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Posts for Tag: ky

Headache Incoming!

I recently spotted a Male Pileated Woodpecker at Bernheim Forest. Just watching this guy repeatedly smashing his beak into the tree gave me a headache. The Pileated Woodpecker is nearly the size of a crow and is the 3rd largest Woodpecker on the planet. 

Seeing him smashing his beak into the wood with such ferocity made me wonder how they avoid brain damage. It turns out that 99.7% of the energy is dissipated through its body and neck, but the remaining 0.3% is dissipated through the heating of its skull. This is why they pause, as in my video below, when they are doing some serious excavating. They need to allow their head to cool off. Is this why people say, "cooler heads will prevail"?

They are extremely remarkable birds.



From the everything old is now new again department...

I've recently discovered the usefulness of "vintage" lenses on modern, mirrorless cameras. These flower photos were taken with a 57-year-old Super-Takumar 1:4 / 50mm, adapted to my trusty Olympus OM-1 (OMD Systems, 2022) camera. This lens falls within the range of the radioactive Super-Takumars, so maybe that helped with the red/amber colors.

Through A Russian Lens

This is what happens when you take a 45-year-old lens made in the USSR, put it on a 5-year-old digital camera made in Vietnam, and hope that everything is blurry in the right places.

The lens is from a Zenit-E camera manufactured by Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works in 1977. KMW was located near Moscow, which was the host-city of the 1980 Summer Olympics. My copy of the Zenit-E was made specifically for the 1980 Summer Olympics and bears the logo of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games on its body. At that time, the USSR was second, only to Japan, in the manufacture of SLR cameras. I obtained my Zenit-E Olympic Model specifically because of its connection to the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, an Olympics in which the US and 65 other countries did not participate. Why?

The 66 countries boycotted the 1980 Olympics in response to the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, a war that was so costly to the USSR, that it has been cited by scholars as a contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The more things change, the more they stay the same…

How Way Leads On To Way...

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

~Robert Frost

Broad Run Park

A beautiful sunset at Broad Run Park, Louisville, KY.

Chipmunk On A Log

Slightly obscured by several sticks, I just really liked the colors in this photo.


Profile Shot

This guy was nice enough to pose for a portrait. Looks like his antlers may have been at a crime scene.

One of the transformers...

A Pandora Sphinx caterpillar. The moth that results from this caterpillar, is not much better looking...