I can see why people made the connection to squirrels with these hyperactive little guys. They absolutely do not hold still, which provides quite a challenge.

Also, accidental renaissance:

And:

A couple of fishy snorkeling photos 😁

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Unidentified bug I found in Peru

Well, alright. I wasn't going to post these guys yet but I put one of my pictures in a comment in the other lemurs post. So fuck it, we're doin' it live.

I didn't get a huge amount of good pictures of these guys because they kept hiding behind things and/or incessantly facing away from me.

Except this one, who was very interested in eating this plant growing just outside of their enclosure.

I do not, as a general rule, edit my photos. Not out of any desire for artistic purity or anything, nor will you ever find me spouting any wine snob buffoonery using fancy words like "intentionality," or "authenticity" or whatever. Rather, this is because by and large I cannot be arsed. If you ask me the whole point of having spent the money on all this crap on my vest is so I can use my camera to take reasonable photographs to begin with.

The argyle penguins watermark thing is something I do automatically with an Imagemagick script, and I've got it integrated into my shell. I can just right click one or even a whole bunch of the little blighters and it dutifully rubber-stamps them all without any other intervention on my part. Ditto with the script I use to bitcrush my images to make them small enough that I can actually post them to the .world servers with it neither being a dice roll as to whether or not the upload will fail nor any of the administrators showing up at my door with an axe.

This picture, though, I edited the ever loving bejesus out of.

This is a mossy prehensile-tailed gecko. I had to take this picture through very smudgy glass with an absurd amount of glare on it, into an enclosure with not very good lighting. I think I did a credible job of recreating what my own eyes saw.

For reference, here's one I didn't edit:

I was at the zoo today, enjoying the ineffable smug satisfaction of rocking up next to the crowds of people all pinching at the screens of their iPhones and frowning while I pull out this fuckin' thing.

I may have also found some time in the margins to look at animals while I was there.

Ring-tailed lemurs, and I guess most small primates in general, always have such a face. I caught this one going "blep."

Shooting at the zoo is like training wheels for wildlife photography. You have many of the same challenges plus some new ones, but at least you have the advantage that your subjects can't escape.

Sometimes you'll catch these guys sunning themselves in a Buddha pose. This is as close as we got today.

Anything that climbs, flies, or leaps is obviously going to be in some kind of cage. One of the unique bugbears of being at the zoo is having to take pictures through the mesh of whatever the enclosure is made out of and still not have it look like crap. The recipe is to have as little distance between your lens and the fence as possible and conversely as much distance between the fence and the critter as possible, and use a huge aperture. Sometimes this imparts weird grid patterns into the final product anyway which are mildly surreal. And if you're quite unlucky you won't be able to escape the sun glare coming off of an especially shiny fence from washing out your exposure even if the fence itself is far out of focus.

Fire Salamander

A little 'Cabin in the Woods', no not that kind, the regular kind 😂

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P.S if your country doesn’t have the freedom to roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom/_to/_roam there’s something inherently wrong.

I went back to my old high school 23 years later. Place is run-down a bit but still functioning. Didn’t really go inside. Stood in the locations I still have flashbacks to.

This work is more for me, for my memories.

I’m downvoting this, you should too. I just want it in my user history.

Shortly after sundown, and the best of several attempts to get both vaguely correctly exposed at the same time.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but if we can't behold the beauty in this I'm not sure we can be helped 😁

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Great Tiger Moth

Probably, anyway. I took this on a Kodak wind-up disposable camera and I was probably eight or nine years old.

I didn't watermark this one because I thought it might cheapen the experience. This is a photo taken from, but not of, my brother's place in Wyoming. The compound under the rainbow there is was his nearest neighbor's. You can see the line of poles going down the dirt road that led back to the nearest real paved road, which was a couple of miles away. These carried electricity. Just electricity. No phone, no cable, and at that point in time certainly no internet. My brother didn't have a phone in his house at all. If he had to call anyone he'd have to drive into town, and if anyone needed to call him they'd have to ring up somebody he knew in town so they could go and get him.

This is lightly retouched. The unedited version straight out of my scanner is here.

Siberian chipmunk and its cute little digits. Foraging, traversing tree branches like it's nothing, eating its well-deserved nuts. More shots here: https://vernissage.photos/@smetterling/7676786680438722650

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📷︎ https://www.smetterling.eu/: Bug Capture 🦋 Smetterling.

Field grasshopper

I wanted to try this one again, now that I had an opportunity to get back to where I shot it the first time, a few months ago. With better kit and fewer reflections, and timing my subtle infiltration into an apartment building I don’t live in, I was able to capture this in a few quick seconds. I think I’m done with this concept and will chase other styles. I just wanted this to match my interval visions first.

Thanks for seeing my work!

Forest footpath 😁

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P.S if your country doesn’t have the freedom to roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom/_to/_roam there’s something inherently wrong.