The full August Sturgeon Supermoon rose through the clouds again last night.
Jupiter and moons
Jupiter in the pre-dawn clouds
Dragon wakes with a flaming yawn
Burning the heavens, scorching stars
Its fire lights the pre-dawn sky
Jet pierces the fiery phalanx
Sunrise
Crazy geese
Contrail
Hummer
Lonely Dove
Blue Boy
Towers
Sunset
Simple was the dawn
Trail cons clouds, moon wanes, leaf glows
Simple sunset was
Jorge answered the door to find a strikingly handsome young man with cinnamon-colored skin and curly black hair on the other side of the door. “Hi, Dad!” ricocheted off Jorge’s ears, flooding his mind with memories of the blond woman, a serviceman’s wife, with whom he had an affair 20 years ago. “Mom told me all about the affair,” the young man said, reading the emotions on Jorge’s face. “She couldn’t bring herself to have an abortion.”
How many ways are there to skin an onion with a cat?
Goose balls?
Flight paths.
Spunk mad dogging the dog.
The dog
The conservancy is let more water into the Rio Grande from upstream. That has brought the water level up in the Clearwater ditch. the black speckles in the sky are crows flying on the crow highway that follows the Rio Grande.
The ducks are happy to be in the clearwater ditch again.
Burning through the sky.
We talk
My world opposite yours
Your today is my tomorrow
My today is your yesterday
Through your voice I see the future
Through my voice you glimpse the past
When I see the light, you stand in darkness
When darkness engulfs me, your light shines
My summer is your winter
When you spring, I fall
Your world opposite mine
We talk
Sunrise
Murder over the bosque
Lavinia asked if I had used a telescope to photograph the moon last night. Lavinia never lets me down on being observant and asking questions when something seems different like a whole lot of detail in the moon photo. As I answered her, I did not use a telescope, I used a 400mm lens that is equivalent to a 640mm lens on my Canon 7D Mark II body. I have been considering getting a long telephoto lens for quite some time.
I was originally looking at the Canon 100-400mm lens, which is one of Canon’s best telephoto zoom lenses for mere mortal photographers, such as myself. However, the 100-400mm lens is ƒ/4.5 to ƒ/5.6, which is a little slow for as much low light photography as I do. I really needed a faster telephoto lens. I seriously considered both the Canon 400mm ƒ/2.8 and the Canon 300mm ƒ/2.8 lenses. The problem with those lenses for me is their weight. The Canon 400mm ƒ/2.8 weighs in at 12 pounds, and the 300mm ƒ/2.8 weighs 6 pounds, 1/2 the weight of the 400mm ƒ/2.8, but still a heavy lens.
I ended up compromising on speed for lighter weight and bought a 400mm ƒ/4.0 DO lens with Refractive Optics, which enables Canon to put a 400mm ƒ/4.0 lens in the same body as the 300mm ƒ/2.8 lens, shaving 2 pounds off the weight in the process. At 4 pounds, the 400mm ƒ/4.0 DO is easy to handle, and fast enough to get decent images hand held in low light. In the photos of the owls below, we could only see outlines of the owls with our bare eyes like in the first photo, but not nearly as close up. The new lens is able to focus on the owls in relative darkness, through the branches and get an amazing amount of detail.
Spunk loves my new lens
Preening
Spunk’s a lens hugger
Intermission photographed using a Fuji XE-1 with 27mm ƒ/2.8 lens
“Who are you calling a ‘lens hugger?’ Stupid Paparazzo!”
RAW image of the owls before I cropped the image and adjusted the exposure, contrast, color balance, etc.
“Oh my! The paparazzo found us again.”
Mirroring
The streak photographed using a Canon 5Ds with a Canon 70-200mm ƒ/4.0 lens
A little over half a moon on 01/21/21
Off Center & Not Even 