Attractive Invader

Purple Loosestrife is an attractive plant I'm sure you've seen along waterways and roadside ditches. Introduced from Europe in the early 1800s, it can now be found over much of the US and Canada. When Purple Loosestrife gets established, fish, bird and wildlife habitat becomes choked out, eliminating native food and cover.

Control methods are uprooting by hand, mowing, cutting, burning and herbicides. Also, four host specific insects have been approved by the federal government for introduction into the US in attempt to control the weed.

A page on the website of Minnesota Sea Grant is a good source for more information. You can visit it here.

Isolation

One of the nice things about close-up photography is the ability to remove the subject from its context. Here, for example, is a photo taken of a frog with a 200mm lens and a 1.4x teleconverter with some extension in between.

The closeness allowed me to isolate the frog from the flower pot in the backyard pond in which it and a bunch of its friends were sitting. Here's the complete scene with the frog filled pot on the left.

Which one gets the coffee?

I like my EF 70-200mm f-4L USM coffe mug from Canonmugs.com. But I was thinking, what if someone sees it in my car and breaks in to steal the lens just sitting there out in the open?

Maybe it would make more sense to make lenses look like coffe mugs.

Playing with Panoramas

I played with a couple of stitched together panoramas and uploaded them. I'm not really happy with the software but it's a beginning. You can check out the attempts at http://trulandphoto.zenfolio.com/p691605948.