A chameleon’s tongue can be one and a half to two times its body length. The strike for prey happens so fast that it’s hard to get a picture (usually about 0.07 seconds). In my three weeks in Madagascar, I only had two opportunities to see and catch a tongue shot. This is one of them.
I’ve been thinking about Badlands National Park lately and wanting to get back out there sometime soon. This photo was taken one stormy afternoon back in 2008. Beyond the spectacular landscapes, the park is full of easily seen wildlife, including bison, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, coyote, prairie dogs and the rare and endangered black footed ferret (which I’ve yet to see).
Nothing much going on here, just a giraffe sticking out its tongue. This one was taken in Lewa in Kenya.
This is a male red-chested sunbird that I photographed in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. The long curved bill is used to extract nectar from flowers. Uganda is one of the best places in the world for birding due to its fortunate geographic positioning between the savannah to the east, the sub-sahara region to the north and the jungle to the west.
These are the Hanuman langurs that I saw all over the place in the national parks of India. It seemed that every adult female was with a baby. In fact, they practice what is known as alloparenting — which means that a baby can be given to, and raised, by a non-biological mother.
Okay, I know I’ve posted quite a few harbor seals lately, but I really can’t get enough of these guys. This one looked like he had quite the headache. As with the other two harbor seal posts lately, this was taken at Children’s Pool Beach in La Jolla, California.
Here’s another species of cactus, this time in Anza-Borrego State Park in southern California. It was getting dark when I took this shot and I ended it up with quite a few pieces of the prickly stuff stuck to my legs by the time I made it back to the car.
The sun had already set when I captured these two zebras nuzzling up to one another. I liked that it’s not a complete silhouette — that you can still see detail in the zebra’s bodies. The photo was taken in the Laikipia region of Kenya on our most recent trip back in November.
This is an old one that I took back in 2002 when I was living in my car and still shooting slides. I was doing a lot of experimenting with shooting the moon as a double exposure. The rule of thumb was to shoot the moon at the shutter speed of your film (so 125th of second for 100 speed film) and f/16. That way you just record the moon and nothing else on the slide is exposed. You have to remember where the moon is on the slide, then reposition for the landscape. In this case I used a telephoto lens to get the moon and a wide angle for the landscape. Of course, now all you do is combine two different shots in Photoshop, but it was fun to get it in one take. This was at Saguaro National Park just outside of downtown Tucson.
The Stradun is the main street through the center of old town Dubrovnik. I took this shot at about 5 AM when there was no one around. By noon each day — after all the cruise ships drop off the thousands of tourists that join forces with all those that stay at the hotels just beyond the city walls — The Stradun gets packed with people. I, of course, much prefer it when like this.