I'm blue da ba dee da ba die...

I haven't taken advantage of the fact that I live in a city full of free museums and great culturalness in a while, so boyfriend and I went to the Museum of Natural History and the National Botanic Gardens a few weeks ago. I haven't gotten a chance to go through all my photos yet, but here are some lovelies from the Gardens.

Out and About in Nature

So yesterday I just happened to look at one of my memory cards and found some pictures from our trek out to boyfriend's cabin in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania that we took in July. This trip was the start of my love affair with frogs, as it's where Lewis and Clark came home with me in the form of tadpoles. So it's fitting that I happened to take a shot of a beautiful frog, that I have since found out is a pickerel frog.

And our animal sightings didn't end there, we also spent a good hour or so crayfish hunting in the river and managed to catch two. Let it be known that boyfriend and his sister tried unsuccessfully for 20 minutes or so, until I stepped in and caught one in five minutes. :)

In other news, I've actually had a few evenings to myself the past couple of days, rather than spending them working, so I was able to finish up and take photos of nine more items for my Totables shop - stay tuned for the additions!

Plants to the Second Power

Here are a few more of my favorites from my last visit to the U.S. Botanic Gardens.

These first two are a plant called the Rattlesnake Master. You have to respect a plant with a name like that.




Stoke's Aster

I've fallen a bit behind, but I plan on putting up some new photos to ViewFound Photography, so stay tuned!

Froggie Update

So I mentioned last week that I have recently acquired three tadpoles. I had found a nifty container to bring them home in at the dollar store, and they seemed to be quite happy in it at home as well, as you can see below.

The appearance of legs!

Well, Sunday boyfriend and I went to change the water in the container, and flipping open the top revealed a little baby frog, holding on upside down! Yes, it turns out I have adopted tree frogs. As it was getting to be very obvious that they needed a new home and some live food in the form of mealworms, boyfriend and I spent a couple of hours at the Petco last night, deciding how to set up my terrarium.

So far, two of three have become frogs and the third tadpole has sprouted back legs. The terrarium will be overhauled next week as well, as I will get a waterpump and make a waterfall for them. The frogs were a little terrified of having so much space I think, after hanging around upside down in the other container, so they stayed away from the plant for a while and instead just clung to the glass. They eventually realized it's much nicer to chill on a leaf, and so now that is their favorite place to be. Boyfriend has christened the two frogs Lewis and Clark, and the more adventurous one is Lewis.

The pictures aren't great, as the lighting isn't super in my apartment in the morning, but I will post better ones later.

This one is hard to see, but their second favorite place to hang out is right on the lip of the bowl.

Off to the Woods!

In a couple of hours I will be on my way off to the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, to go spend the weekend at boyfriend's cabin. This will be the second weekend in a row that I get to spend time in nature, which is particularly exciting, seeing as how I am a complete city person sans car. Last weekend we went hiking in the Shenandoah with friends and it was so amazingly beautiful. I also got to try out slow shutter speeds to get the beautiful flowing water look, even though it involved crawling around on dirty rocks and taking hundreds of pictures to get one just right. :)

Ernst Haeckel and His Very Cool Prints

I love fishy things, and anything related to the ocean, pretty much. Any nature show that has underwater filming has me captivated. Somehow, I stumbled upon these prints, which are done by Ernst Haeckel, which depict all sorts of nature, but I'm primarily fascinated by his ocean-related ones. Ernst was a biologist, naturalist, among many other things, in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and his Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature) contained 100 prints of various organisms. The three below were my favorites, but several others are in very high resolution on Wikipedia. The detail is amazing, and I'm thinking about printing off some of them some day, but for now I just look at them every now and then.