Important Reminder: Olympia's Spring 2019 Arts Walk is coming up on April 26 & 27 and once again my good friends at Encore Chocolates & Teas ( 116 5th Ave SE in downtown Olympia) will be hosting me. I'll be there with photo prints, a video slideshow and some other goodies, so please stop by to have a look and say hi. [...and while you're there, you might want to try the chocolate and tea samples and buy some treats for yourselves]
I’ve just completed a major overhaul of the photo pages, adding hundreds of new photos. Don’t worry - many of your old favorites are still there too. I'm excited about the new images and hope you will be, too. In addition to the new still images, there's also a new video slideshow for you to view. It's titled "Arts Walk Slideshow Spring 2019". View it with or without the included sound track for five minutes of sheer relaxation and enjoyment.
Important Reminder: Olympia's Spring 2019 Arts Walk is coming up on April 26 & 27 and once again my good friends at Encore Chocolates & Teas ( 116 5th Ave SE in downtown Olympia) will be hosting me. I'll be there with photo prints, a video slideshow and some other goodies, so please stop by to have a look and say hi. [...and while you're there, you might want to try the chocolate and tea samples and buy some treats for yourselves]
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There's a new way to navigate my photos. Go to the tab labeled Portfolio Index Page and click on any of the titled images to go to the desired page. When you're finished on a page, just click on either of the "Return to Portfolio Index Page" buttons and you'll be back at the main portfolio page. I hope this new feature makes your photo browsing easier.
Greetings to all my old friends and supporters, and welcome to all you new visitors to my site.
I'm in the process of updating the website with lots of new photos. Be sure to check out the already updated Portfolio pages for Birds of Prey, Herons, Hummingbirds and Waterfowl, plus the newly added pages for Frogs and Dragonflies. There are also now 6 video slideshows, prepared for my exhibits at Encore Chocolates and Teas for the spring and fall Olympia Arts Walk events. There's still more to come. I'll be adding a second volume of waterfowl photos and making major additions to the Songbirds page. I also want to add a page entitled "Recent Shots" in order to share a sampling of my newest photos. A longer term project will be to add captions to all my photos. Hope the photos on my site bring you joy, relaxation and peace, Barry What a wild weekend it's been! Just finished my first-ever public photo exhibit as part of Olympia's spring Arts Walk, in which downtown businesses provide an opportunity for local artists to showcase their work.
My deepest appreciation to Dean and Carla Jones of Encore Chocolates & Teas for offering to sponsor my art, and then, working with my loving wife Linda to help design and set up the exhibit. It was a fun team effort made all the more enjoyable by the wonderful chocolates and teas we consumed in the process. Thank you to all my friends who showed up to support and encourage me, to those who weren't able to attend but sent me their best wishes, and to the many visitors who stopped by to look at my photographs. I had a wonderful time talking with folks of all ages who were kind enough to share their impressions, talk about their own experiences with wildlife or learn more about photography. My only regret is that I didn't have more time to talk to everyone. A really popular part of my exhibit was a 5-minute video slide show of wildlife images. For those who weren't able to attend Arts Walk and for those who would like another chance to watch it, I've posted it here on my website. Just click here or go to the Portfolio page and look for Olympia Arts Walk Slideshow 2014. There is a soundtrack, so make sure you have your sound turned on if you want that part of the experience. ![]() The initial posting of the pages "Polar Images" appears to have been a hit with viewers, and I still had more images I wanted to share, so I've added yet another page of photos to this series. For me, these photos bring back a flood of memories. For you, I'm hoping they provide yet another glimpse into the wonders of these remote seas. For the last several months, I've been tackling the job of sorting, culling and scanning my collection of slides taken over the last 40 or so years. While it's been hard work, this process turned out to be more fun than I expected. I especially enjoyed reliving my days as an "itinerant biologist" when my project work with the WA Game Department was interspersed with time spent conducting marine mammal research at sea. My favorite cruises were those that took me to high-latitude seas, both north and south: nearly 18 months in the Antarctic, Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands and the Barents Sea north of Norway. I love the quality of the light and the abundance of life in these cold, remote regions. On my new photo pages entitled "Polar Memories," I've tried to capture some of the special beauty and interest of these areas. I'll be adding more photos to this series, as well as some blog entries to share my stories of these cruises.
![]() Been quite a while since I've posted anything. Have been going through my photo collection and doing a lot of organizing and culling of photos. Got down to almost 5500, with more work still to do. The good news is that I've also been selecting shots to post on Portfolio page of this website. You may have noticed there are already some new pages that appear when you click on "Portfolio". There are quite a few more pages that almost ready to post, so check back frequently to catch the new additions. I'll also be adding a new page entitled "Photographer's Statement" that I hope you'll find interesting. I came home one day and heard a mysterious noise near our house that sounded like someone rasping with a metal file. Finally tracked down the source of the noise - one of our resident Douglas squirrels sitting in a big leaf maple tree gnawing on a possum skull. How you might ask, did it come to have a possum skull? Because wildlife biologists (and their wives) do strange things, like bringing home interesting bleached-out bones from an old road kill. We'd set the bones on our back deck the previous week and when they disappeared I thought perhaps a curious raven had carried them off. Turns out that the squirrel, a nursing female, had discovered the bones and was delighted to have a source of calcium to gnaw on. I watched as she worked away on the skull, then, wanting to make sure she didn't lose her precious find, ran up the branch and carefully buried the skull under a loose patch of moss. Now I'm always on the lookout for small bones to bring home and place near the old maple. Call it recycling.
This blog entry is dedicated to my young friends Hunter and Anabel who were so intrigued by this story. If upon reading the title of this post you were hoping I'd reveal where the dragons Smaug and Fafnir were guarding their hidden hoards of gold, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. Instead, I thought I'd reveal some facets of dragonfly life as exposed (pun intended) by the wonders of digital photography. Though I was dragged kicking and screaming from the film world into the digital world, I've really come to appreciate the advantages of digital photography, among those being the ability to "develop" your own photos using photo software. As I'm enlarging and cropping photos, I'll sometimes find some really interesting detail that I otherwise would have missed. If you looked closely at 2 of the photos from my earlier "Flying Dragons" post, you might have noticed a small, reddish-orange dot in front of the eye. That dot, it turns out, was actually a parasitic water mite [click for link]. In the middle shot above, what looks like a winged ant atop the beetle being eaten by the dragonfly is actually a parasitic wasp that appears to be laying its eggs in the beetle - bad timing as it would turn out. The last photo of the above series shows that even the most intimate details of animal behavior aren't safe from the inquisitive eye of a wildlife biologist/photographer - is it just me or does the dragonfly at the bottom have a smile on its little face?
In my next posting, I'll switch from dragonflies to exploring an interesting connection between a Douglas squirrel and a possum. A couple of years ago I took on the challenge of trying to capture dragonflies in flight. My good friend and photo buddy, John, had already had amazing success with this and was generous enough to give me some good tips, the key one of which was "use manual focus". Having learned photography in the days before there was autofocus (or auto anything for that matter) probably helped, but it still took many hours of practice and experimentation until I could get consistently happy results. As for getting flight shots of butterflies - well, that's still a "work in progress". I'll let you know if I have any luck with that.
Use my CONTACT page to e-mail me if you're interested in tips for photographing dragonflies in flight, or if you want to learn about good spots to find dragonflies near Olympia, WA. |
AuthorMy passion is sharing intimate glimpses of wildlife subjects. Archives
April 2019
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