Julia Butterfly under any name is gorgeous...

Going back to images from our December visit to the Butterfly Conservatory of the National Museum of American History in New York (Manhattan), NY today, I realized I'd never posted this one. When I went looking for the ID of this butterfly, I found lots of references to it as Julia Butterfly (some even as Orange Julia). It wasn't until I looked at the Wikipedia entry on this beauty that I found the scientific name Dryas iulia correctly spelled. Wikipedia also noted that the scientific name is "often incorrectly spelled julia" which is most probably why we commonly know it as Julia Heliconian or Julia Butterfly.

Great Eggfly Butterfly ... Butterfly Conservatory...

The Great Eggfly Butterfly, Hypolimnas bolina, is also called the Blue Moon Butterfly and lives in the South Pacific islands, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, and southeast Asia. It also lives in the Butterfly Conservatory of the American Museum of Natural History which is where this photo was taken in December, 2010. The upper side of the wings of the female is dark brown and the female does not have the spots (white circles) that the male, seen here, does.

Sparrow frenzy at the back yard feeder... December 2010

Just to remind you (in case you think I've lost my mind which is entirely possible given the events of the last few days), when I put a date in the title of a post, it refers to the date the image was captured, not the date of the post. This image is from a sunny day in December of last year when the birds were going a little bit crazy for the food in my feeders. It is also the first image that I've posted where I did quite a bit of post-processing using many of the tricks I learned in my Lightroom class (more on this below).

As for the events of the past few days that have contributed to my absence (as far as visiting YOUR blogs), I took a Lightroom 3 class this past Saturday and have been struggling since then to master a few simple things that are FAR from intuitively obvious.

This is where the internet is a MARVELOUS tool... because one of the things I've been struggling with is publishing images to Picasa/Facebook/Flickr (and maybe others in future) straight out of Lightroom. Let me tell you about the Facebook fiasco... the Publishing Service for Facebook that comes WITH Lightroom 3 has sent my browser into never-never-land more times than I can count... in trying to troubleshoot the problem, I clicked the Plug-in Exchange button (not having a CLUE what it did) in the setup dialog for setting up the various Publishing Services in Lightroom. Voilà! That button took me to Adobe's Lightroom page where I could search for plug-ins for publishing to various web services. And I found a third party developer's plug-in for Picasa... the developer has already received a donation from me to support his efforts for Picasa. (and I suspect he will be receiving one for his Export to Facebook plug-in although I haven't set that service up yet because I wanted to send some images to Picasa first so I could blog this one today!)

And in case you are wondering... why Lightroom? I've used iPhoto on a Mac since first starting to use a digital camera almost five years ago. As much as I LOVE my Mac and the ease of use of iPhoto, I hate the way iPhoto 'hides' deep in the iPhoto library, images representing my originals AND another copy of the SAME image representing any editing changes thus increasing overhead as far as storing multiple copies of the same photo. And, IF I want to use Photoshop (either Elements or the full version of Photoshop) to further edit an image that I've put into iPhoto, I have to EITHER export it OR go find it (there are ways) where it is buried in the library and put a copy somewhere outside of the iPhoto library where Photoshop software can 'see' the image.

As you might expect, after awhile working with iPhoto gets awfully old and tiring and it is also limited as to the editing changes one can make if one starts to get REALLY serious about post-processing. So, I'm trying to learn Lightroom and hope to eventually stop using iPhoto altogether. The learning curve is quite steep!

Tropical Butterfly... something warm for a cold day...

In the Washington, DC Metropolitan area, a little bit of snow often results in school closings... and when schools close... many other things get canceled as a result. Our garden club meeting has been canceled for today because of a little bit of snow falling overnight. It has changed to rain (maybe freezing rain) so roads might be slippery... but out my window I can see our street is mostly clear and cars going up and down.

The above is a long way around to introducing this image... something to warm us all in winter... an Orange Tiger (Dryadula phaetusa) butterfly! Also known as Banded Orange Heliconian and the sole representative of its species according to Wikipedia, it is "native from Brazil to central Mexico, and in summer it can be found rarely as far north as central Kansas." I photographed this one in the Butterfly Conservatory of the National Museum of American History in New York City during a December visit.

Variable Cracker Butterfly... Butterfly Conservatory Image...

There is quite a lot of information on the "Blue Cracker" butterfly to be found when searching for butterflies similar to this one. BUT, when a search was done on the scientific name for the so-called Blue Cracker, MANY references to the Red Cracker butterfly were found... but none of those images had the "red bar" on the fore-wing that this butterfly has.

More exhaustive searching around on Google finally turned up an image that looks very similar to this one, leading me to believe this is Hamadryas feronia, commonly called the Variable Cracker. The "cracker" part of the name refers to the noise the male of this butterfly species makes as part of their territorial display. Isn't he just gorgeous?! (I certainly have no idea if it is a he or a she butterfly... either way... I'm quite pleased with how this turned out!)

Pink Cattleheart or Transandean Butterfly... December, 2010

After quite a bit of "googling" around, I believe I've identified this as Parides iphidamas whose common names are Pink Cattleheart or Transandean. As near as I can tell from having studied several different web sites and images, this is a female of the species.

There seems to be quite a bit of variability in the coloring and markings of this species and I'm by no means an expert! So I trust someone out there will correct me if I've misidentified this one. :-) It is resting on a Pentas blossom cluster... and I do know that Pentas blossoms are a favorite of butterflies everywhere they bloom so have vowed to have more of them in my garden in 2011. (Unfortunately, they are an annual flowering plant and are fairly expensive but I simply must find ways to attract more butterflies to my garden and don't have the room for a butterfly bush!)

Christmas baking... a family tradition!

I've been making two of the four cookies pictured here (slightly smaller than actual size) at Christmas time (missing a few years here and there for some reason or another) for over 50 years and others of my family also make these annually. The recipes date back to when my mother discovered some recipe suggestions for Christmas baking, tucked into a bag of Gold Medal flour. She thought a couple of the recipes sounded like fun and would be delicious so we set out to make them.

My mother suffered from eczema and could not do the "hand mixing" that was required of both recipes (in the time before food processors came along). From the time I can remember, I was Mom's kitchen helper, doing most of the chores requiring "hands on" when she could not do those chores. So until my siblings were older and could help, Christmas baking fell to me with Mom assisting with chores that didn't require her to touch the ingredients.

Pictured above are Cherry Coconut Bars, Cream Wafers, Chocolate Truffles, Spiced Pecans and Russian Tea Cakes (or Mexican Wedding Cakes). The Cherry Coconut Bars and Cream Wafers are the two "family" recipes that I've been making off and on ever since I was a young girl... and once I discovered that the "hand mixing" could be done better and more efficiently using a food processor, I've been making them almost every year since. The other items are more recent additions with the Russian Tea Cakes being made for the first time this year.

Recipes for the Cherry Coconut Bars, Cream Wafers, Chocolate Truffles, Spiced Pecans and some other holiday treats not pictured here may be found on my other blog starting with Holiday Baking - Part 1 and I share ALL my secrets for simplifying the recipes.

Three views of a Leopard Lacewing butterfly...

It would be very nice if the folks at the American Museum of Natural History would post the names of the butterflies on view in the Butterfly Conservatory. That said, there is a certain satisfaction to be had in poking around on the internet to compare my photos with others out there and to see if I can find an ID on my own... in the case of these three images... mission accomplished! It took the visual guide downloaded from the Pacific Science Center plus a search of Wikipedia for Lacewing to find the common name of Leopard Lacewing and the species name of Cethosia cyane for this beauty.

I captured quite a few images of it trying to find the "sweet spot" for drinking nectar from these tiny Pentas blossoms the one above is during a pause in the action with the proboscis tightly curled up. (and note the ladybug on the leaf below the butterfly... not the point of focus but definitely visible once the image was out of the camera and viewed on a big monitor!)

This view shows the underside of the wings... in this species... the underside is perhaps more beautiful than the top side of the wings.

Another topside view... and another miss while trying to find the flower center!

Excuse me... I was here first! Sparrows at my feeder... December, 2010

It's kind of sad that the sparrows have mostly driven away the other birds that used to visit my feeders... and this morning, this feeder was the only one with any seed left in it before I went out to refill all of them. There were at least 30 sparrows sitting in a neighbor's rose bush and taking turns at the feeder... some were more polite than others but mostly it was a feeding frenzy!

I know this isn't the best in terms of sharpness of the image... in addition to the motion of the feeder due to the sparrows fighting over perches, there was a fairly stiff breeze blowing things around.

I'll be mostly off-line for a few days but will visit soon. I'm enjoying comments and promise to return your visits soon if I haven't already!

A trio of Hydrangea images... which one do you prefer?

I love my Hydrangea blossoms when they are in bud, or bursting into bloom... and even when they are faded at the end of the blooming season. I keep hoping for frost so I can get some images of the faded blossoms kissed by frost.

In the meantime, I use iPhoto on a Macintosh computer for simple editing when I'm too lazy to do anything complicated with Photoshop. I upgraded recently to the very latest version... while poking around to see what new items were available for tweaking images, I discovered "antique" and "boost" effects, both of which were used to give interesting effects to the Hydrangea blossom you see above with the "antique" effect applied. Scroll down to see the SOOC (Straight Out Of the Camera) image followed by the image with the "boost" option at 2. I like them all ... which one do you like best?!

SOOC image of faded Hydrangea blossom.

Hydrangea blossom with color boost set at level 2 (using iPhoto on a Macintosh).

Late fall visitor to late blooming Blanket Flower... November, 2010

Because I was expecting visitors for Thanksgiving dinner, I decided to go out and do some garden cleanup (dead/dying tomato plants and some other dead growth) so I wouldn't be embarrassed at the condition of my garden. Imagine my surprise to find this charming sweat bee exploring a Blanket Flower in search of pollen.

The weather has finally turned colder so I doubt I'll have any more opportunities to photograph insects in my garden until spring!

Two Confused Camellia blossoms for your viewing pleasure...

This time of year, thoughts turn to the weather because the garden goes dormant and we have to wait until spring for color in the garden. BUT, our weather this fall has been unseasonably warm and my spring blooming Camellia has decided to bloom now instead of waiting until spring. It's quite lovely with white, bi-color pink and white (as you see here with just a splash of pink, but sometimes much more pink than white) and even a few solid pinks now and then. I fear this means I'll have no blossoms in spring so I've been out photographing a few this past week to have the images to enjoy now and again in spring.

I don't normally post two images but as I was typing the above image caption, I realized maybe you'd like to see the mostly pink blossom as well as the white and I have WAY more images than I have time to post them! The pink image is a touch out of focus because those blossoms are in a spot where I have to balance precariously in order to photograph them.

A life well lived... portrait of a great lady!

Since I'm not real sure I should be posting full names here... I will just tell you that this image is a candid photo of a friend's mother, whom I met this past week. She is here visiting her son who hosted us and some other friends to a pre-Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday. She is an amazing woman at 99 years young... friends in her home town of Memphis have told her that they didn't celebrate her 99th birthday because they plan a big party for her 100th! There is an article available if you would like to read more about her.

In the meantime, I don't normally post images of people and almost never take "posed" pictures... but this struck me because her dress almost perfectly matches the chair and I love the attentive look on her face as she is paying close attention to the lively conversation and chiming in often!

Balloon Flower Stigma... floating above rain water... Summer, 2010

This is for Ginnie... along with a bit of a story. Earlier this month, I posted an image that shows an entire Balloon Flower blossom. And Ginnie left a comment about knowing who to come to if she needed help learning how to use her macro lens... so this is for her.

When the flowers turn their faces up, their "bells" catch water when it rains. I snapped this image after heavy overnight rains using extension tubes along with my macro lens. I think I used the 36mm Kenko extension tube with my Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 lens on a Nikon D90 body for this shot. ((I really MUST start taking notes... the other possibility would have been with the 12mm AND 20mm Kenko extension tubes together instead of the 36mm tube.) Using extension tubes allows for really tight focus on a very little bit of the field of view... leaving the rest as a dreamy wash of color. The stigma is about 1 cm (3/8 inch) in diameter.

Oh... before I forget... Ginnie is someone I'm getting to know through her marvelous blog... you should check it out!

Yarrow blossoms... shallow depth of field... Summer, 2010

I think I've mentioned before that I've been experimenting with extension tubes when shooting some of my flower images. One thing about using extension tubes is that there is less light coming in to the camera compared to using the same lens without any extension tubes. (Stick with me, I don't speak "technical" when I talk about shooting pictures!)

Shooting with the aperture wide open results in the very shallow depth of field you see here. (The alternative is to use flash which isn't something I like to do when shooting flowers in a natural setting.) Yarrow is a perfect candidate for shooting with extension tubes because the cluster of tiny blossoms is nearly all in the same plane, making it easy to get a nice sharp image of the flowers with everything else "fuzzed" into the background bokeh.

Round Two Image for Photography Slam competition...

The previous five posts qualified me for the Final Round in the Photo Slam competition described in this post. This image, entitled Mammoth Hot Springs... surreal landscape of the travertine terraces... is the one I chose for the final round where we were judged on a single image. Some of you may recall having seen it before when I posted it over a year ago after our September, 2009 trip out west.

The top three contestants in the photo slam will be featured in a gallery show at Glen Echo Park in November, 2011. I will definitely post more about that as the time draws near.

Fourth of Five in Round One Portfolio for Photography Slam competition...

This image, entitled Hydrangea wet with raindrops... is one from a year or more ago that somehow never got posted here. It is the fourth of five included in my winning first round portfolio in the contest described in an earlier post.

And I'm still floating on a cloud for having done so well in the contest... placing in the top three means that some of my photographic images will be in a gallery show during FotoWeek DC 2011 (about a year from now).

Third of Five in Round One Portfolio for Photography Slam competition...

This image, entitled Bumblebee in Coneflower... may be a repeat of a post from 2009... but I'm sharing it anyway because it is one of the ones included in my winning portfolio in the contest described in an earlier post.

Second of Five in Round One Portfolio for Photography Slam competition...

Pink Petal Perfection... dew kissed... is the second of five images from the round one portfolio entered in the Photography Slam competition run by Photoworks (a photography resource and education center based at Glen Echo Park) as part of FotoWeek DC 2010 (an annual photography event in Washington, DC).

I'm quite excited about having taken second place in a field of 40 photographers entered and will be posting the images here over the next few days. The prize for the top three entrants is participation in a gallery show at Photoworks during Foto Week 2011 (about one year from now).

If you have ever been to a poetry slam competition, you might guess that a Photography Slam is modeled after a poetry slam... The forty entrants were judged in 4 rounds of 10 photographers each with the top three in each round advancing to the final round. Audience participation was encouraged as well as bribing of the three judges (tongue in cheek). It was an exciting evening and I was thrilled to do so well.

Photography Slam 2010 Results... Second Place in a field of 40!

Sharing..., three hoverflies on a wildflower, is the first of five images from my round one portfolio. With apologies to those of you who know this already and are probably bored by the news... I'm quite excited about having taken second place in a field of 40 photographers entered and will be posting the images here over the next few days.

If you have ever been to a poetry slam competition, you might guess that a Photography Slam is modeled after a poetry slam... As part of FotoWeek DC 2010 (an annual photography event in Washington, DC), Photoworks (a photography resource and education center based at Glen Echo Park), sponsored a Photography Slam competition.

Photographers entered a total of six images; five images made up a portfolio for the first stage of the competition. The images were projected and judged in four rounds of 10 entrants in each round. The top three entrants from each round advanced to the second round where one image alone was judged against the other finalists. My portfolio of five macro images took second place in the second round and advanced to the finals where my Mammoth Hot Springs image impressed the judges enough to give me second place overall. (missed first place by 0.6 point) The prize for each of the three winning contestants is participation in a gallery show at Photoworks during Foto Week 2011!