carbon dioxide and water.  The opposite of this is cellular respiration, the cellular process of converting sugar (and other foodstuffs) into carbon dioxide and water.  The carbon dioxide is dealt with through breathing (CO2 out and O2 in).  The water stays behind. The ability of kangaroo rats to conserve water is amazing.  The seeds eaten by kangaroo rats may contain some water...

Bend Oregon.  Shot with my D70 camera in 2010.  I haven't looked at this image for over 15 years. I have been organizing my digital images lately, saving all my 2025 stuff.  In doing so, I have also been perusing my archives for old photos, ones that I haven't worked on before.  This one (above) fit the bill for the blog I want to do today. Keep your old files/images.  You may never need them, but having them allows you to access them should the desire or need arise.  Memory is cheap; you can buy a 6 or 8 TB hard drive for around $250.  Unless you shoot a lot of video, that is enough memory to hold hundreds of thousands of images. Most of my images are in raw format, so I can open them anew and work with them using editors that far surpass the ones from days of old.  As well, my understanding of the workflow has improved and so I am also better at the adjustments.   Over the years, I have upgraded my cameras, starting with my Fuji S1Pro ...

An Individual American Coot at Munson Pond, Kelowna.  Feb 14, 2026. Inset:  a group of coots I photographed in 2012 (location unknown). American coots are highly social birds.  Whenever I see one, I know there are others nearby.  What I found in this case, though, was that it was alone.  Now, I can't prove that, as others may have been hiding in the nearby clutter of overhanging branches, but it still was, in my mind, unusual. It turns out that coots do migrate in groups, but not necessarily with others of the same species.  Coots may hitch a ride with ducks or geese that are migrating, both to and from their breeding area.  Another possibility is that this individual may not have migrated at all.  Coots are known to stay in the Okanagan Valley throughout the year.  Given the mild winter we have had, this is a very plausible explanation.  They like open water, so the pond where I found them wouldn't have been an option as it was frozen o...

Male common merganser.  A female hooded merganser is in the background.  Munson Pond. I was at Munson Pond yesterday taking photos of birds.  The ice had just recently come off the surface and the entire water body was clear of it.  What was there in its stead were birds; hundreds of them.  The largest collection was Canada geese, but I was amazed at how many hooded mergansers there were too.  And then I saw them; large and colourful - male common mergansers. In all, there were maybe a dozen common mergansers, both males and females.  The common variety were much larger than the hooded ones.  However, they didn't mind hanging out together, and they exhibited a most interesting behaviour.  They all dove at once. Called cooperative fishing, it is a behaviour that increases the chances of any one individual catching a fish.  One bird on its own has to either be very lucky on its dive or has to chase down a fish fleeing for its life.  M...

Canada goose driving off competition.  Munson Pond, Kelowna.  Feb 14, 2026. It's Valentine's Day today, and an excellent time to talk about monogamous birds, such as the Canada goose.  But is it love? Monogamy is the word that describes species that mate more than once in their lifetime, and only with the same partner.  There are a surprising number of bird species that behave this way.  Male and female, they find each other, usually both young and both inexperienced with mating, and they stay together.  For years.  How long? - Canada geese may live up to 25 years in the wild, but often live up to their early twenties.  Imagine staying together with the same partner for that long.  Better than many humans. Canada geese are monogamous.  They mate for life.  If a partner dies, they will eventually find another to mate with, but not right away.  They typically go through a period of mourning.  Yes, they are sad, depressed, mi...

Crabs, lobsters, and crayfish - all members of the decapods You probably know about our equilibrium organs making up the inner ear.  Called the vestibular system, the three loops of tubing (vestibules) give us a sense of balance, each tube corresponding to each of the three dimensions of our reality.  It turns out that balance systems are not unique to life - many other creatures have a similar system. Many aquatic creatures use statocysts, somewhat analogous to our vestibule canals.  However, instead of there being three individual organs, there is a single organ that essentially does the same thing.  The one I want to discuss today in my blog is found in decapods - crabs and their relatives. I copied the image below from this source - it shows the statocyst of a lobster.  It is essentially a round ball of cells, empty in the center - with hair-like (cilia) projections facing the center.  A small, hard object, the statolith, has its position within the sph...

My family in 2010 - Two losses and two additions since then. Tumbler Ridge.  Someone enters a high school with a gun.  What comes next is horrible - life-taking, life-changing, life-destroying.  Families, the school, the community, and even the country will never be the same again. This is why family is important.  Before, during, and after.   Before - I can't speak to who the person with the gun was, but I have to believe that there were deep problems with the family.  That's not always true, of course, but often when there is deep unrest, there is something missing within the family.  Fortunately, most children are somewhat resilient and can thrive in spite of family squabbles.  But, at the end of the day, everyone is usually much better off when a family loves each other and works together. During - I can only imagine the horror of what the people in Tumbler Ridge are going through right now.  Parents losing children, children who hav...

Phainopepla - Left (2016) and right (2008) - Photographed in Arizona  OK - not my best photos of birds - but I have only ever seen them once - for each the male and female.  The female photo was taken with my Nikon D7200 and 80-400 S zoom while the male's was shot with my Nikon D200 and my non "S" 80-400 zoom.  The two systems are worlds apart, but both allowed me to do what I love, which is to get outdoors, see wildlife, and photograph it. The species is fond of berries and often eats them from mistletoe, which is a plant parasite.  The downside to this is that the seeds are widely distributed from their droppings and offer new trees to parasitize.  They also eat the berries of a vast variety of plants and take insects, often on the wing, whenever they can.   The males both build and defend the nest.  Although these birds are rarely found on the ground, they will forage there for nesting materials.  Their defensive behaviours depend greatly ...

My family and I wearing hats - wHat it's all about. I just love to wear a hat. Big or little, thin or fat. Sitting high, or low and flat. I'll never have enough of that. What's a hat without a brim? It's like a tube, long and slim. Wearing one on just a whim, Hats are meant to have a rim. A hat can be very fun, Or keep you from too much sun. Dawning one when rain's begun, Hold onto it if you run. Toques or beanies when it's cold, Helmets for the very bold, Peaked caps for cops we're told, Berets are hats that you can fold. Bowler, floppy, and top hats, Cowboy, firemen's, screens for gnats, hiking, biking, or hunting rats, It's enough to drive one bats. Coloured hats, blue, green or red, Or maybe cool patterns instead, My favourite hat, from A to Zed, Is the one upon my head. Thanks for reading. Eric Svendsen      www.ericspix.com  

Male mallard duck photographed Knox Mountain in Kelowna, February 7, 2026. I had some fun putting this together.  I got quite a few good photos of the drake in spite of the low light.  However, the heavy cloud did make for even lighting with no visible shadows.  The image reminded me of someone speed skating, and I just took it from there.  The fact that the winter Olympics are currently in session also provided some impetus. I don't often photograph mallard ducks as they are very common and rarely inspire me.  They fall into the same category as robins and house sparrows.  My main purpose for this series of photos was to take some bird photos, and there were only two species available - mallards and goldeneyes.  I wrote a blog on the female goldeneye I took yesterday ( click here ).  I did a blog a few weeks ago on common goldeneye ducks as well, where I wrote up some information on them ( click here ). I have to admit to enjoying being silly on ...

Female goldeneye duck on Knox Mountain Pond in Kelowna - the ice is starting to melt. There is a pond about 2 km away from where I live.  It is on Knox Mountain; there is a modest gain in elevation when walking there.  It is usually frozen over at this time of year, but with the warm, snowless winter we have had, what little ice there is has begun to disappear. It hasn't been exactly warm.  It was 5° C in the afternoon today, on the 7th of February; it hasn't been below zero for a few weeks.  The odd thing is that it has been freezing back east - Lake Erie has almost completely frozen over.  Not that I am complaining.  It has been nice to go walking without studs attached to the bottom of my boots. Even though spring seems to be in the air, there is little evidence of it regarding migrating birds.  goldeneye ducks and mallards have been overwintering here by the bucketful.  They have been staying along the creeks and rivers here, but are starting ...

Different species of lichen growing on fence boards. One of the strangest relationships on the planet Earth exists between an alga and a fungus.  Together they exhibit obligate mutualism - a form of symbiosis where each partner of the relationship has to be together to survive. There are some 15,000 to 20,000 species of lichen across the planet.  The word species is a bit odd in this circumstance as there are actually 2 distinct species making up the single entity.  For the most part, the fungus is a unicellular variety belonging to the Ascomycetes, the same group that yeast belongs to.  The photosynthetic component of the equation often is a form of green algae, although it may also be a member of the cyanobacteria. Both forms benefit from the presence of the other.  The fungus receives sugars from photosynthesis done by the algal component.  The fungal component provides moisture, other nutrients, and protection for the algae.   Although lichens...

The night sky photographed near Sunshine Valley, BC.  17 min 4 sec exposure. Polaris, also known as the North Star, sits atop the imaginary axis around 450 light years away.  You can see Polaris from almost any place in the Northern Hemisphere at night (without cloud cover or bright city lighting).  I photographed the star field on June 15, which was less than a week away from the Earth's Summer solstice.  The angle of the star in the sky changes as the Earth revolves around the sun due to the tilt in the Earth's axis. Diagram explaining why Polaris is also called the North Star.   Anywhere you stand in the Northern Hemisphere, you can see the North Star.  Finding it, if you are unfamiliar with the trick, is to use the two end ladle stars of the bit dipper and follow them in a line until you come to it.  There is a great website here that shows you how to find Polaris and how the stars around it seem to rotate from one's perspective on the Earth. ...

Cap rocks lead to hoodoo formations - but where do the cap rocks come from? Alberta was once the site of a large inland sea (click here for an image).  Over millennia, suspended particles in the water settled to the bottom to form the thick clay deposits found in the interior of the province.  Uplifting through plate tectonics eventually drove the water away, but not before the fine silt caused many a dead prehistoric creature to be entombed and eventually fossilized.  Alberta is a rich source of remarkable fossils, many of which are on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. The flattened, raised seabed would support millions of years of soil development and grasslands that would eventually give rise to the prairies.  A period of cooling led to the development of glaciers that tore through the Canadian Rockies and carried enormous quantities of gravel, rocks, and boulders across the plains.  When the glaciers melted, the rock burden was deposited as ...

Small changes in tone/colour produce significant variations in skin tone. Getting the right white balance is important when photographing people.  Small changes in white balance affect skin tones significantly.  There are two standard places where you can correct white balance:  In the camera directly or by editing the photo afterwards.   Picking white balance in camera - your camera comes with a white balance control that is accessed from a button on the camera and/or through a menu.  When shooting jpeg or heif images, the best plan is to set the white balance first before shooting.  It is reasonably easy to do, although if you have never done it before it may take a bit of playing.  You can either white balance from a photo stored on the memory card or you can white balance directly at a scene by taking a photo.   The trick here is to have something truly neutral.  It should be white, black, or grey, and have no hint of any shade...

Red tailed hawk at Munson Pond, Jan 31, 2026. I walked around Kelowna's Munson Pond yesterday.  I found over a dozen feather piles from the carcasses of dispatched geese or maybe ducks on my walkabout.  Clearly, something was catching and eating the birds. I saw two red-tailed hawks, one at a distance (photo below) and one that perched atop a nearby tree (above).  I used a APS-C sensor camera with a 1.4x teleconverter and my 500 mm f/5.6 len, which gave me the equivalent of a little over 1000 mm of focal length.  You can see from the detail on the head (right panel) that I was relatively close - in fact the bird almost filled the frame in my viewfinder. I suspect that the geese may have been too large to haul off to a favoured perch to consume, so it would have been plucked and eaten on the ground.  I did not find much in the way of remains other than feathers, although there was a femur or humerus present that must have been from a goose at one of the sites....

The three primary colours (RGB) and secondary colours (CMY) make up the colour wheel. The colour wheel in photography involves all the colours you can make with the three primary colours red, green, and blue (RGB).  There is an excellent image showing the relationship between the primary and the secondary colours (YMC) here . If you look at the image above, you can see the colour cast I added to the surrounding images.  Opposite colours are diagonally located (green and magenta are opposites).  Combining two of the primary colours produces a secondary colour.  For example, if you combine red and blue, you get magenta.  The same is true for red and green (yellow) and green and blue (cyan).  If you subtract opposite colours, you get the opposing colour (if you subtract cyan, you get red).  Adding opposite colours cancels them out and produces white (gray). I used the colour wheel all the time when printing photos in the lab I worked in.  Altering th...