Nature photography

I got a lot of great responses to my recent piece on features of C# I somewhat regret; thanks all for those.

As promised, today on fun-for-Friday-FAIC I've posted some fabulous adventures in nature photography from my recent trip to Lake Huron. Click on any image for a larger version. These were either taken by me or my friend Amber, who graciously loaned me her Canon DSLR, and taken with either the Canon or my GoPro.

Starting with the low point: I did not recognize this fish when my four-year-old friend Ada - she with the sharp eyes for strange fish - spotted it close to shore, but I think now that it is an invasive sea lamprey. This fish has decimated the trout population in Lake Huron. Had I known it was invasive I would have removed it from the lake, but I didn't have access to the internet at the time to look it up.

The water was barely deep enough to conceal this common snapping turtle, one of two I saw on this trip. He or she (the turtle of course living between plated decks that cleverly conceal its sex) was sticking his or her head up to breathe, and got spotted by Amber from a kayak.

Some cedar trees growing out of a limestone outcropping. Nice roots.

We saw a number of northern leopard frogs on this trip; this was the most photogenic. We also saw some leaping out of the lake at sunset to eat low-flying bugs, but did not get any images unfortunately.

We saw a lot of double crested cormorants hunting this year; this one was behaving a bit oddly. It was standing alone in a river, and let me get very close. Normally they're more skittish. Not sure what was up with this bird.

And finally, two pictures of non-terrestrial phenomena. This one was slightly out of focus, but here we've got one of the Perseids meteor shower. The tail is green; perhaps this meteor contained a lot of copper, which would burn green. The cluster of stars is Messier 45, the Pleiades.

Finally, an image of the Milky Way and Great Rift, shot around midnight before the moon rose. The bright star is Altair.