See it here: http://ift.tt/2tAMVkn
Gypsy at the Bridge
by Jack Foster Mancilla
The small LensLord™ gallery on Flickr
The Full LensLord™ Gallery
This is a little quickie animated gif, created with Cinemagraph Pro, available in the App store.
The truth is that it is very easy to use. This is just a small handheld iPhone gif, but it would be a hundred times better with a larger format camera, and a tripod. I just wanted to play with it a little. …
What it does is converts any movie by freezing a chosen frame, and allowing specifically masked portions of the frame to reveal movement in the following frames. It is very easy to just brush in, or out, any portion of the frame by adjusting the mask.
The final product can be exported as a movie, for inclusion in other projects or as stand alone movies. Or, the final product can be exported as an animated gif, with options, like looping, bounce back, numbers of repetitions. …
This particular animated gif is a small part of a larger movie, that I chose the in point, the end point, and the time taken for the movement, I then added a bounce back, so the loop runs forward to the end then runs backwards, to the start, and then keeps that loop up forever….
This is just a single strobe on a single bird, with the flash bounced off the ceiling for a softer light. We are separated from the background by chance, and on purpose. … By chance, in that the room has four sides, two of which are twice as close as the wall I chose. … On purpose, I chose the far wall so that the light from the flash would fall off appreciably, leaving the subject well lit, and the background about two stops darker than the subject.
Why do I even mention the distance to the back wall? I have the source light on my person, and the inverse square law says that light will fall off from the source like this. … When you double the distance from the source to the subject, you cut the light to one fourth the amount of light. … So I knew how much the light would fall off between the subject bird, and the subject background wall.
This is a link to a gallery of non-furry animals.
This is a link to a gallery of furry animals.
And this is a link to a gallery of people.
The other day, I mentioned that Macros were everywhere. And I used a piece of moss that I cut out of the planter that the Plumeria was in, in the back yard.
Well. … I placed that moss in a little plastic container, and added water. “Why?” You ask. Well, I do not really know. … I like Moss. I was hoping to see it get really green. I just like all life and did not want t throw it away. … I would put it back where I got it, but I had not done that yet. …
So, as Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise. Surprise.” When I looked, this morning there was a little hairy surprise in the moss. … So I shot this image. … When you look at the moth under normal light, it is much closer to the color of the moist ground around the moss. It is only because of the reflectivity of the moth, and the transparency of the water on the surrounding dirt/moss combination that channels the light away from the camera, that the moth stands out so brightly in this image.
Anyway. … The serendipity of unforseen consequences oftentimes adds an opportunity. … Take advantage of the opportunities.
My Quest
by Jack Foster Mancilla
I push through space, through brightness, and shadow,
languidly pulsing my life force through the continuum.
On my tendrils the soft current of the breeze shallow
peaks my interest of tastes and sex. Tongues my medium
like agars replete with life, nourishing, and driving
my very self to reproduce. Bring me my mate, my bodied
complement, I search the flowing agar-agar for your scent.
Long has been my toil, my primal quest near atrophied.
Again, I catch the waft of your passing. Please, relent.
Rough banging upon my being, assailed by torrents maddened,
bereft of nourishing agar, cast upon the hardness of empty,
immobilized by I know not what, my tendrils movement dampened,
I long to be free. Yet, I feel the future of my passing entity.
Sometimes things just happen.
This little family came in to get some pictures of just their dogs. … Believe me when I say I love animals, I really do. But that includes the human animal. … And while images of just pets can be truly rewarding, and great, I have a penchant for getting groups together. I like the interactions between them, the way they play off each other.
So, when I started talking the family into including the child in the image, they thought it might be a good idea. But, when I asked for the father to lay on the floor and hold the brown dog up by the butt, while the dog’s front legs were hanging over the child’s shoulders, he said, “No. No way!”
Almost before he finished his rejection, the mother jumped in, stood up and said, “I’ll do it.”
This is the result. … The boy is smiling. The dogs are a little weirded out. The mom is lying on the floor behind the boy, supporting the dog. The father is standing off to the right; thinking I am making a fool of his family. I am taking one of my favorite pictures.
So it goes.
We’re having a conversation here. … You need something? – View Large
Link to my large collection of pet photos
[by Jack Foster Mancilla]
I love animals. And they love me. Here is a single image of some Boston Terriers that I talked into sitting on my little furniture. My niece gave me the furniture as props to shoot pets with. If you wander through the larger gallery, you will see some very cool shots.
All these gallery shots were taken a while ago, and I have become much better at my work through the passing of time. I think it would be great good fun to shoot another thousand pet photos.
Well it is that time of the year, where thoughts turns to love. Love current, loves lost, loves past, and loves future. …
But one love always stands the test of time and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes. … The unquallified love our pets have for us, and we have for them. I know that at this very moment, while I have my feet up on a cushion in front of my chair, that between the chair and cushion, under my legs, lies Gypsy. She is waiting patiently for me to finish this little letter to my human friends, so that I can take her for a little tour around the neighbourhood. …
Well today is very special, we will go many dog places today, and she will be very happy. 😉 Me too!
Check out My Amazing Pet Photography Gallery, and think about a time when we can shoot all our pets together, on one very special day. Because, I would surely like that!
One of the first things to be done in the morning, besides letting the dogs outside, is to fix the morning coffee.
As you can see, the early morning sun is cascading through the kitchen window, across the sugar, the coffee, the coffee pot, and the toaster, while my cup sits at the ready, awaiting the double sized portion of brew required for filling.
Horses are huge. They are a kind of super sized mobile toy, like a giant red waggon that can take you anywhere, even over the rough ground that a giant red waggon could not cross.
Horses are alive. They are dreams, out of movies, fording rivers, carrying the righters of wrong, enabling humans to take giant leaps across the surface of the planet.
And they have giant reflective eyes. In the eye of this horse, you can easily see the horse’s owner, the horse trailer, the shape of this horse by its shadow. These eyes capture imaginations.
Pimelometopon pulchrum: The California sheepshead ranges from Monterey Bay to the Gulf of California with the largest populations in the lower half of the range, south of Point Conception. It is usually caught at the edges of kelp beds and rocky shores where its main diet consists of mollusks, lobsters, crabs, and small fishes. It is not related to the sheepshead of the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. And, even more important, it is mightily tasty!
In this study of a Garden Spider’s web in the evening sun, I love the way the web refracts the sunlight. Look at that little cone of colors, to the right of the spider, it is a soft focused part of the web, but the way the light is caught on the tiny droplets of the web. The tiny drops are the sticky trap part of the web.
This image is beautiful in its small version, but at twenty inches by thirty inches, it is an eye catching jewel.
★★★ View HD Video on YouTube ★★★
Purchase this image.
View large size image.
We noticed this nest, just under the eaves on the front of the house. It must have been there for a while, and not really bothered anyone, but now we know, they are there, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting, child, dog, or even the gardener.
If you look closely during the video, you can see some easily observable actions that these wasps do as part of their social life. At the top center of the nest is a wasp that is going along the sides of a single paper cell, enlarging the cell with a paper mâché from its mouth. Below center, you can see two wasps grooming each other. Just above center right, you can see a whole line of larva whose faces look like the caterpillar in “A Bugs Life.” And if you watch very closely, you can see a wasp doing the wasp version of the wiggle dance.
★★★ View HD Video on YouTube ★★★
You should watch the video on YouTube. When you watch, make sure you see it in HD, and then expand the video to fit your screen.
I want to thank our friends for visiting us in Chula Vista while we were shooting a Customer Appreciation day for a Bank. We all had a good time, including customers, bank employees, dogs, and even the cats. 😉
You should check out this little gallery. … I think you will be entertained.
Ok, it is not a true headline. … This headline is more like the stories we are hearing from the mouths of lawyers about the oil spill, those stories are also, not true.
Living in California, we only have a few images captured by photographers, showing us tiny slices of the enormity of the problem the gulf is facing. The Deepwater Horizon accident, and the ensuing catastrophe, has been covered every day on the news, and I swear that I know less of the truth today, than I did two months ago.
Think Globally, and act locally. … If. … If only.
Perhaps that should be added to the Golden Rule. … Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Think Globally, and act locally.
A few of my friends, and our dog partners, visited Fiesta Island. 😉 All of us had a very nice time in a beautiful section of San Diego.
My dog, Gypsy, and I go there quite often. We have a wonderful time there.
This is a link to a few more Gypsy images
I wanted to invite all of my friends that could make it, down to fiesta island with their dogs so we could do a giant dog shoot. (I will set a date for that soon)
But, June 26, I will be shooting pets for Citibank customers at …
Citibank
2240 Otay Lakes Road
Chula Vista, CA 91915-1003
Phone: 619-216-1251
You might want to check out those kinds of images as well. …
Furry Un-Dogs
Dogs … Really, dogs. 😉
Scales, Feathers, Amphibians, Other Pets
Pets and People, together 🙂
Come on down! 😉
This is an interesting image to me. … It evokes loneliness, and yet it is a colony of birds as well.
They are protected here in their lonely home on the lake. Land based predators cannot reach them through the shallows.
For me, sitting on the shore, they are unreachable, except by my long lens.
This little section of beach is part of The San Dieguito Wetlands Project in the San Dieguito River Valley. The project will take 150 acres of coastal wetlands back in time, to when life flourished in the river valley.
It is also where horses can run in the water, and where I caught grunion with my family, as a boy. It is a place of people, kites, volleyball, and dogs. You would like it there. I do.
Tomorrow I will be … In a few years the earth will … “In the year 2525, if man is still alive” …
This image illustrates all transition for me, because it is so easy to see and understand because it happens in such a short time, we can see it progress. It is an image of a frog, or a tadpole? It is really a froglet. Froglets are usually seen with much shorter tails.
Everything has a lifetime to live, and we change throughout that life, we only call it living in mankind, not metamorphosis as we do in frogs, because we do not lose a tail, or grow legs. … Or do we? Our most visual metamorphosis takes place unseen, in the wombs of our mothers, where we lose our tails, and gain four limbs.
Most humans try to separate themselves from animals, I don’t. I revel in the flow of time, and I look forward to the continued evolution of myself, all life known and unknown, and the universe.
