Murph is a yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys
Barzini and Monstrego are two other pet turtles of the same species but a different sub-species: Trachemys scripta elegans. Both escaped in the Summer of 2015, but I recovered Barzini about a year and a half later.
Here, Nicole and I pose for Murph’s release.
Pablo enjoys some millet as Frida calls.
I have thousands of digital photographs that I’ve taken since my first digital camera purchase in 2000 (maybe 1999). That was an Olympus D-150Z, which sported a whole 1-megapixel sensor, a 3x optical zoom lens, and an 8 Mb storage card. Not a lot of photographs (if any) from those days have made it to Montegraphia, nor have many from the next in line, a Canon PowerShot A530, but my Lightroom database reports over 9,000 photos between these two devices. Lots of great memories are tied to the photographs that I took with those devices, and some were shared through other means, such as Google Photos (Picasa at the time). A set of parody films that I made in college, a cold, snowy day collecting leaves for crayfish processing, or a foggy morning spent at Magee Marsh with lab mates and my advisor where we saw 99 bird species (I think that was the frustratingly close-to-centennial number) popped up when I did a quick look through.
The vast majority of photographs here were taken using my first DSLR—an Olympus E-420 with just a handful of lenses. That device is still around, but a loose memory draw and an increasingly frustrating inconsistency in single-autofocus function in my Sigma-made macro lens, followed by a recommendation for a waterproof device, led me to purchase an Olympus Tough TG-4. That’s been my go-to for the last two or three years.
The accumulated backlog of photographs is one of the reasons I have inconsistent postings here. I have a workflow and process I like to use prior to “archiving” onto Montegraphia—the photos should have meaningful tags, some image processing effects, and often a geo-location, and that’s time-consuming; and, it’s overwhelming at times. So, my solution: buy a new digital camera.
I recently purchased a Canon EOS M6
The setting sun from a new camera at the dock associated with my apartment complex on Wilmington Island.
Mike, Kevin, and Amos enjoy the fog over Tybee Creek and Bull River.
On a foggy, January morning, Kevin, Mike and I took off from the south side of Tybee Island to camp a night on Little Tybee, an uninhabited barrier island and nature preserve.
I’ve not been able to identify what entity manages the preserve, but it seems that camping is allowed, which suggests that it’s not a national refuge like the nearby Wassaw Island or under an easement and privately owned like Ossabaw Island.
Exploring Skidaway Island State Park.
A Sphagnum moss grows along the edges of a cool spring at George L. Smith II State Park. The moss is partly characterized by a capitum—a bunch of early branchings at the tip of the moss—and is most common in northern latitudes. It was interesting to see it in Georgia, and Amos was certainly happy to enjoy the cool water.
In September, I spent a night at primitive campsite #2 in George L. Smith II State Park—a site I’ve kayaked to with some friends a couple of years past and with the dogs on another occasion. This trip was hot and buggy, and the water of the reservoir was the lowest I’ve seen.
