Boston Museum of Science | Stripped-down frame of a Duck Boat truck, showing the engine & propellor assembly

Boston Museum of Science | Stripped-down frame of a Duck Boat truck, showing the engine & propellor assembly

Image by Chris Devers
Photos from the Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age exhibit at the Museum of Science. Quoting from their description:

Travel back to a time when humans shared the stage with woolly giants! Examine full-scale replicas of massive Ice Age mammals, including Lyuba, a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth discovered by a Siberian reindeer herder in 2007. The exhibit also features some of the oldest art in existence, huge skulls and tusks, weird and wonderful mammoth relatives, and mastodon bones collected by William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) for President Thomas Jefferson's own collection.

This exhibition was created by The Field Museum, Chicago.

Female elephant seal with day-old pup.

Image by mikebaird
Female elephant seal with day-old pup. Northern Elephant Seal (M. angustirostris) scene at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal south viewing area, which is north of San Simeon, CA, 20 April 2011. One of three Photos taken. Birthing started three days ago on approximately 17 Dec 2011. We saw two baby Elephant Seals today 20 Dec 2011. Males are staking out their territory as the females occupy the beaches and give birth.
www.elephantseal.org/ says "The adult animals come on to the beach in the winter for the birthing and breeding season, with adult males arriving in late November or early December when they contest for a dominant position on the beach. The males are followed by the adult females in mid-December to late January. As the females come on the beach they become, in effect, part of a 'harem' controlled by one of the alpha males. They give birth to their pup within a few days of their arrival on the beach and nurse them for approximately four weeks. Toward the end of the nursing period the females go into estrous and are bred, usually with the alpha bull although other males will attempt to mate as the opportunity arises. Shortly after the mating and at the end of the nursing period, the female will go back to sea."
Note: Two of my other Elephant Seal photos appears on the related Wikipedia pages at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_seal and
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Elephant_Seal
to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mating_scene_with_elevated_Alp...
and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elephant_seals_fighting.jpg and
File:Elephant_seals_fighting.jpg from www.flickr.com/photos/72825507@N00/2238575400/
Photo © 2011 “Mike” Michael L. Baird, mike {at] mikebaird d o t com, flickr.bairdphotos.com, Canon EOS 5D Mark II 21.1MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera with Canon 600mm f/4 telephoto lens, with a Circular Polarizer, on a massive Gitzo tripod with gimbal and leveling head, IS on.
To use this photo, see access, attribution, and commenting recommendations at www.flickr.com/people/mikebaird/#credit - Please add comments/notes/tags to add to or correct information, identification, etc. Please, no comments or invites with badges, unrelated images, flashing icons, links to your photos, multiple invites, or invites with award levels and/or award/post rules. Critique is always welcomed.
keywords: elephant seal, Northern Elephant Seal, M., angustirostris, Mammal,piedras blancas,blancas,san simeon,20Dec2011
Captions:
Female elephant seal with day-old pup.
Alpha male elephant seal chasing off a younger adult male.
Alpha male elephant seal engaging a younger adult male.

Praying Mantis

Image by jillmotts
It was just hanging out right next to the door. After about fifteen frames, I finally got a decent shot.

Edit, 22May06: I just uploaded a baby mantis picture and discovered that this is most likely a male California Mantis, Stagmomantis californica.

Alpha male elephant seal engaging a younger adult male.

Image by mikebaird
Alpha male elephant seal engaging a younger adult male. Northern Elephant Seal (M. angustirostris) scene at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal south viewing area, which is north of San Simeon, CA, 20 April 2011. One of three Photos taken. Birthing started three days ago on approximately 17 Dec 2011. We saw two baby Elephant Seals today 20 Dec 2011. Males are staking out their territory as the females occupy the beaches and give birth.
www.elephantseal.org/ says "The adult animals come on to the beach in the winter for the birthing and breeding season, with adult males arriving in late November or early December when they contest for a dominant position on the beach. The males are followed by the adult females in mid-December to late January. As the females come on the beach they become, in effect, part of a 'harem' controlled by one of the alpha males. They give birth to their pup within a few days of their arrival on the beach and nurse them for approximately four weeks. Toward the end of the nursing period the females go into estrous and are bred, usually with the alpha bull although other males will attempt to mate as the opportunity arises. Shortly after the mating and at the end of the nursing period, the female will go back to sea."
Note: Two of my other Elephant Seal photos appears on the related Wikipedia pages at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_seal and
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Elephant_Seal
to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mating_scene_with_elevated_Alp...
and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elephant_seals_fighting.jpg and
File:Elephant_seals_fighting.jpg from www.flickr.com/photos/72825507@N00/2238575400/
Photo © 2011 “Mike” Michael L. Baird, mike {at] mikebaird d o t com, flickr.bairdphotos.com, Canon EOS 5D Mark II 21.1MP Full Frame CMOS Digital SLR Camera with Canon 600mm f/4 telephoto lens, with a Circular Polarizer, on a massive Gitzo tripod with gimbal and leveling head, IS on.
To use this photo, see access, attribution, and commenting recommendations at www.flickr.com/people/mikebaird/#credit - Please add comments/notes/tags to add to or correct information, identification, etc. Please, no comments or invites with badges, unrelated images, flashing icons, links to your photos, multiple invites, or invites with award levels and/or award/post rules. Critique is always welcomed.
keywords: elephant seal, Northern Elephant Seal, M., angustirostris, Mammal,piedras blancas,blancas,san simeon,20Dec2011
Captions:
Female elephant seal with day-old pup.
Alpha male elephant seal chasing off a younger adult male.
Alpha male elephant seal engaging a younger adult male.

Sorry, kid, that's not the Aztec Two-Step

Image by Ed Yourdon
Yeah, well, it's a little more complicated than that … but I'm sure you already knew: "Aztec Two-Step" is a line from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in A Coney Island of the Mind, which you can read about here on Wikipedia.

It's also the name of a band, formed in 1971 by Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman, details of which you can read here on Wikipedia.

But as far as the little girl is concerned, it's a dance step. And her baby-sitter knows she's not doing it right.

But you already knew that, too ...

Note: as an illustration of the stupid automation used to create some web pages, this photo was published in an undated (mid-April 2012) "Artist info" page for an indy band called Aztec Camera.

**************************

This is the continuation of a photo-project that I began in the summer of 2008 (which you can see in this Flickr set), and continued throughout 2009, 2010, and 2011 (as shown in this Flickr set, this Flickr set, and this Flickr set): a random collection of "interesting" people in a broad stretch of the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- between 72nd Street and 104th Street, especially along Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. These are the people in my neighborhood, aka "peeps in the 'hood."

As I indicated when I first started this project nearly four years ago, I don't like to intrude on people's privacy, so I normally use a zoom telephoto lens in order to photograph them while they're still 50-100 feet away from me; but that means I have to continue focusing my attention on the people and activities half a block away, rather than on what's right in front of me. Sometimes I find an empty bench on a busy street corner, and just sit quietly for an hour, watching people hustling past on the other side of the street; they're almost always so busy listening to their iPod, or talking on their cellphone, or daydreaming about something, that they never look up and see me aiming my camera in their direction.

I've also learned that, in many cases, the opportunities for an interesting picture are very fleeting -- literally a matter of a couple of seconds, before the person(s) in question move on, turn away, or stop doing whatever was interesting. So I've learned to keep my camera switched on, and not worry so much about zooming in for a perfectly-framed picture ... after all, once the digital image is uploaded to my computer, it's pretty trivial to crop out the parts unrelated to the main subject. Indeed, some of my most interesting photos have been so-called "hip shots," where I don't even bother to raise the camera up to my eye; I just keep the zoom lens set to the maximum wide-angle aperture, point in the general direction of the subject, and take several shots. As long as I can keep the shutter speed fairly high (which sometimes requires a fairly high ISO setting), I can usually get some fairly crisp shots -- even if the subject is walking in one direction, and I'm walking in the other direction, while I'm snapping the photos.

With only a few exceptions, I've generally avoided photographing bums, drunks, crazies, and homeless people. There are plenty of them around, and they would certainly create some dramatic pictures; but they generally don't want to be photographed, and I don't want to feel like I'm taking advantage of them. There have been a few opportunities to take some "sympathetic" pictures of such people, which might inspire others to reach out and help them. This is one example, and here is another example.

The other thing I've noticed, while carrying on this project for the past four years, is that while there are lots of interesting people to photograph, there are far, far, far more people who are not so interesting. They're probably fine people, and they might even be more interesting than the ones I've photographed ... unfortunately, there was just nothing memorable about them. They're all part of this big, crowded city; but for better or worse, there are an awful lot that you won't see in these Flickr sets of mine...