Behind the Digital LensMusings of an Amateur Photographer

11th Mar, 2024 The Walmart Wanderers

I admit, I shop at Walmart. And sometimes I go without having eaten anything before hand. Being diabetic, that’s not such a good thing, so I usually grab something quick to eat in the car while sitting in the parking lot. Now, being the photographer that I am, I tend to look at things and people [even though I don’t take people pictures] and lately I’ve noticed something about the parking lot at the Walmart that I visit. I call them the “Walmart Wanderers”. They are the people that have been in the store long enough to forget where they parked their car. They wander from aisle to aisle and back again lost, but eventually finding the vessel that will whisk them away back to the safety and familiarity of their castle. Some remember to “call” their car using their key fob, but at times that doesn’t even help, especially if they’re too far away from the car. Strangely, however, this isn’t just a Walmart phenomenon as I have noticed this behavior in other retail parking lots as well. And now, I’m thinking I should take my video cam and vid this new phenomenon.

Okay, I have a confession….this has happened to me on two occasions, once in a Walmart parking lot in Dallas, and once in the Walmart parking lot close to where I now live. And, FWIW, this behavior is divided evenly between men and women!

8th Mar, 2024 Pardon the Dust!

When I mentioned a few posts ago that there would be changes coming, I certainly didn’t mean what you are seeing as of 3/8/2024! In a WordPress update apparently a “critical error” zapped my blog and by the time I was able to get it up and running again, the blog looked completely different, leaving me with just a plain old every day type blog – nothing at all like what it did. 😭 But! at least it was back up, a plain jane no frills blog. It could have been worse; I could have lost everything, but only lost my background, which I have restored, and links, which so far I have not been able to restore, but I will keep trying. It’s been a frustrating several days, but there have been some positive gains in all of this. Like re-learning how to do all of this! Patience, dear man. Patience! And at my age, patience is a premium. 😉

Update….. Got the links back! after a lot of trial and error, but now you see a nice little number after each one. I did not put those numbers there and have no clue at the moment how to get rid of them; they are Rating numbers. So, I will keep plugging away here.

After three days of phone calls to my hosting company, and many hours of trying this and that, I think I’ve done pretty good getting back what I had. But, like I said, the recent changes were not exactly what I had in mind and what I had in mind wasn’t front facing at all. Those changes will still be happening sometime in the near future. For now, however, I am still unpacking and getting rid of things I don’t need after my move, but with the nicer weather I am really hoping to get out and start getting some photos! After all, it’s what I love doing!

25th Jul, 2022 Links

Over on the right I have some links, a few which are very important to me. One of those is Rogers Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. For a few years I volunteered at Tri-City Animal Shelter & Adoption Center and one of the neat things I got to do was take injured birds out to Rogers. What a fantastic place this is! I was almost always greeted by the most beautiful peacock which always seemed like he was making sure I was okay to enter.

I cannot begin to tell you how valuable Rogers has been in rehabilitating injured birds of all kinds; some are able to be released back into their environment, but others are fortunate to have Rogers to call home. All of the caretakers there are volunteers, those who love birds and wish to see them go back to their environment if able. But Rogers isn’t just a rehab center; it also opens its doors as an environmental educational facility. Students and their families visit their Outdoor Learning Center to observe and learn how to conserve our environment, and also to learn about how Rogers is involved in this extremely important endeavor.

Rogers is a “501c3 non-profit wildlife organization whose purpose is to provide care and rehabilitation to injured, sick and orphaned birds with the goal of returning them to their natural environment.” They do not receive any funding from federal, state or local governments but rely solely on private funding and donations. If you read the website, you’ll see how many birds they have taken care of – 40,000 birds in the last decade alone. That is a heck of a lot of birds to take care of, folks.

Why am I bringing this up when it has nothing to do with photography? Well, as I said in the beginning, Rogers is just one of those places that has a special place in my heart. Saving wild birds and the environment, and teaching others how to get interested and involved is important. Our wildlife is disappearing at alarming rates, and some just adapt which makes people angry, but we have to remember, we are the ones destroying their habitat giving them very little choice how to live, or where to live.

No one has asked me to do this, but I feel it is about time I spoke up for a place not a lot of people in North Texas know exist. And so, I am asking if you are able to donate, even $1 to this necessary operation, please do so by clicking on the How to Help tab on their web page. There are several ways to help them out, be it with a money donation or with supplies. Every little bit will help them.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and if you find an injured wild animal, don’t let it suffer needlessly when it could be helped. Contact your state’s wildlife authority and report where you saw the animal.

Jason

25th Jul, 2022 All Righty, Then

It’s Summer, oh yes indeedy, it is Summer! And Texas, like many other parts of the country is under fire. No, not by idiots running around gunning innocent people down. Literally under fire. Parts of West Texas and closer to Dallas have been besieged by raging wildfires sparked by many different ways, but many started by our intense heat and drought. Last week in Dallas we saw three days in a row with temperatures of 109° and we’re in 50+ days without rain. It’s hot. Searing hot. Land that hasn’t seen significant rainfall has grasses that have turned from luscious green to brittle brown. Dust devils have whisked up leaving us in fascination because they look like tornadoes yet spawn under non-rainy skies. But, we are suffering as much as our Western neighbors. Lake Mead is drying up, something no one really could have thought would happen, leaving those that have depended on that water source to wonder when will they see relief. The Great Salt Lake, too, is drying up.

Amid all this “wonderfulness”, gas prices have shot up. For me, it’s yet another round of stay-at-home because I can’t afford gas to go anywhere except for those places that are necessary. And between the heat and gas prices, who wants to go anywhere anyway? Last year I got a membership to the Dallas Arboretum. I haven’t used it at all. My bad. But, a bunch of physical health problems rather curbed my activities, and that place was once of them. So, in hopes for a better year, I will renew my membership when it comes due. I need to take photos! I miss taking photos! And no, I have no desire in this heat to travel to the areas under fire to take photos, especially with these gas prices!

13th May, 2022 Back in Business!

I love Amazon! Especially being a Prime member. Battery charger and two batteries were delivered last evening and I now have one charged and back in my camera. I will, of course, be charging another one this evening. And the batteries for my little Nikon Coolpix S220 will be getting charged as well. I am back in business! I feel rather lost when I don’t have a camera handy. Sure, I have my phone, which is with me all the time, but it’s not quite the same, although it has come in handy from time to time. I think Roby is glad the camera has been “down”. Poor puppy gets photographed a lot!

May 15 – 16 2022 is the full moon and I really enjoy being able to take photos of the full moon. And this month is also a lunar eclipse. That means that the moon will appear to be blood red. That would be something awesome to get a photo of! According to cnn.com a partial lunar eclipse will begin at 10:27 pm ET Sunday and the total lunar eclipse will begin at 11:29 pm ET. The total lunar eclipse will end at 12:53 am ET Monday with the partial eclipse ending at 1:55 am ET Monday. It’s pretty late for a lot of people, including myself. This will be one of those tripod nights for me. [I can remember the last time I used my tripod to take moon photos, I just can’t remember the year it was. ☹️]

So, getting that battery charged was an essential, and now I can take tons of photos with the assurance of having my battery charger handy.

Now, if I could only find the other charger…… ?

11th May, 2022 Where in the heck did it go?

I can’t FIND it! I have looked all over, and even checked out Roby’s “stash” hiding place [where he kindly hid my hammer, btw] and I just can’t find it! I have looked all over the place and it’s just not here. On top of that I am missing a battery! I’ve looked everywhere I thought that might be but no luck so far. I DO have a way of charging my battery, but it involves hooking up the entire camera to a USB port. Not very convenient, to say the least. I try to keep two batteries charged at all times, but at the moment, that is a wee bit hard without the second battery or the charger. I admit, I have a third battery, but have never used it nor charged it. It’s brand new.

Sooooo, in my frustration, I broke down and bought a new battery charger. It plugs into an outlet, and it comes with a car charger and two batteries, giving me five batteries in all to work with! And more pieces to lose! I only have three camera cases [yeah, none of them have the elusive charger and battery!, I’ve looked.] Hopefully that will come sometime tomorrow. Oh, I have two more cameras; my Nikon D3000 and a little Nikon Coolpix S220 and I KNOW where their chargers are. Of course! I think, though, the S220 could probably use a new battery at this point because it seems as though the battery drains faster than I think it should. So, I have ordered two of those, with no battery pack.

Now watch, once the new battery charger gets here I will find the other one.

24th Aug, 2020 New Lens

Okay! This evening I was finally able to test out the lens I got for my birthday from a friend. It’s a Nikkor 40mm AF-S Micro 1:2.8G. I love taking Micro/Macro photos, but haven’t done so in years. I have to admit that I got spoiled with my Canon PowerShot Pro1 when it came to macro shooting. It was so easy; just put it on the Macro setting and shoot. Well, there was a little more to it than that, but it felt that easy. Not a huge learning curve to that one, but it took such great macro shots! So, now I have this lens and it has a bit of a learning curve, but isn’t that part of the fun of it?

I couldn’t think of anything that would be interesting enough to shoot and then I remembered I have some crystals that might be cool, so I hauled those out. I took quite a few photos, some good, some not so good, and some just plain awful. The “some good” came after trial and error with the “some awful”, but that’s why it’s called learning. So, now I’m excited to keep with this learning to see what I can do with this lens beyond crystals.