Just for laughs

PBase here I come!

I have now decided to also put my images on the very popular photography website PBase.

Shutterpoint

I have recently joined a new for me online stock photography website, Shutterpoint, and I highly recommend that anyone out there who is a photo buyer or photographer look into joining this awesome new website geared at promoting your work.

Stock photos in any category, many thousands to choose from

Sell your photos online

Follow the leader I

It is that time of year when the birds have all migrated south for the winter, and here in Missouri it is time for taking out the long telephoto lenses and heavy duty tripods and going after images of waterfowl. as flocks of hundreds of canada and snow geese filter through the wetlands of the prairie pothole region, it offers some awesome opportunities to get flight shots of groups, pairs and individuals. The conservation and restoration of millions of acres of wetlands in North America is due to the the efforts of groups like Ducks Unlimited. I am particularly fond of the blue phase of snow goose, once thought to be a seperate species, but now known through genetics research to simply be a plumage variant.

Christmas cougar

When I was just getting started in wildlife biology, after I finished my BS at Colorado State University in the mid-90's, I was lucky enough to work for a Utah State University grad student's project in south-central Utah studying the population dynamic's and effects of resident cougar populations on the elk and mule deer populations. The Utah Division of Wildlife was also interested in trying to get a better assessment of the true population size of the cougar in Utah and figure out if their harvest quotas for the secretive Rocky Mountain carnivore was appropriate. I was lucky enough to witness the capture of several adult cougars, as well as a few cubs. This young animal was a male born sometime the previous year. We have all heard about the plight of the cougar, or puma or mountain lion as they are also referred to in the Eastern United States, but what many people don't realize is that they have one of the largest overall geographic ranges of any mammal in the world. The cougar is found all the way from Alaska to South America, and many parts in between. It was a tremendous treat to work on this magnificent animal, definitely a gem in my biological fieldwork career. This young male has just been tranquilized, and is soon to be sound asleep for a while. we worked the animal up, put a radio collar on it to track it's movements and then released it unharmed. I posted this image because I felt it had sort of a Christmas feel to it. Iused the orginal version of the Canon Elan camera with a Tokina 400/5.6 telephoto lens to capture this image on Fujichrome 100 film. The good ole days!

Rockfish 2006!

This past weekend my wife and I were back in Virginia visitng family, and we had the pleasure of going out on my Uncle Billy's boat to fish for Rockfish (Morone saxatilis)(aka striped bass) in the Chesapeake Bay around the Bay Bridge Tunnel. This fish is slowly but surely recovering thanks to conservation efforts and very strict control of commercial and recreational quotas. The weather was perfect, about 50 F, and we had a fantastic time! We caught ~40 fish all total, ranging in size form 16 inches to 29 inches in length. We concluded the day by cooking some of the fresh fish up on Billy's grill. The menu included green beans, batter bread, homemade oatmeal-raisin-walnut cookies (courtesy of my grandmother Lucy), and Boston Cream pie with peppermint ice cream. It was so much fun fishing and cathcing these hard fighting fish, and I can't wait to go after them again! Most of them were caught on either a white colored swimbait or heavy stick plugs jigged about 10 feet below the surface.

An old but timeless friend

This is an old, old photo I took on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia in the winter as the last wisps of sunlight dipped below the horizons edge. I was using a 400mm telephoto lens on a tripod with a timer release, but what I didn't intend to do but am happy with now is that I left the lens slightly out-of-focus, that in combination with the extremly long exposure time and the atmospheric conditions resulted in this image entitled "Blueridge". In this instance, one can truly see why these are called the Blue Ridge Mountains. These ancient worn down mountains are some of the oldest on earth. I hope you enjoy this image as much as I do even today, several years later. Home will always be Virginia, between the Blue Ridge and the Chesapeake Bay.