Bird

Flamingo

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Flamingo

Sometimes I caption when I am tired. Sometimes I even get too tired to caption.

This caption by predictive text: “This flamingo and I will be there by 5 20 or so and then I will be able to find a way to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who was the guy who was the guy who was the guy …”

I’m not really worried about A.I. causing us serious harm anytime soon.

Amphiban

Chinese Giant Salamander

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Chinese Giant Salamander_5

Of course, when I’m there with a half-working system, that’s the time the Chinese giant salamander decides to pose. Good thing the Sony system does well in low light.

For those that track such things, this is a 100% crop at ISO 3200, hand-held at 1/60th of a second.

The salamander was about 15 feet* away. It would have looked a lot better on my Nikon.

* 4.5ish meters for those who use a decent** measurement system
** About 18.3 cham ams, for those who don’t

Insect

Sonoran Centipede

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Sonoran Centipede_1

I shoot with two major types of cameras – Nikon and Sony. The advantage of the Nikon line is that it is, frankly, the best available for nature photography. The autofocus system is the fastest anywhere and, while their lenses are rather pricey, there is a noticeable improvement for the cost. The Sony line, on the other hand, has the best low light capability (more or less, this is debatable) and is *much* smaller. So, the Nikon is the system I take for the serious shoots and the Sony system is what I use as a backup, when I am doing non-serious photography, or when I am just tired of carrying all the weight of the Nikon stuff.

Last summer, I was surprised to learn that the flash system I use (PocketWizard) was constructed such that I could use the Nikon units on the Sony system. This is amazing because off camera flash is how I get the good looking macro shots. I ran some tests at home and it worked, so I took the Sony system to the zoo along with my PocketWizards and Nikon flashes. Then I went to use it.

Well … “works” is apparently a loaded word.

The flash did fire. That’s true. There was no way to adjust the flash power except manually on the flash. That’s okay though. However, even in the few shots that did work out okay, the top 1/3 of the photo was black. This is weird because if it were a flash sync issue, I’d expect it to be the bottom, but I suppose the electronic shutter is, somehow, faster than the radio trigger to the flash unit.

Anyway, I only got one good macro shot with the flash. This is it – cropped from the partial photo.

Mammal

Gorilla

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Gorilla_5

This gorilla was trying to write a report, but ABBA came up on the playlist, so he went to see what they were up to and discovered that they will be launching a “hologram” project in 2019, but the word hologram can mean different things. After reading up on it, he’s decided that their “hologram” project will likely involve digital recreations that are presented in a 3D form via some sort of augmented or virtual reality, which is an odd term in of itself because reality is only ever experienced through the senses and no one is ever in a position to know what an objective reality is in the first place. Although, to be fair, it is now believed that we have more than the traditional five senses, with some putting the number as high as eighteen, one of which is proprioception, or the ability to sense where one’s body parts are, and now the gorilla can’t stop feeling his ears, which are listening to ABBA.

This gorilla doesn’t really want to write a report.

Photos, Stories, and Lies