Reminder to vote on Alphabet Challenge “B” Stories poll

A quick reminder to vote for one of the stories in the “B” Alphabet Challenge Submissions. You can vote HERE and for them who have yet to read them, there are links to each of the stories in that post.

By the way, you can still vote for the “A” Alphabet Challenge Submissions HERE and for them who have yet to read them, there are links to each of those stories in that post.

To be clear, you can read the stories and not vote (as some people have done). It’s also perfectly OK to not like any of them (it’s one of the voting options).

Any reader involvement is appreciated and we welcome comments and questions. They will be answered anonymously, but answers you’ll get (if you have questions, of course).

Obviously, it’s not a recent photo. September flowers, they are.

I don’t have all that many. Flower photos, that is. We didn’t have the variety or quantity we had in Colorado. Perhaps we’ll get there, but we’re trying to keep from getting saddled with a lot of maintenance. Lazy, we’re becoming.

For anyone interested, all of these are crops of the original, processed with Topaz Sharpen AI, then Color Efex Pro 4, then tweaked in Lightroom, then processed with Define 2, and then output as JPG in two sizes; one for SmugMug, and one for the blog.

These seem ripe for some creative tweaking . . . probably on a future post.

I’m slowly making my way through the 2019 photos to see what worthwhile shots I can share. I mean, I have many photos, but most are me testing what the camera and lens combinations can do.

Notice that you can either get a larger view here by clicking on the photo or click on the link in the caption to go to the SmugMug gallery. I plan to add to the gallery, but right now there are only five photos populating it.

At the same time I shot the above, I saw something strange. I’ve seen herons in various poses, but I’ve never seen a heron in this pose.

This is a crop of a large photo, so the quality isn’t there, but you can easily see it’s asking for a handout. I didn’t include the full-size version because it doesn’t look good at the pixel level (I did a lot of tweaking to make it presentable).

Seriously, the only thing I could think of was that it was drying the underside of its wings . . . or trying to get a suntan under its beak.

I wasn’t far off once I looked into it. It seems it’s a common sunning behavior for some large birds to warm up. It was a cool day, so that makes sense. Certainly, the feathers don’t look wet. The thing is, I’ve had the opportunity to observe a lot of herons since moving here, and I’d never seen that pose before.

Here are two more photos shot with the P900. They are not any better (worse, in fact, so I’m presenting them without the option to enlarge them.

Anyway, remember to vote and to direct friends, enemies, and people you have no opinion about toward the trio of stories.

Here’s the gallery of the above . . .

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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