Category: Photography

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Nature as Art – Up Close

Today I spent some time in the garden trying to be Georgia O’Keeffe with her oversize flowers, curves and colorful shapes in leaves, mountains or whatever she painted. I love her work! Here’s 10 of about 100 photos I made today in the garden.

It was also a “practice” for next week when I will be at Maquenque Lodge, not only photographing lots of birds, but hopefully some “Nature as Art” photos of many other natural creations in that beautiful wilderness setting, partly from my tree-house room!  🙂   Click an image to enlarge it or start manual slideshow.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

~Marcus Tullius Cicero
See my Flora & Forest Costa Rica gallery for more of this type of “art.”
Or for some of my old Tennessee “Nature a Art” Photos, another gallery with images sized as I sold them in arts & crafts fairs in the 2010’s.
¡Pura Vida!
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My Nashville Zoo Photos Posted

As noted earlier, one of the things I’m doing more of during the “lock-down” time is trying get all of my old photos culled through and posted in one place.

One of the biggest collections is from my 10 years of volunteer work at Nashville Zoo and my Nashville Zoo Gallery is now completed. It includes one of my biggest collections of bird photos along with so many other animals and a really large number of people photos which was what the Zoo PR Dept. wanted a lot of. It was a nice re-living of many great memories at Nashville Zoo. And as I go through other photo files I expect to find more of Nashville Zoo, like when friends and family visited, I often took them to the zoo but haven’t gotten to those photos yet!   🙂

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Organized in 6 super-galleries with many sub-galleries under each.

 

And check out the current Nashville Zoo Website – A wonderful zoo!

¡Pura Vida!

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Yellows & Whites + Grasshopper

Today a cloud of mostly Yellows was in my garden plus one brown Skipper I didn’t try to photograph. They don’t stay still, thus very difficult to photograph and with the book full of Yellows & Whites the identification is not always exacting, but my best effort with a few “either/or” IDs!   🙂

And the grasshopper only eats the leaves, while the butterflies go for the flower nectar, so no competition! They share a flower!   🙂

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My Costa Rica Butterflies Gallery

¡Pura Vida!

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Morning Walk in Nature

Walking around my little house is one morning joy I can have any day! As good as up the hill or in a faraway place.

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There I feel that nothing can befall me.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

My Flora & Forest Gallery

¡Pura Vida!

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Design by Nature

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

~Rabindranath Tagore

 

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Guarumo or Cecropia Tree from my terrace – always facing heaven.

 

You have glimpsed the divine.”
~Vera Nazarian

 

See my Flora & Forest Gallery.

¡Pura Vida!

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Color Walk

On the same walk to town with yesterday’s beetle I snapped these 3 flowers that caught my attention. The red & yellow hibiscus is rare or at least for my eyes!   🙂   One of the red flowers (feature photo) appears to be in the poinsettia family but not the traditional one while the other red flower is more common here, but eye-catching none-the-less!

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“Life is like a box of crayons.”

~John Mayer

My Flora & Forest GALLERY

¡Pura Vida!

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Flowers = Butterflies

And 4 species today!   🙂   I went out and photographed the above flowers for a one-shot post when I realized there was a dozen or so butterflies beyond them on my Porterweed flowers of these 4 species (one I incorrectly named the other day}:

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Cloudless Sulphur
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Statira Sulphur
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Polydamas Swallowtail, I mistakenly called a Red-sided Swallowtail recently. Sorry!

 

Cloudywing Butterfly (not sure which one of several Cloudywings)

 

See more of these 4 and 100 others in my Costa Rica Butterflies Gallery.

¡Pura Vida!

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Red-sided Swallowtail

Yesterday I saw a new butterfly for me and my best efforts at identification using my book and online sites is “Red-sided Swallowtail.” He matches all the photos of that species except for his tail, but that could be one of those “exceptions” every species seems to have. His tail is more like the “Dual-spotted Swallowtail” but the wings are just too different. And his wings are a little bit like “White Crescent Swallowtail” but not totally and those don’t live further south than Honduras, so I’m sticking with this ID for now!  🙂

Just thankful that I have one more new butterfly whatever he is!   🙂

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Butterflies are nature’s angels.
They remind us what a gift it is to be alive.
-Robyn Nola

¡Pura Vida!

 

See my Butterfly Gallery.

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The BIG BOOK!

Finally –  “the big book” – what I’ve been planning for nearly 6 years!  Almost all the birds I’ve photographed since moving to Costa Rica in 2014. I haven’t finished photographing birds here, and next month at Maquenque Lodge I could easily get a photo I will regret is not in this book! But why not do it now, with the Coronavirus Down Time providing time to create and the year of my 80th birthday as a celebration excuse!   🙂  If I keep putting it off, there won’t be a book! And this one is so much bigger and better than my recent Roca Verde Birds book which was just birds in my yard!

Here’s the bookstore official description:

Click cover for preview. Best at full screen!

About the Book
Eighty-year-old retiree from Tennessee, Charlie Doggett, has lived in and explored the rainforests and cloud forests of Costa Rica for 6 years, sharing photos and experiences in his “Retired in Costa Rica” BLOG. This book has 420 bird photos from his blog – more than 300 species of birds, named in both English and Spanish with a complete English-names INDEX. At 230 photo pages, 10 X 8 inches, it’s a great gift or coffee table book about Costa Rica, printed on 100# Premium Lustre Gloss Photo Paper.

Available in a hardcover edition or a PDF electronic version. You can PREVIEW the book electronically for free at: https://www.blurb.com/b/10150063-pura-vida-birds

Check out what I’ve been doing for the last 5+ years!   🙂

¡Pura Vida!