I wish it would just rain already! For a couple of reasons, 1) obviously to quench the massive thirst of the flowers that re growing and trying to bloom, 2) the fire ants have no pre-designated areas. If the ground was wet, I would know exactly where their mounds are! As it is right now, wherever I stand in the backyard I see 1 or a ton of them!

You’ll notice I have no interest whatsoever in the grass growing, just the flowers!! ;-)

Pictures of Birds on my door step!

Ok, they are not exactly on my door step but they are pretty close

History: I bought some bird seed and a really cheap feeder from Wal-Mart a few years ago. Instead of actually hanging the feeder I just put it in my backyard and well, you can guess the results. NO BIRDS in sight! I didn’t want to hang it in a tree , I figured I wouldn’t bee able to see the feeder well enough then!

So the feeder got smashed or thrown out or whatever but I retained the seed. I came across the seed again this year and said what the heck, I’ll just throw some out on our back porch and see if we get any takers. Low and behold, we had some customers!

||| The turtle doves were the first to arrive and usually the last to leave. ||| At first I was happy to see them but quickly they became the gluttons of our seed!

||| I wound up chasing them away from time to time just so they wouldn’t eat everything in sight! But then came more interesting birds, namely cardinals and finches ||| The cardinal kind of surprised me because I’ve tried to photograph them before and they are VERY AWARE of you in proximity to them. They will fly away usually before you could get your camera set and ready.

||| Most of the time it was one or the other with the different kinds of birds. Rarely would you see them together this close. Both of them must have been hungry! Well, we know the turtle dove is hungry all the time.

The amazing part is that I was able to see and shoot all of these from inside. I knew the flash would interfere with the windows and create huge reflections (which I solved later). So all of the ones early on were taken without flash. That’s why some of them look like they could use some more PS work!

¹²³ Roving Clouds (UNCUT) ³²¹ || Clouds time-lapse Video

Somebody gave me ‘guff’ over the effects I did in this video, and of course I care what people think for some strange reason, so I recut the video. This time I did it without any special effects, outside of the titles and watermark. Enjoy :-)