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San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park Animals

MeerkatI've been looking back over the photos I took at the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park this past spring and have been putting together a set of photos of the various animals at the park, both of the feathered and furry kind. Animals make such great subjects to photograph - for a start, they are a lot less critical of how they look in the photo than are people!

San Diego Zoo Animals Slide Show

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Samoan Youth

This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .

The Watchman and Virgin River — Painterly Winter Landscape

The Watchman and Virgin River, Zion National Park — Painterly Winter Landscape — © John Corney The Watchman is one of Zion National Park's most recognizable formations — the peak that rises up just past the south entrance, often photographed reflected in or framed by the Virgin River as it winds through the valley floor. I photographed this view on the same January 2006 trip as the other winter Zion piece in this collection, with the river running low and the cottonwoods and willows along the bank stripped bare for the season. I worked this one up with AI assistance into a full painterly interpretation, the same way I've approached the rest of this Zion series — directing the process the way a film director works with a cinematographer, choosing what to carry forward from the original photograph and what to push harder. Here that meant leaning into the warmth of the low winter light against the cool snow on the upper ridgeline, and letting th...

A Steindachner's Ebony Tarantula at Crystal Cove

I crossed paths with this fellow on a hike at Crystal Cove State Park this morning, along the Fenceline trail. I posted it to iNaturalist as soon as I got home, and within a few hours had it confirmed by several people: a male Steindachner's ebony tarantula ( Aphonopelma steindachneri ). Turns out the timing wasn't a fluke. Males of this species leave their burrows specifically to search for mates between July and October, so this was a textbook-timed encounter rather than an unusual one — good to actually check that before assuming, since my first instinct was that a July sighting seemed early. After his photo session, I gently nudged him with a stick and he scurried off the trail into the chaparral, safe from being run over by a mountain biker or stomped by an arachnophobic hiker.  Aphonopelma steindachneri is native to the coastal ranges of Southern California and northern Baja California, and it's one of the tarantulas you're genuinely most likely to run into ...