Dragons Fly Tri-Cities Washington photoblog

More Oak Creek

2011-01-01T19:55:00.000-08:00

Big Horn Sheep

and the best for last- the butt shot

Elk

I say, Old Chap...

Oak Creek Wildlife

2010-12-24T18:27:00.000-08:00

Burrowing Owls

2010-06-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

I walk my 2 dogs in the dessert, this time of year is difficult because of the rattlesnakes. Murphy's goal where rattlesnakes are concerned at to kill or be killed. So, I keep the dogs close. Last Thursday evening, these two appeared out of no where, alternatively dive bombing or luring my dogs away. I may be giving them too much credit, but I swear they actually herded Finn right to me after I caught Murphy and put him on leash. They sure did herd Finn directly at me so I could catch her, too. But, while all of this worked to get my dogs away from their den, it also gave me a very good idea of exactly where it was, so Saturday morning I got up early and went back out without the dogs (the first time I've ever done anything that evil to them). I didn't want to get any closer than this, I didn't want to make them nervous I assume they've got young-uns they are protecting.

While I'm pretty sure this is just a house finch, what's up with her eyebrows?

Dixie Washington: Rufus Hummingbird

2010-05-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

These are aggressive little guys. It's entertaining to watch a single, tiny, rufus male guard 6 feeders and keep them all to himself.

Dixie Washington: Hummingbirds

2010-05-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

Who ever heard of Dixie Washington? Who knew that hummingbirds migrate through Dixie Washington in the thousands? Cold, wet, rainy, bad light - and a wonderful day in the backyard of a wonderful man who puts out dozens of hummingbird feeders and lets people traipse all over his property. You could hear them all over - giant bumblebees everywhere. Seeing them was another matter.

Hood Park

2010-05-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Rode bikes out to hood park, camped, took a few morning shots, and rode home again.

and this morning at Johnson Park

Finally some sun!

2010-02-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

Three Witches Fly into Richland

GBH

Northern Shrike

Female Bufflehead among the reeds.

New Mexico; Harrier Hawks

2009-12-27T17:06:00.000-08:00

45 F and sunny. Bosque Del Apache and the Rio Grande Nature Center.
Harrier Hawk

Some Winter Birds

2009-11-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

I'm guessing this is a Downy Woodpecker.

A Craven (Raven or Crow), taken in Seattle

A GBH flying through the neighborhood

A GBH hiding in the reeds off of Bateman Island

Immature White Crowned Sparrow

I hate photographing people

2009-11-27T10:35:00.000-08:00

American Red Cross Turkey Trot - AKA insane people running in the cold.

And my best photo of the day... the only one I took without a person in it.

Woodland Park Zoo - Residents

2009-11-20T16:35:00.000-08:00

Snow Leopard Pups playing

A couple of Lions

Stripes are in this time of year

Why Don't you come on up and See my etchings sometime?

Woodland Park Zoo - Animals Not in Cages

2009-11-18T21:21:00.000-08:00

I took more photos of squirrels and birds that were hanging out to get visitor's scraps than I did of the animals at the zoo. Here are some of the former.

Beauty Like this takes work to maintain.

McNary continued

2009-11-15T09:32:00.000-08:00

Up close and personal, they are surprisingly pretty birds. White pelican

Some sort of gull.

Marsh Wren gymnastics.

McNary Wildlife Refuge

2009-11-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

The weather report for today was cold, overcast and rainy. I woke up to the beginnings of a nice sunny day and got to McNary as fast as I could. Not too many birds due to the season, but the ones that were there put on a show for me.

Winter Dulldrums

2009-11-11T17:09:00.000-08:00

I've always loved winter. The dull gray excites me rather than depresses me. Until now. The sun comes up after 7 and goes down before 5 and in between are dull gray overcast skies. There was a hint of blue in the sky Tuesday, so I tried to skip out of work so I could go take a photo, any photo of anything, but I had a client with an emergency deadline Wednesday, which meant Tuesday I had to crunch to help them out.
I got out just after sunset and took these photos. ISO 3200, but the 7D did a good job of minimizing the grain. This is even with me not having any noise managment software. When I get some, watch out, this camera may be able to take OK photos even in the winter dulldrums.

Gotta get away from the crazy person with the camera.

Must not drop my veggies

Landing.

Finn running agility

2009-11-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

These photos of me running Finn in agility were taken by my friend, Margie. These are amazing - Finn is a very soft dog, which means she gets scared and shuts down. 12 teams and another half dozen spectators in a small area and high winds - and she ran great! I'm so proud of her, she's come a long way.

More Trains

2009-11-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

Fall in the Pacific NW

2009-11-04T19:59:00.000-08:00

This one I call beauty and the beast. It's of a dredge used to mine for gold near Sumpter Or.

This one was taking in the backyard of my work building, from the Hanford 300 area across the columbia river, showing a powerful verga

and the requisite bird photo. Dark background, but neat BIF.

Sumpter Narrow Guage Train

2009-10-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

These two are very similar, but one with a deep DOF, one with a narrow DOF. I should have taken many more photos with a smaller aperture = deeper DOF, but hindsight is always perfectly in focus.

And the scenery was fabulous even without a train in it.

Da Murph Man

2009-10-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

BIF = birds in flight

2009-10-19T20:13:00.000-07:00

Fall Harvest Festival, Pasco Wa

2009-10-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

learning to see in wide angle

2009-10-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

so far not all that successfully.

and more traditional photos for me

7th Dimension

2009-10-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

Trying to learn to use a new complicated camera. I think this little sparrow (Lincoln's?) might be my favorite shot of all time. No one else seems to think it's all that special. It's a little OOF, but I think I like that it's got depth and, I think, nice color

This cormorant looks like he's at the bottom of the pile. I assume that white stuff isn't what it looks like. The focus is on his wing instead of his face, still pretty impressive.

I've gone to this one spot repeatedly trying to get a shot of a little heron that is often there, but he always flies away. I got one of him sitting and one flying away - again, thanks to the new camera.

Look at the water dribbling off the lower duck's beak.

Kestrel and Cormorant

2009-10-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

Reflecting on Life

2009-09-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

Birds at Chamna

2009-09-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

Maybe a Sharp-shinned?

Butter Butt Flicker

Finn's a very pretty dog.

Trying something new

2009-09-23T19:53:00.000-07:00

Went out with the photography club. One woman, Judy, took some beautiful photos that I never would have thought of shooting. Great use of the light through the trees. The first three photos are an unabashed copy of hers, in fact the first two are the same subject. Not as good as hers but different than my usual.

The last is a duck taking off into the sun. I'm honestly not sure if it's really neat or really terrible. I'm sure it's one of the two.

Birds at the "Archery Range"

2009-09-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

Nice bright sunny sky. I think the new "spot metering" option on my camera may help with picking the birds out of bright background and/or shrubbery.

and a damselfly and dragonfly for good measure

not a good day to be a little fish

2009-09-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

On this one you can see the two little fish the Egret has.
I brought my camera to this place to take a photo of the shy black-capped night heron that is often there, and found this big fella gorging him/herself on little fish instead.

Feeling rather random today

2009-09-05T19:31:00.001-07:00

Breakfast

2009-08-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

An Egret this morning. Saw it catch a couple of fish.

Now I know there's one here somewhere

Caught it!

Swallowing it

couple of old photos

2009-08-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't been carrying my camera on walks due to babysitting a 3rd dog. It's 30x harder to walk 3 dogs than it is to walk 2. I've missed it, though. Great sunset with bad whether rolling in, and no camera.
These are some old photos I haven't posted yet, taken at W.E. Johnson Park.

Bugs on the other side of the Yakima River

2009-08-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

Two different views of the same dragonfly. I kept walking around to get a face shot, and it kept hopping around to show me its rear. Love to know what it thought I was doing.

This black dragonfly was huge, at least 5" long from nose to tail.

This turquoise dragonfly was really stunning looking. Hard to photograph as it didn't sit still and stayed in the shadows.

Walked in a hateful little area, lots of bugs and tons of trash. It was 101 degrees and Murphy couldn't handle the heat, so I trusted Finn to walk along and carried/coaxed Murphy. Big mistake - Finn found something extremely pungent to roll in. Don't know where she's sleeping tonight, but it isn't with me.
The dragonflies are new types. Amazing variety of dragonflieys, and these are just across the river from all the others I've taken.

While I took a photo, my mom took a photo

2009-08-19T06:42:00.001-07:00

It's sad really, look at how beautiful the scene is, and all I saw was the bird on the post in the front. OK, in my defense, I may have noticed the scene, but with my telephoto lens, I couldn't have taken that shot anyway.

Still more Oregon Coast photos

2009-08-17T20:30:00.001-07:00

Oregon Coast - My Brother's photos

2009-08-16T11:04:00.001-07:00

I never heard back permission to post his photos, so I guess that isn't the lack of permission either.

More Oregon Coast birds

2009-08-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

I also figured out how to put a watermark on the photos. Not a good one, but it's a start.

Gray Oregon Coast - Birds

2009-08-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

There were thousands and thousands of shorebirds. This is where my 100-400 lens shines. Too bad about the total lack of light, though.

Gray Oregon Coast - Landscapes

2009-08-14T21:37:00.001-07:00

Last week on a very gray Oregon Coast. The photos with railroad tracks in them are my brother's, as well as the one right under the two RR tracks and some others might be, too. First two are the Peter Iredale at Ft Steven's State Park. The RR track photos are from the Eagle Sanctuary near Astoria.

Beaver Family

2009-08-13T21:35:00.000-07:00

Had a horrible walk tonight - saw a magpie caught in a fishing line. I couldn't get to it, even after trying to walk knee deep in the Yakima river. But, my shoes were sucking into the muck and it was dangling from a tree more than 10 ft in the air. After 30 min I gave up. It will probably take all night for the poor thing to die.
Then, on the way back, I saw the entire beaver family in the pond between the Yakima and the concrete plant. So, I'll try to be happy seeing a healthy baby beaver covered in pond scum.

why dragons fly

2009-08-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

The name of this blog came about because a few days before I started it, Chamna Natural Preserve was overrun with dragonflies. But, I prefer dragons. Then dragons fly was already taken, so I tried several different formats to no avail. That day at work I found I'd misspelled piece, peace, so I was laughing at myself and going through double entendres based on peace/piece - I decided my non-existent rock band will be named broken peace.
Who knew there were so many different kinds of dragonflies. I tried to look them up, but the websites I found had poor pictures and were hard to navigate. So, I decided to name them myself. Much more interesting anyway, since naturalist tend to go toward - piliated or naming them after someone they think is famous, but no one else has ever heard of.

From the top:
Photogenicfly
Paranoidfly (a subspecies of flackjacketfly)
Bigbluefly
Bigheadfly
Flackjacketfly
Kissmyfly
Flackjacketfly
Scaryredfly
Camofly

Bateman Island woodpecker

2009-07-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

How much do I love my b'day present from my family? It's an R-strap camera strap which allows me to carry my camera like a swashbuckling sword down by my side and grab it quickly when it's needed. This little fella (or fellas, don't know if these are the same bird or a differents ones) only gave me a few seconds to grab the camera, I would have missed him if I'd had to pull it out of my camera bag. I think it's a Downy Woodpecker, but I'm not positive.

The doves were just hanging out, though

Dogs

2009-07-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

Here is a googles map of places I like to walk my dog around the Tricities
View TriCities places to walk dogs in a larger map
No walk tonight, too many things going on. so, I'm going to post some old photos I've taken of dogs.
Up first, my old man Murphy. This isn't a great photo, but it shows is joie de vivre
Murphy's a rescue, got him about 7 years ago, he's about 10 now. He weighs 18 lbs and is less than 8" at the withers, he's a compact little guy. He's very fear aggressive, but getting better all the time.

This is Finn. I always laugh when I see bios of people that say they are outstanding in their fields. Well here is Finn outstanding in her field. Finn is a Shiba Inu-X, also a rescue. This little 20 lb girl was feral the first year of her life. She doesn't speak domestic dog and that has gotten her into trouble. I think she also might be insane. But, I love her.

And here are some photos of dogs that aren't mine.
Starting with my friend, Andrea's dog, Buzz.
This is what Andrea had to say about Buzz and this shot. "Buzz is my prized border collie, the dog who will someday win ribbons and accolades, my prodigy dog, my agility partner and apparently a dog who will always be a source of humor, amusement and joy as I continue to work with him."

I'm still learning the art of taking agility photos, but her are some from our club's trial back in May

July 2009

2009-07-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

With any luck this will be a photoblog of what I'm seeing. I have 2 dogs, my dynamic negatives Murphy and Finagle (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finagle%27s_law ) and walk them everyday. It was still 98 degrees tonight at 7 pm when we went out. But, I still took some pictures. I used my new R-strap - awesome way of carrying a camera and brought along my Canon Rebel Xti and my EF 100-400 f 4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens, currenlty the only lens I have. I'm in despirate need of something with a wider angle.