Fawns And Stuff

Spotted in a neighbor's front yard recently:

Judging by size I guess they were born in the most recent batch.
Taller than cats, but not by a whole lot.

While daytime deer sightings are common, unguarded babies are another story.


If they are munching people's gardening they're obviously weaned and mama must have decided it was time to boot them out of the nest:
Too bad mama didn't school them on the dangers of the 'hood.
I was doing yard stuff, then creeping close for pictures, and the expected fear response never kicked-in.
Kinda worried about these little guys...



While navigating Blogger to make this post I noticed something odd on top of my dashboard:
I cropped it tight, but this is actual size.
WTF does it say?


Let's crank up the browser's magnification to 300% and see if it's legible:
Crap...
I hate the new Blogger interface.
It reminds me of the time I tried using Wordpress--not a good experience and I never could get either one to work in a logical or error-free manner.

Hopefully the bugs have been killed by now.

Thanksgiving Day 2010

The band had to play last night, because just like the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year, the day before is the biggest drinking night of the year.
I got to play bass at the end of the night, and it was a lot of fun:
To be honest, I really miss playing regularly and am trying to get this part of my life fixed. It's terribly frustrating and depressing.


Here's a view of the sky just before the cold front blew in:
From the '80s to the 40's in a couple hours--on a drive across town I started with the AC in my truck and ended up switching to the heater.


In a newish neighborhood ("The Parc"--how pretentious!) on FM1516 near Converse my brother detoured me to this scupture of a deer made from scrap metal:
It's huge--at least 40 feet high. You can get a sense of the size by the bicycle sticking out of the buck's chest.
It was already dark and I didn't have a tripod, so I did the best I could for a photo. Definitely going back for daytime color and infrared pics--especially since the high thin cirrus clouds I love for IR photography are finally back in season.


Sadly, some rotten scumbags stole tools and clothes and jewelry out of a truck parked at the family gathering today. Instead of shopping for Christmas on Black Friday, they'll be buying necessities just to get through their visit, which is just wrong.
At least nobody got hurt, although I would give thanks if the thieves had an "accident" and lost their teeth and maybe some fingers...

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! 

Sorry I've been too busy to take nice pictures lately, but with Christmas coming soon you just know I'll be shooting some cool stuff for our card so be on the lookout for the outtakes. 

Views Of June

Yesterday I felt a sudden urge to peep out the front window.
Nothing in particular triggers these urges of mine, but they often pay off.

I spotted this cute little fawn chillin' next to our driveway:


The mirror-slap of my camera scared it:
This was the very first time that I should have used one of my other lenses since buying the 50mm F1.8 on May 6th.
My 55-200mm would have given me a much better first shot, but would have had even better odds of failure for the follow-up.
Oh well.
(For pixel-peepers, both of these are 100% crops so every pixel you see onscreen is the same as the camera's output).


Speaking of young bucks and does, these are the graduates I have shot as favors in the last month:
This is obviously an outtake but I liked it best.
He was a cool kid who I'll probably never see again.

Tonight I shot this sweet girl--daughter of an old friend.
It was fun, and good practice.

Really need to put together some kind of "real" backdrop system.
I already have some serious tripods for band lights, so some PVC pipe/elbows and rolls of seamless 2-sided paper are in my future.


The Now-Expected Rant:
My friend James works for Time-Warner.
To help him and his team earn points or rewards or whatever, we opted to upgrade to digital cable and a DVR in a package that includes RoadRunner for our interwebs.
We had been paying ATT for DSL, but you have to also pay for the land-line phone service to get DSL, and we never used the phone!
Seriously, it had been unplugged for years!
If you want to call me, use my cell.
What a waste of money.

Makes sense so far...

I'm sure it's just an unfortunate series of events, but what a nightmare this week has been!
The contractors (NOT Time Warner employees) did a fine job up to the point where the internet was concerned.
I did the actual hookup for that because they were both too big to fit under my desk, but then one of them called-in the wrong MAC address # from our new modem, so we were assigned invalid IP addresses.
They tried half-heartedly to get us running, then told me that there was an "outage in our area" and left.
This was a lie.

The next day, an actual TW smarty-pants spent almost an hour trouble-shooting my internet before he finally figured out the MAC address problem.
7 is a poor substitute for C!
Boom--I'm online for an hour.
Then we have to go out for dinner at Bill Miller's, hit HEB, etc.
The two huge storm systems collided over our part of town right when we got home, and just AFTER it was all over the cable goes out.
Until 9am today!

We watched our own DVDs on both the TV and computer all evening.
I was tempted to hook-up the ATT modem again and get me some www, but resisted the urge to mess with things.
Today, I finally found out just how much faster the cable company's internet is.
Wow!
You often discover the limitations of the servers and ISP's on the other end, because Road Runner is FAST!!!
Very impressive.

Then at 5 pm I went to turn on the news while I washed dishes, and got nothing but a black screen, so I went back to the computer and found out that the cable was offline again.
Grrr!
I was royally pissed, but it came back by 5:30.
Probably some post-storm work that needed to be done.
The winds were in the 60-90mph range last night (hurricane force!) and hundreds of pieces of bark from our cottonwood tree are all over the yard, which I have never seen before.

Right now, I am playing on the computer and Sylvia is snoozing in front of many new TV channels, so all is right with the world.
I'm almost as content as Ralphie was, clutching the cold steel beauty of his Daisy Range Model Air Rifle with the compass in the the stock and "this thing which tells time".
It was an almost comical series of minor mistakes and unprecedented weather that combined to make our transition to the modern world seem like a nightmare.

I have high hopes that smooth sailing lies ahead.

Incidental Deer

I was in the back yard checking on my plants when I spotted some deer in the alley.
Grabbed my camera and went to the corner where I can stand on a railroad tie and poke my head over the fence.
The deer were spooked as I took a few pictures, but true to their nature curiosity made them come back.
I talked and sang to them, and made gentle noises until they came quite close.
I was only a head and camera from their viewpoint, so they felt relatively safe.

Then I noticed that a squirrel was also coming towards me along the top of the fence.
He kept getting closer and closer until I was able to compose this shot:
The idea of having deer in the background of a squirrel photo was too good to pass up, and I even opened-up the aperture to blur the deer some more. They soon became incidental, as if I hadn't realized they were there.

When the squirrel got within five feet of me I could see he was about to jump for a hackberry tree, but the autofocus didn't know what to do and I got a bad one. I'm posting it anyway because it's so much fun:
I used my new 50mm F1.8 lens all day, and I really like using it.
In fact, it hasn't come off the camera since I opened the box in the car to play with it on the way home from the Sony Style store.
It's just right for much of what I do.
Hope I don't forget how to use zoom lenses.


I did a quick photoshoot early today for a young man who's graduating from high school next month.
The mom was nice and he was a great kid.
The pictures turned out well and they are happy.
I'm happy because they paid in advance--a 20 pack of beer, and not the cheap crap I usually drink at home.
There are 18 left.

What's In My Alley?

I was standing in our back yard as the sun was going down.
(Nov 17th)
Heard some noises coming from the alley, then saw some movement through the gaps in our wood fence.
Went inside for a camera.

I spooked the deer as I rose up over the fence, and only got a picture of the buck's flag as they ran away.
But less than a minute later I heard them coming back, so I got into position again.
The doe jumped the chainlink fence across the alley from us, where the drummer who likes Black Sabbath lives.


The buck posed for a photo or four, and decided that the noises my camera was making were less important than what he had on his mind.

So over he went, after the doe.
He chased her around the yard, so she hopped the fence into the next yard up the hill.

He followed, chased her around a bit, then they both came back to the first yard.
Repeat.
Repeat again.
And again.

In all I got 14 photos of these two jumping fences in just four minutes, and I missed quite a few. I would guess I saw 30+ jumps.
It was wild!
I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and started laughing out loud halfway through, which is no way to take good photos. Had I known they were going to put on a show, I would have grabbed a camera that shoots video.

The 10-point buck wanted some, and the doe was having none of that.
I saw them together again last night, so maybe things worked out.