A nature photographer’s images and stories of birds, butterflies, and other creatures from her backyard near Orlando, FL
April 26, 2014 - Sadly, I’ve realized in the past week or two that the American Goldfinches in my backyard have migrated home for the summer. It’s always sad to see them go. They are such cheerful little birds and their songs are so sweet. I enjoy hosting them for the winter. The video below was taken back in […]
April 17, 2014 - The last time we had a total lunar eclipse, it was a few days before Christmas and I photographed the moon using my old 40D camera and my 400mm lens. A few days later, Rich surprised me with the Beast! Ever since then, I’ve been waiting for the next eclipse, so that I could get […]
April 6, 2014 - Sometimes it’s great to go off to exciting places to take pictures of nature. Sometimes it’s nice just to stay home and photograph the nature in your own backyard! You never know what you are missing until you spend a few hours curled up in a blind or hidden in some bushes. I know that […]
February 10, 2014 - I finally pulled out my bird blind for the first time this winter. It’s a great way to get shots of the birds in my backyard. My blind is basically a big camouflage tent. There’s room inside for me, the Beast, my tripod, even a chair. I zip myself in as Rich laughs, then I […]
February 7, 2014 - Poor Squirt – it wasn’t enough that I withheld pansies for lightpad photography once, but I had such a good time that I did it again! I took some pansies and some small petunias and played more with my new ArtOGraph Lightpad. Then I spent a rainy afternoon having fun with the post-processing. A few of […]
February 4, 2014 - Rich got me an ArtOGraph Lightpad for Christmas, after seeing me drool over some of Denise Ippolito’s flower shots. I infuriated Squirt by photographing some pansies on the Lightpad out on his porch, where he sat waiting to devour my subjects as soon as I finished photographing them. Whiskey was right there, too! At our […]
January 27, 2014 - The Hooded Mergansers continue to hang out at my backyard pond, and I’ve visited them several times over the past month. They are very skittish birds. I lie down near the pond’s edge and use my groundpod to balance the Beast. The birds usually start out on the opposite side of the pond, but after […]
December 21, 2013 - Yesterday afternoon I went down to our local retention pond where a flock of Hooded Mergansers can often be found diving. I got lots of funny looks as I walked down our residential street with my big camera and lens, carrying my groundpod. (The only bad thing about the groundpod is that it is incredibly […]
December 16, 2013 - My mom’s neighbors (hi Dick and Connie!) recently gave her a branch from a flowering orchid, and my mom was sweet and froze it for me! I guess she wanted to see more frozen flowers on my blog. :) Then she was nice enough to keep it in the freezer for me for a few […]
December 8, 2013 - Our neighborhood Yellow-throated Warbler is back! We call him Bow Tie because his black and white colors remind me of a tuxedo, and his bright yellow tummy is his bow tie. We’ve seen him for the past couple of winters. He’s one of my regular suet customers, although my first shot of him this year […]
December 7, 2013 - In my last post I wrote about photographing pansies under a hose. After I finished playing with the flowers, I was inspired to try a different take on my Colorful Water Droplet experiment. With my first colorful water droplets, I focused close on a single water droplet as it dripped from my kitchen faucet. The […]
December 5, 2013 - I have a secret. Don’t tell Squirt. The last time we bought him pansies, I didn’t give them to him right away. I took them to the backyard and photographed them. Then he got to devour them. I have another secret. I wanted to try photographing pansies in rain, but there was no rain in […]
December 1, 2013 - We drove by our local retention pond over Thanksgiving break and found that our flock of Hooded Mergansers is back! These diving ducks are such fun to watch and photograph. They are pretty skittish, though, so you have to move carefully or the whole flock will fly off. A cold front was moving through, and […]
November 22, 2013 - Sometimes it’s great just to bird in your own backyard. Like on a gray, drizzly morning when you’re stuck at home waiting for a workman to show up. This morning I had several Painted Buntings (both males and greenies), a pair of American Goldfinches, a couple of House Finches, and an Eastern Phoebe (an occasional […]
November 17, 2013 - This was a gray icky weekend – why is it that we have bright clear skies during the work week, then cold fronts over the weekends? It’s a Florida winter pattern! So the cats and I birded from our house windows this weekend, and the pictures below were taken through the windows in the drizzle. […]
October 31, 2013 - Happy Halloween! The cats and I convinced Rich to carve a cat-o-lantern again this year. He does such a good job with them! Goldilocks says the pumpkin is orange, just like her. Whiskey wanted to call it a jack-o-loopy. Squirt just sat on the grill and supervised. I experimented with my flash in order to […]
October 11, 2013 - I saw my first of fall Painted Bunting at my feeder this afternoon! I had just cleaned the feeder and refilled it with fresh millet this morning. My bird stayed for a few minutes, dining on the millet inside my bunting cage. Just as I got to the window with my camera, he flew off. […]
October 5, 2013 - I’ve been working every weekend since I returned from Maine, and I need to start making time to get back out with my camera. I’m hearing warblers chip-chip in the treetops in the evenings, and the sunrises this week have been gorgeous! In the meantime, I took a page from Herman‘s book and played with […]
October 1, 2013 - Can you believe it’s October already? Seems like it was just yesterday that I was photographing baby Sandhill Cranes and newborn cygnets! And now the fall breeze is in the air and the days are getting shorter, quickly. That means it’s time for fall mums and pumpkins! Chrysanthemums are some of my favorite flowers. They […]
September 27, 2013 - We took a walk around the neighborhood the other night and I had to take my camera. Our community flower beds are full of colorful pentas right now, and they call my name every time I drive by them! The mass of colors made me want to experiment with some intentional blurs… First I tried […]
August 28, 2013 - It’s been a while since I’ve written about the roses and butterflies in the backyard. While I love to go cool places to photograph birds, sometimes the best opportunities come in your own backyard. As frequent readers of my blog know, I have a bit of a green thumb, and I’ve landscaped our garden with […]
August 6, 2013 - Our cats were enchanted by a guest visitor to our front trees last week. A juvenile Downy Woodpecker flew in and tried to find food. You could tell from his behavior that he was a juvie – the poor little guy was wearing himself out, pecking at a live tree, trying to extract sap from […]
August 2, 2013 - Ever since my first frozen flower experiments, Rich whispers “Freeze me!” in my ear every time we pass a clump of African Irises. On a recent rainy day (we’ve had plenty of those!), I took a flower inside and did some more experimentation. This time I didn’t freeze the flower. I set it up in […]
July 29, 2013 - Last week we had a hummingbird in our backyard! We were eating dinner on our back porch with the cats when I noticed the hummer nectaring on my hummingbird bush. By the time I grabbed my camera, the bird had gone. I couldn’t tell if it was a male or female. But it was a […]
June 28, 2013 - It’s been raining cats and dogs around Central Florida lately! And my cats are not particularly happy about it. They are not fans of lightning and thunder, and even the gentle rains often leave the porch too wet for feline usage. But on the bright side, there’s a decent chance of catching a rainbow after […]
June 26, 2013 - The little brown truck brought me a new toy this summer! It’s a Canon 5D Mark III camera body. I’m so excited about it, as it has much improved autofocus, even better than my 1D Mark IV. It also does in-camera HDR and in-camera multiple exposures. It’s a full-frame camera, which will be fun for […]
June 16, 2013 - Today is a big-number day on catandturtle.net – 1500 blog posts! That’s a lot of posts! I started blogging back in January 2007 with the goal of keeping track of the wildlife in my backyard. I wanted to know when migratory birds came and went, to document which species of butterflies visited the yard, and […]
June 7, 2013 - Thanks to everyone who notified me today that my website was down. I upgraded the hosting service today, so it took a while for the updates to go live. Hopefully the site will be faster now! The cats and I spent a pleasant hour on the porch this afternoon while I worked on the website. […]
May 31, 2013 - A while back I read a fun blog entry by Denise Ippolito where she froze flowers to photograph. It sounds weird, but she got some amazing results. Then my friend Kathy Urbach started experimenting with the same technique. I liked their images and decided to try the technique myself. It’s not as easy as it […]
May 21, 2013 - The other day we got home from work and Squirt really, really wanted to go out on the porch. So did Whiskey. How to say no to two adorable cats? So I grabbed my macro lens and extension tubes and we all went outside. While the boys sniffed the breeze and chased lizards, I photographed […]
April 29, 2013 - My daylilies in the backyard are starting to bloom, and they are so colorful. I’ve been having fun with my macro lens, Photoshop, the Nik filters, and some Fractalius. (Rich loves to tease me that I have Windows running on my Mac for almost the sole purpose of the Fractalius Photoshop filter!) It’s fun to […]
April 24, 2013 - I’m sorry to report that my backyard migrant birds have left. :( Last Tuesday after work I had an hour of free time, so I set up my blind (yes, my actual blind, not my bush hideaway!) I set up a pretty branch perch next to their feeder, trying to get “the pretty shot.” Unfortunately, […]
April 16, 2013 - I’ve been enjoying watching the brightly colored birds passing through my yard in the past couple of weeks. I wrote recently about an Indigo Bunting that joined our feeder party, and he inspired me to get out in the backyard so that I could get closer to the birds. I have a blind, but I’ve […]
March 25, 2013 - Rich looked out at our bunting feeder tonight and found a new customer at our backyard bird feeder – an Indigo Bunting! He’s the first one we’ve had visit our yard. Rich stopped and said, “What’s that!? He’s different!” I grabbed my camera and Rich grabbed binoculars and we both said, “Indigo Bunting!” He’s a […]
March 7, 2013 - My backyard has been filled with American Goldfinches for the past few weeks. They empty my six-port niger feeder in just a few days, so finally I had to break down and get out the 24-port feeder! They are eating us out of house and home. It’s a good thing they are so cute and […]
March 4, 2013 - I glanced out the kitchen window yesterday afternoon to see FIVE male Painted Buntings eating at the feeder together! That’s the most I’ve seen together ever in the yard. Luckily I had the Beast nearby, and luckily my motion of putting the camera in the window didn’t scare them away. As I hit the shutter, […]
March 2, 2013 - Yesterday morning I spent some time birding in my Central Florida backyard, and I found the funniest thing: my Painted Buntings have a sweet tooth! I was observing them at my millet feeder, noting that there seemed to be more “greenies” (females and/or immature males) than there were a few weeks ago. Then I noticed […]
February 27, 2013 - This past weekend I was feeling well enough to get out and shoot, but it was windy and rainy. Yuck! So I got out the camera and headed for my own backyard. My azaleas are in full bloom, and they are just gorgeous. Luckily the rain didn’t blow all the azalea blooms away like last […]
February 8, 2013 - Rich and I were saddened to walk into Pansies-R-Us (a.k.a. Lowes) yesterday to discover that the garden center is now stocking marigolds instead of pansies! Squirt is mourning the loss of his favorite “leafy greens.” He likes the warmer weather out on his porch, but he feels that the pansies have been taken away too […]
February 2, 2013 - Today is Groundhog Day, and Punxsutawney Phil says that we’re in for an early spring. Thank goodness — I’m tired of the cold! I didn’t need a groundhog to tell me that spring is coming, though. My backyard plants are telling me all about it. The oaks are putting out their new leaves already, my […]
February 1, 2013 - If you are reading this, you’re seeing catandturtle from our new host server. Did you notice how much faster it loaded? :) :) :)
January 27, 2013 - You know you’ve been bitten by the photography bug when you’re in a garden center, and you see a display of flowering Gerber Daisies, and you purchase it thinking, “oooh, that one would look good with the Fractalius filter applied!” You can have lots of fun with a pot of Gerber Daisies, Photoshop, and filters… […]
January 15, 2013 - I’ve had lots of time to enjoy the birds in my own backyard lately. It’s a backyard winter wonderland! All the winter migrants are here and the backyard is full of activity. It’s great! This weekend I had all these different kinds of birds: American Goldfinch Pine Siskin Painted Bunting Eastern Phoebe American Robin Cedar […]
January 8, 2013 - My favorite wintertime birds are back – the American Goldfinches! I know, you’re wondering why my favorite birds are the common goldfinches when I’m so fortunate to have Painted Buntings in my yard each winter. The Painteds are beautiful, and definitely great to have visiting, but they stay so aloof. They call to each other […]
December 22, 2012 - It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas! Work is done for the year, the cats are enjoying the cold front breezes out on the porch, and I got to photograph Squirt’s favorite holiday treat. Well, one of Squirt’s favorite holiday treats. :)
December 16, 2012 - This is my mom’s nemesis bird – the hawk that disturbs her little birdies at their feeders! He flew up on top of this phone pole the last time I was there. I grabbed the Beast and hand-held a few shots before he flew off. We knew he was either a Cooper’s Hawk or a […]
December 13, 2012 - My ‘Gold Medal’ rose is blooming like crazy right now. The big yellow flowers are very pretty and fragrant. I went outside on Sunday morning to fertilize the roses, and I immediately ran back inside to get the camera. The dew drops were too pretty not to photograph!
December 12, 2012 - Tonight was our city’s annual Santa Claus visit. Accompanied by police and firemen, Santa rides his sleigh up and down all the streets. His helpers throw candies to the kids on the sidewalks. It was fun to walk out and see tons of people in the streets to wait for Santa. Carla had to work, […]
December 10, 2012 - I love our winter bird visitors! The backyard is so active these days. We have plenty of Palm Warblers that hop through the yard, and I finally saw Bow Tie, our Yellow-Throated Warbler that seems to come back from year to year. He likes to hop up on our window and peck at the glass. […]