Sony

Have a new camera; Sony a7 lll. It is the one that i wanted as the Canon i have been using is getting to heavy to carry around - the Sony is 30% smaller and lighter, is full frame and, best of all, mirrorless. What does all that mean? I'll tell you when i know.

Couple of first images i took:

Amaryllis

Study or Guest Room

And yesterday i visited the NC Arboretum which is just a few miles from here and came home with these photographs:

The pink tulips were amazing

And one bumble bee 

This was a rather large bumble bee and whenever it landed on a flower, they bowed over; so, the bee is actually upside down and i rotated the image so it would appear on top when in reality is it hanging upside down.

Trees

Some of the trees looked pretty awesome standing cold and forlorn looking at the ice's edge —

Santa Fe Birds

Was in Santa Fe last week and where i was staying had three bird feeders hanging and they were heavily used. So i sat out back with my camera and big lens and took a few photos of them.

Western bluebirds which are quite different from the Northern Bluebirds around here:

The Western Bluebirds resemble swallows, a little bit, particularly the male above. That is a couple above with the female on the right and the male on the left - they were around the suet (which is what they are eating) everyday.

Quail ... rather different looking from the ones that lived at GGF which had the strange looking topknot. I wasn't very happy with the image but it was the best shot. The is: The scaled quail (Callipepla squamata), also commonly called blue quail or cottontop

from Wikipedia. Cottontop seems most appropiate.

Curve-Billed Thrasher ... a rather intense looking bird which did not hang about as the other birds did and i was lucky to get this shot.

And one of my favorite birds whose name i have to look up ... 

White Crown Sparrow, i think.

Behind ...

Am feeling behind on a variety of photographic fronts: haven't posted last week's gallery and haven't been spending an hour or so per day on reorganizing the files - without which the whole change over from date to category is fairly useless. Sigh, can't tell if it is a time issue or i'm just lazy - probably some of both.

We have an Amaryllis blooming and i've, again, trying to capture some of its bloomin' center. Here's the first effort:

It came out pretty (click on it to see it in large form) but the stamen and pistil could be sharper so i'm gonna tackle that shortly. This is a 40 photo image.

In the backyard, there are more moving critters (which i love seeing) and the first below has taken me a variety of shooting to capture. It is very shy and runs aways at the slightest noise:

A groundhog. There are a lot of them in Asheville. In the top image you see its paws just below its chin. It ate constantly and always seemed to have its mouth full. It was eating a particular plant, sorta a weed with purple flowers, not clover; at least not the clover plant that has been identified to me as clover. Will look up the plant he is eating.

Birds

Birds are passing thru on the way north now ... while most of these can be local, the Cedar Waxwings are clearly moving north. These are the first i've seen in NC.

And this showed up yesterday and while native to this area, i rarely see Flickers here. This is a female Northern Flicker, yellow shafted which you can see in the second photograph.

These are always here and are so large they are easily confused with Ravens, however, they are Crows: These are amazingly large birds!

Cotoneaster

Today i have spent most of the day working on macro-photographing an cotoneaster bonsai i started growing last year and now it is growing small blooms and those blooms are opening.

This is the very small bloom on the upper left

and i've wanted to photograph it throuout the day as the different pieces uncurl and stand upright and eventually they will bend outwards.

Humm, this has been six hours 'tween the two shots and there's not so much difference ... i'll see what happens overnight.

Oxalis

I've never tired of seeing this blooming plants. I don't have any now but there are some on order that will be shipped once the cold weather warms up a bit.

O.K. ... 'nuff of the shamrockie flower for now. (no, it is not a shamrock, but often called that as the leaves look like shamrock leaves).