leaf-cutting ants
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lifelessons – a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Reflections on Life through poetry, essays and photos
leaf-cutting ants
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
WOW!
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This one is the only one I didn’t take. It’s an amazing photo, but I ended up taking it down as I thought it was misleading. Wish I had taken it!!
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When I find one so perfect, I sometime get suspicious…not that it may not be yours, but rather that it may be photo shopped. All of your “micro photos” are so near perfect though, that I wonder if many are plagiarized by other people that you do not know about. The only thing that I sometime find a problem with is the size relationship, like that one I thought was a trillium; which turned out to be tiny, but a perfect likeness except for size. I have many very tiny flowers on my place which friends, when walking around, can smell the aroma, but do not understand that they are trumping on them. I have been wanting to go around on my hands and knees to photograph them.. It would make a nice very unusual presentation.
Soon spring will be here and I will do this. I do try to be careful when posting, but bet some of the ones I have used may have accidentally been encroached upon, though they are always are from public domain. Mostly I check to see if they are public, or give credit, I never have used one that another blog has posted, that would be dumb. (except that one I asked you if I could use of yours). When I do the “tiny flowers” presentation I may put some object like a coin along side some of them to get the relationship. One macro and one larger scene with the relationship. We could have a “photo off” of tiny flowers; I would loose but it would be fun~!
Sometime back you asked for photos of my travel life to be posted. Well they are almost all slides and I am working on digitizing them, but unfortunately some of them have sadly, discolored toward the red. SAD~! I have thousands~! Many of things like uncivilized Indians, steamboats from the early 1900’s on the Magdalena, polled pirogues on a bayou, floating log rafts on a river, narrow gauge trains loaded with bananas, etc all things that actually no longer exist.
SAM
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I have thousands of slides as well.. and a converter that will make them into jpegs, but so many tasks and so little time. What I want for Xmas is an assistant who will convert all my slides, then my cassettes. I have a converter for them, too. and for photos..Then someone to find a publisher for four completed books and get them into final format. Is that asking too much? Anxious to see your slides/photos. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. I did convert slides of my driving trip through Great Britain with my mom in 1970 something. Oh that hairdo!
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Oh sadly, that so many are ruined, but some of those, I have turned into black and white. (damn Ektachorme (sic?), So damn many, such UN-replaceable backup to my stories, and the only facts I have that it really happened…At times even ( I ) do not believe that these things happened to (ME). “Shot at by hostile Indians, held by bandits”,, etc etc…That book would be perfect, if I could only get these things digitized. I have about three digitizers, all rather expensive, but not worth a damn, and so slow~!. Right now I am using a projector to be able to see them properly, catalogue them, and then digitize the keepers, but sadly I must throw away those that are beyond repair. Hour after hour and so little done~! Some I have even forgotten where I photographed them. I have stories that I would like to publish, but they would not be believed without those photo backups, because the people who could verify them are mostly dead. So often you and I have had a parallel life, while still being so different in so many of these things.
My guest has long gone to bed and I am now going to do the same… REM sleep often wakes me up about 3:AM when some of my many UN-reliable posts take place, or ideas that seem to be dumb or not even knowledgeable by daylight.
My guest is a very fine newspaper editor, and would really straighten out my (Coonass) grammar…I have set her up with a great work station here, and that way she can have time down here from Minneapolis, while still keeping up with work and missing that terrible weather. I just need to get it all organized.
“I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.” Ha ha~! Have not heard that sense the second grade~!
SAM
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We didn’t even know we had them in the second grade!!!
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None of my photos are photoshopped, but some have the color adjusted to echo the true colors washed out by sunlight or other factors and I sometimes sharpen the images and crop. That’s it. I always mention the source of photos if they were not taken by me but most are my own photos.
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I realize this~! I do not have “photoshop” and do not like it. I too sometime corp and run a fast fix, mostly on contrast. Not good, but never looks fake. I am not as good as I once was, due to lack of patience as I get older, when taking the photos. Some even surprise me. Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to get photos of “sap suckers” which are using a couple of my hummingbird feeders I had left out after the hummingbirds left. I can not get close enough to them and from a distance they are coming out as a silhouettes. Really interesting seeing those huge birds using hummingbird feeders I may need to use my game camera to catch them up close.
SAM
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Hey.. looked up sapsuckers.. I didn’t realize they were woodpeckers! I have two that wake me up every morning in my tallest palm trees.
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Those tiny little holes in a line that you see in the bark of some trees are from sap suckers, they are woodpeckers but not the red headed variety you often see, though there is some slight red on their heads. They peck those tiny holes to get the sap to flow (like a maple tree would) then stick their long pointed tongues in to lick it up. I have never seen them on a hummingbird feeder before until this year when I was lax in taking down and cleaning my feeders. Next thing I knew, I had at least three of them on the smelly feeders. So I cleaned and refilled them.. Now for several weeks they are feeding all day. They are not like humming birds in that they do not fight for the feeder, but will fly by until one occupant leaves then take over where that one has left. My problem is that they are much more afraid of people than a humming bird, so I have not been able to get out on the porch to get a good close up photo even with my largest telephoto lens. I have taken several through the window but they do not come out proper as they only look like a silhouette due to the inside light difference.. I will try again today using a tripod and a movie setting and may get a good one that way. I can’t find my remote camera trigger, as I have not used it in a long time. It is fascinating to see this VERY LARGE bird hanging onto a feeder, sometime up side down, and sticking their long tongue down that tiny hole.
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