persephone's bees

Honey bee in a pomegranate blossom.  I caught it brushing its antennae with its right foreleg.

manzanita

Saw these tall shrubs on the mountainsides in San Jose.  They looked like some kind of myrtle at first glance--similar branch structure and leaves, but with striking wine-colored bark.  Definitely gorgeous trees--the whole vacation was full of lovely Californian live oaks, eucalyptus trees, and unfamiliar flowers and vines.  My mom and I like to joke that some people go sightseeing, we look at plants.

california

Power lines and mackerel skies on the foothills near my uncle's house.

Kayaking in Sacramento's Folsom Bay.

toddlers

My recent absence was due to a two-week visit to famiy and friends on the West Coast, where I got to see my cousins, including these two little girls.  Did a little shooting with a 50-prime portrait lens (the first three photos), which filled me with envy and want.  I may have found the next item on my wishlist...

pause in flight

Do I ever take pictures of anything other than insects and plants?  Not often...the truth of the matter is, unimaginative as I am, I would rather do the finding and let Nature do the hard work of composing a photograph.  And besides, could anything I came up with be more beautiful than the shadow of a dragonfly's wing on a reed?

bloodworm

Bait from a weekend in Shady Side, MD.  Bloodworms, well, bleed (excessively).  The weird nodule on the left end is its proboscis, or retractable mouthpart; you can see the four-pointed area that contains its four hollow teeth (that inject poison!).  I wish I had gotten a better photo of the proboscis, but the worm had already retracted it after I took this one.

teej

Like most UVa students, I have a half-joking, half-serious reverence for Thomas Jefferson, the founder of our school.  This picture was taken on graduation morning, as my last look at TJ as an undergrad.

eye of newt

Eye of ornamental dragon, actually, but newts and dragons are both vaguely lizardlike, right?

patagonia

A few throwback photos from the trip to Patagonia my junior year, in 2005.  Evidence that the subject, not the camera, makes the photo (taken with an ancient bricklike Sony point-and-shoot that I thought was cutting edge at the time).

lucky

A weird talent of mine is finding four-leaf clovers.  I am strangely adept at spotting them in clover patches, and I always pluck and press them in books, only to find them years later.  I found three today while exploring the patches in my yard.

If only this luck would translate to real life.  I could put it on my resume: "Good at finding four-leaf clovers and turning that luck into efficiency in the workplace."

Tiny garden slug, about half an inch long.

Leaf miner trails.  You can see the tiny droppings left by the caterpillars living between the two epidermal leaf layers.  As they eat their way through the leaf, feeding on the chloroplast-containing palisade cells, they remove the green tissue, leaving only clear surface layers behind.  Definitely click and enlarge this one--you can see minuscule beads of condensation on the inner side of the leaf epidermis.

gibbous

Taken with a 55-200mm lens on a clear night.

pollination

A honeybee on my friend's boardshorts at the beach.

palmetto

South Carolina's state tree, the palmetto, at dusk.

candlelight vigil

Students light each others' candles at a vigil I attended for a classmate who recently passed away.

tug for the town

A few candids taken at a tug-of-war tournament I participated (and made it to 2nd place!) in.

Relay For Life

At Relay For Life, the all-night walkathon for the American Cancer Society.  Many of those energy drinks were consumed through the night.  The second photo is of us on the field, holding glowsticks up to form a glowing cancer ribbon for a photo shot from above.

the reason for my hiatus

These past two weeks have been spent frantically running trials for my thesis research and writing the damn thing up.  Here's a bit of what I do in the lab (it's a psychology lab, and a blood glucose/cognition experiment).

Taking a blood sample in a glucometer cuvette.

Placing the sample in the Hemocue meter.

Relatively high--I think I had just eaten before this and was mapping out how fast my glucose levels would spike.

budding ginkgo

Ginkgos are my favorite trees, and I can't tell you how delighted I am that their little larval leaves are finally coming in.  The top two photos are of the Pratt Ginkgo, a rather famous tree around UVa grounds due to its age and size.  It's a male, and you can see the cone-shaped "flowers" (but of course, these aren't really flowers because ginkgos are gymnosperms and developed before plants evolved flowering structures!).  The bottom two photos are of a female tree, and its little leaves are probably no bigger than a quarter of an inch across.

Ginkgos are considered "living fossils" because they are the last remaining species in their entire phylum (which is kind of a big deal).  Also, they were around during dinosaur times, which is pretty cool too.

miami

nested

scenes from Jamaica

thatched

Back from spring break--I went on a cruise to Jamaica (where this photo was taken).  Returning from the tropics to dreary Charlottesville was less than desirable, but I can feel the stirrings of spring!

inky

This looks pretty cool in color too--shot at dusk, so the sky was a deep saturated blue.