Coneflower blooms.
A shot from a walk last week. It has been a bad summer for a lot of plant species in the area. Winter dragged on well into spring and summer has been hot and very dry.
I noticed this small group of Coneflower blooms in the soft, evening light. The plant was much smaller than previous years.
Male Common Kingfisher.
Throwback Thursday travels back to Cheshire, England in the early 1990s. Having posted a photo of a North American Belted Kingfisher for Wordless Wednesday I thought I would follow up with another Kingfisher species on a different continent.
This is a male Common Kingfisher that is found across parts of Eurasia and North Africa. Other common English names are Eurasian Kingfisher and River Kingfisher. The background is an out of focus hay meadow. I had a portable hide (blind) set up next to a pond in the meadow.
Male Belted Kingfisher and clouds.
The EMPTY signs amused me.
Taken on a evening walk during week 32. These are Bear resistant garbage cans that are bolted to concrete slabs. The red pole is a marker to show snow plough operators where they are although the one on the right looks as if it’s had a tap from a plough.
The EMPTY signs on two of the cans amused me. I wondered if they were for the Bears so they wouldn’t bother trying to break into the empty ones. I know the reason for the signs but the thought of them being for the Bears still amuses me.
Hidden behaviour in plain sight.
This week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge is Hidden In Plain Sight: Photo Elements You Might Have Missed.
This is a photo of a pair of American Avocets in Saskatchewan, Canada. They’re in breeding plumage having arrived for the summer. You may wonder what I missed? The photo was taken in the mid 1990s but until I copied the slide a couple of years ago I hadn’t noticed the behaviour of the two birds.
The bird on the left seems to be ready to mate while the other bird appears to be preening as if getting ready to go on a date. By the curve of their bills it’s a female ready to mate and a male preening.
Week 32. An old barn in the mist at sunrise.
For week 32 I was in a retro mood and at the weekend I left my zoom lenses at home and packed my smallest camera bag with with four manual focus prime lenses. Sometimes I like going back to the way I shot film for decades.
It was originally supposed to be three prime lenses, a wide angle, a normal and a telephoto like I used most of the time as a photography student. However I found a deal on a fisheye lens that was impossible to resist so it got added to the original three lenses.
Sunday morning saw me returning from the sunrise at Colpoy’s Bay to find some interesting mist over some of the fields. I ended up taking more photos of the mist over various fields than I had of the sunrise. The photo is mist around an old barn soon after sunrise and was taken with the wide angle lens.
