I am not sure why they call them cypress knees. They look kind of eerie and I can imagine a slow speed canoe chase through a foggy wetlands where dodging the knees is the difference between life and death. This solitary one looks like the head of Valcor The Luck Dragon from the The Neverending Story rising from a lake.
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A Plant with Knees
Lettuce Lake is a state park located in Tampa Florida. I like visiting there whenever I am in Tampa. It has a great series of boardwalks running through florida wetlands and a wildlife sanctuary. The reflections in the still dark waters can produce magnificent mirror images until disrupted by a bird, canoe or alligator.
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Swamp Reflections
Lettuce Lake is a state park located in Tampa Florida. I like visiting there whenever I am in Tampa. It has a great series of boardwalks running through florida wetlands and a wildlife sanctuary. This year It was kind of overcast when we arrived and for the first time I actually saw it in monochrome. This is one of the black and white shots from the visit.
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Lettuce Lake State Park
Frick Park in Pittsburgh is over 650 acres and the largest in the city. It has a wonderful collection of trails, two dog parks,playgrounds, baseball fields and even an occasional black bear can be spotted along with deer, rabbits and other forest creatures. Unknown to me until recently is that apparently fairies or Leprechauns also live in the park.
Along the Tranquil trail you can find many of these doors built in to tree stumps or even living trees. I have asked people about them and some say that parents construct them with their children. I don’t believe that for a minute. They must be fairy doors. I mean what else can they be?
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Fairy Door
I took this picture of a fawn in 2002 at the end of our first summer living on the mountain. People that lived there full time like us said wait a year and you will start to think of them as vermin. It never quite got to that level for me because the next year our community voted for a deer cull in a heated political battle between the “full timers” and “weekenders”. The herd grew at a rapid rate in our community because no hunting was allowed. Deer are not dumb and they began to migrate into our community. DCNR noticed that some deer had wasting disease and fawns that were born were small and struggled to survive. The amount of deer/auto accidents increased dramatically.
The size of the herd was unhealthy according to DCNR and our local environmental experts. After the first two years of deer culls the herd reduced to a more normal size. We began to see fawns again and the herd was restored to health. This deer has all but lost the markings fo a fawn as it munched in my back yard waiting for its first summer to end.
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Bambi Lives
The Blue Heron is a beautiful fisher bird that migrates to Florida and other southern states during the winter. There is something about this particular one that made me think that this bird knew exactly how pretty it was. The bird kept turning as we walked along a boardwalk almost as if posing for a photograph.
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This title is really a stretch. Florida doesn’t really have waterfalls. The highest elevation in the state id 345 feet so the terrain doesn’t lend itself to what a Pennsylvanian would call a waterfall. There are cascades and rapids however in some of the rivers and streams. Florida also has wonderful and well run State Parks with great facilities that are well maintained. This picture was taken at Hillsborough River State Park north of Tampa.
I didn’t have a tripod but was able to rest the camera on a railing and take this picture at a shutter speed of 1/8th of a second at f22 with an ISO of 100. Normally I would use a tripod for this kind of shot but have been impressed with Nikon’s VR {vibration reduction} lenses and risked the shot. It turned out so well I am sorry I did not experiment with even slower shutter speeds.
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If you follow this blog you have come to realize that I love Pelicans. I photograph them whenever I can and even offer Pelican apparel on my commercial site. Yet as many as I have photographed, I have still not captured the “money shot”. The shot that I visualize is a Pelican rising out of the water with a fish in his mouth. I guess I have to keep taking pictures of them. This one was captured in flight off Merritt Island in Florida.
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I never knew until recently that cypress trees have knees. I always thought that they were dead cypress trees but apparently they are not. Nobody really knows why they exist but harvesting them is illegal in Florida because it affects the health of the tree.
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Cypress Knees
What you can’t see in this picture is the baby alligator at the other end of the log watching these three. If the aligator was a couple of years older this trio wouldn’t be sunning themseves on this log.
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Tres Amigos
Imagery Photography 