Santa brought a couple of new pets to our house this year. (Apparently Santa think 2 cats and a dog are insufficient…?)
So meet Rouge:
Kinda cute, yes?
To shoot these, I used an off-camera strobe, and also the on-camera flash to even out some of the light. And for the record… a Hermit Crab can sometimes move much faster than a lens can focus.
So what did Santa bring you?
This is pretty much the essence of last night’s chaos at our house.
Took longer to bring up than I’d anticipated — I had to change the signature!
:>
Hope you had a safe, enjoyable night. Welcome to 2009!
Adorable Child has a friend visiting from up North for a couple of days who has never seen an alligator “in the wild” (her words).
Now, we have alligators all over the place here. I see them in the local bayous all the time, and AC’s friends often talk about the time a gator was at the school bus stop. (Supposedly, “somebody” was called, and they came out and shot it in front of the kids. Sounds like a highly embellished tale to me…).
Unfortunately, I can’t count on alligators sauntering up out of the local ditches on demand… but I was pretty sure I could deliver many wild gators if we went to Brazos Bend State Park.
Sadly, what we saw mostly yesterday were algae-covered turtles — Red Eared Sliders, to be precise.
Okay… and we saw lots of birds. This is probably some kind of warbler, but they all look pretty much alike to me.
But the reason we didn’t see many alligators wasn’t because they weren’t out there. (They were!) The problem was that no matter how many times I tried to tell them that they had to actually walk to see them out in the lakes and swamps, they couldn’t rouse themselves to that much effort.
I vaguely remember this stage in my life, when going anywhere with Mom was a chore, and all I really wanted to do was sleep. In fact, I think I’m grateful nobody recorded my total lack of energy for posterity!
No doubt I should have just left them there, eh? Eventually a grumpy alligator might have strolled up and chomped on one of them.
*sigh*
Wishing everyone the very happiest Holiday Season.
Santa visited here last night, but I think it was very late. He seems to be have been tired…
Update: Via a link provided by Glenn over at the Flickr page for this photo, it turns out the cool “Stonehenge” shots (as I thought of them) are of the Donnellan Grave Vault — a burial crypt for one of Houston’s early families:
The Donnellan crypt is a large vault made of red brick with a small wooden door in the lower right corner. A fine degree of workmanship is seen in the arched header to doorway which is boarded up with timbers. Located in the bank of Buffalo Bayou under the Franklin Avenue bridge at Louisiana Street, the vault has survived a number of phases of construction along the bayou, including the rechannelization of the bayou in the mid-1920’s. Remnants of former bridge pilings stand under the modern bridge and a concrete ramp extends from the water line to the base of the vault to prevent erosion from undermining the vault’s integrity.
I never, ever, spend any time in Houston. It’s just so big… so crowded…. so, well… urban! This past weekend, though, a friend invited me to get out on the water in his inflatable canoe.
Turns out downtown Houston’s pretty danged cool from Buffalo Bayou!
This is the same bayou that runs through my neighborhood, but it looks MUCH different out my way.
I was particularly fascinated by the way Houston’s been building bridges on top of bridges. This is exactly why Rome has layers upon layers of archaeological history — though Houston’s obviously still in the very early evolutionary stages. This, for instance:
Such amazing light here – I had to shoot it coming and going. (Added: This is also the Donnellan Grave Vault. See update above.)
And being told that we’d “sprung a leak” just as it was getting dark only added to the fun. (LOL!) Seriously — I’d do this again in a heartbeat. The reflections were splendid, and the view of the city unique.
I may need to buy myself a little boat so I can get out and do this more often.
(Full set of images from this shoot viewable here. Still bringing them online, though, as of this post.) All online that’re comin’.
