Tag Archives: Savannah

Murph

Murph is a yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys scripta scripta) that I discovered in Tom Triplett Community Park in the Fall of 2016. At the time, she was about the size of a quarter and being attack by fire ants as she dispersed across the forest. I removed the ants, and started a 10-g aquarium for her, feeding her mealworms, some Gambusia, and, eventually, pellets until last summer as she approached a more robust size.

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.

New camera, more Amos

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 with a 18-150 mm kit lens and a separate 28 mm macro. Maybe I’ll keep this up, maybe I won’t, and I suspect most of the focus will be on Amos.

Friends-giving 2013

In 2013, Sean and Morgan offered to host a Friends-Giving dinner at their home in Savannah. The following year, I travelled to Merida, Mexico where two other friends, Ryan and Camilla, invited friends to enjoy a week in their new home and a lobster-based Thanksgiving dinner. Today, we’re enjoying  another gracious dinner in Buena Vista, Colorado, hosted by Libby and Casey.

I wish to share some photographs from the 2013 friends-giving event, and I’m thankful that I’ve met and can share company with these friends, who now live throughout the US (and Mexico…). Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!