More Advertising and a Clarification

It’s come to my attention that I was unclear yesterday about the new Gallery and what it involved. Through the BPC Gallery site, you can click on the tabs below each image, such as “buy print” or “buy card,” in order to 1. Order prints of my photos or 2. Create cards using a specific photo of mine. But those cards will not be pre-made with my (if I do say so myself) witty text inside.

Since some people indicated a preference for pre-made, event-specific cards, I have also created a Zazzle site with pre-made cards with my images; currently there are mainly holiday cards (including ones with owls wishing you “Appy Owlidays”) available, but I will be posting many, many more in the days and weeks to come. That site—which will also be linked in perpetuity through the “Buy Cards and Prints” tab above—is:

Beasts in a Populous City Designs
(http://www.zazzle.com/o_ambrogio*)

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Getting into the Spirit of the Season: Advertising!

[just itching to tell you my news...]

That’s right, the day you’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived: you can now own high-quality prints of flamingos feeding, orangutans brachiating, and cows pretending to be innocent—among others. Ever wanted to send a greeting card with a picture of a lemur on it? Ever wanted to send a Christmas card wishing your loved ones “Appy Owlidays”? Now you can!

I’ve gotten enough (positive) comments on my photos that it seemed time to make them available for purchase as prints or cards. So I’ve set up a “gallery,” a separate blog that shows all of the images that are available (entries are grouped by month). The blog is Beasts in a Populous City Gallery, http://BPCgallery.blogspot.com, and it can be accessed any time from the new top-tab, “Buy Prints and Cards.” I think that any details about the prints are already posted in that tab or on the Gallery site, but if you don’t find what you’re looking for there, just comment on this post with a question, and I’ll answer it.

Stay tuned for a less-commercially-inclined post tomorrow!

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

The Charisma Continues: Red Pandas (part 2)

It's been a lovely Thanksgiving weekend, but I'm still in a somewhat comatose state from the holiday (and the eating...), so I hope you'll forgive the lack of introduction for these further photos of red pandas. Hopefully the cuteness speaks for itself.

[The End]

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Flamingo Friday: Feathers Again

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll just moralize briefly about the fact that it’s always worth considering the plight of other species as well as our own on Thanksgiving, and thinking of what we can do to help them—be it giving money to a conservation group, planting more native wildflowers in spring, or being more careful with our resource consumption/waste disposal.

Okay, enough of that. Since Thanksgiving doesn’t have a specific visual theme (except eating), I’ll just post some images of zoo life in autumn:

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

The Charisma Begins: Red Pandas (part one)

I don’t have a whole lot to say about red pandas (beyond what I already wrote in this post) except, “They’re so cute!” But then, since that’s sort of the reason for this entry, it’s not really a problem. I can say that they are not cooperative photo subjects; in some ways, they’re even worse than otters, for all that the otters are more frenetically active. Red pandas like to do things like curl up, ever so adorably, in trees, where branches and leaves obscure their fox-like features.


Or they like to walk through their enclosure, scent-marking it—all very admirable, I’m sure, but even at a slow pace, they climb up and down and behind things, making it very difficult to get a clear shot.


There have been lucky moments, however, and now that it’s late autumn and the trees are mainly bare of leaves, it’s much easier to get pictures that include these guys’ faces (there’s a male and a female). So enough of the narrative; enjoy the photos.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Wild Wildlife: Share the Fountains

A Quick Picture (or so)

Well, otters won out in the Charismatic Macrofauna vote, but I’ll have to post first about red pandas (the runners-up) anyway, since I learned some new things about small-clawed otters this past week, and it’ll take me a little while to write up a proper entry about them. So here are a couple of otter pictures (of one plunging for and playing with a pebble) to tide you over, and look forward to red pandas, and then more otters, in the near future.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Flamingo Friday: A Quiet Morning

Usually, even when feeding, the flamingos are full of honks and squawks and strange little coughing moans, but every now and then, for a minute or two, they fall silent, and the only sound is the rippling of water as they run their beaks over the silken surface.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

1930s Gangster Turns Gorilla

While I wait for a few more people to cast their vote on yesterday’s entry, I’ll simply ask: doesn’t that look like a toothpick to you? Pretty soon, this guy will be tossing a coin in one hand, too…

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Battle of the Charismatic Macrofauna

“Charismatic macrofauna,” as some of you may remember, is the term used by biologists (at least, the ones I spend time with) to describe those species of animals that are large (or larger than the majority of animal life on the planet, such as insects, parasites, krill, etc.) and considered cute by almost everybody. These species are often used as poster animals for conservation causes, since most people have greater emotional interest in saving an adorable bear than a lichen. –But this is all peripheral to the subject of today’s post.

I happen to have a number of photos of a few species of the zoo’s charismatic macrofauna, and while I will probably post entries about all of these species at some point, I wanted to ask you, my readers, which you’d like to see first.

So, would you prefer a post, with plenty of pictures, about:

Pandas?


Ring-tailed lemurs?


Asian small-clawed otters?


Or red pandas?


(Bear in mind that the quality or cuteness level of these particular pictures does not represent the general cuteness level of the photos I have for each species; in fact, I’m deliberately tantalizing you with my less-than-best images of these guys.)

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: Scarlet Ibis Takes Off

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

It's All A Blur

I took a whirlwind trip to NYC this past weekend to see friends and family (not that the two are mutually exclusive), so my opportunities to photograph wildlife were somewhat reduced—not because there isn’t any nature in New York, but because I was generally too busy visiting people to take pictures outside. I did, however, enjoy hearing the sweet sounds of pigeon courtship coming from a window-sill:


And wandering through Central Park on my way to the A-line subway:


And on the train back to DC, I was able to appreciate what’s left of the fall foliage and to experiment with using slower shutter speeds to better illustrate the bright, flickering smear of color I saw out of the train window:



There were moments, too, when for just a second the sun would strike changing leaves at such an angle that it turned them into burning jewels, shards of stained glass, shattered fragments of light flaring up against the backdrop of ordinary trees—and for that instant, seeing them, I would be pierced with a feeling of exhilaration and incipient loss so clear that it was like being injected with the distillation of autumn.

But you can’t reproduce that.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}