The Zebra Longwing (Heliconius charitionius) is the state butterfly of Florida. They used to be a rare sight in my butterfly garden, but this year are the most common sight so far. The Orange Cestrum (Cestrum aurantiacum) is the most popular plant in the garden so far this year too. It’s grown too big for its spot though and needs to be moved or at least severely pruned this Fall.

View the photo on Flickr

The photo was published as part of Derrick Story’s “Photo Assignment” gallery for April 2008, “Angular,” on The Digital Story web site.

View the photo on Flickr

The simpler analysis is probably PepsiStuff. One 20 oz. bottle gets you one point. Five points gets you a song download on Amazon. A song typically goes for 89 cents. So each point is worth about 18 cents. The caveat is that not every song is buyable in this manner.

With MyCokeRewards, I often redeem 220 points for a gold movie pass good at AMC Theatres. The maximum current price of an AMC movie ticket is $9.50. The makes each point worth about 4 cents. One 20 oz. bottle of soda gets you three points, making the value of the points per bottle about 12 cents. I often buy my Coke products in 12-packs, however, and the point value on the 12-pack then works out to 40 cents.

I also saw a sign on the convenience store door that said MyCokeRewards was like, “buy eight, get one free” on 20 oz. bottles. In that case, if the store charges $1.39 for your 20 oz. bottle, the value per point is close to 6 cents and the point value per bottle works out to about 18 cents, which gets us back into the PepsiStuff value ballpark per 20 oz. bottle purchased.

I might have to do a further exercise to see if the point differential would make it beneficial to buy six-packs of 24 oz. plastic bottles rather than 12-packs of 12 oz. cans. Then you’d have to get into the eco-friendliness of plastic bottles vs. aluminum cans, too. I always recycle both, btw.

Just a reminder that no matter how busy or hurried you are, you should always be willing to stop for a moment and listen to the call of the flowers. If you have your camera with you, that’s all the better.

Cloudless Sulphur butterfly.

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My best shot on a night of fighting with the clouds.

Update: View my whole set from the evening on Flickr.

The photo above was my first shot posted of the event and that got it picked up on a couple of eclipse stories (1, 2) on Yahoo! News. It was viewed over 3,000 times during the course of the evening and is now over 4,000 total views, by far my most ever.

The photo was published as part of Derrick Story’s “Photo Assignment” gallery for December 2007 on The Digital Story web site.

View the photo on Flickr

Shot with “super macro” on my new camera.

The aformentioned camera conundrum was resolved in mid-December when, after spending what seemed like a couple of hours in Best Buy going through every menu and setting on the camera, I brought home an Olympus Stylus 770 SW.

I feel guardedly positive about the purchase. “Mr. Though shalt buy Canon” brought home an Olympus and I’m not used to the UI or the handling quite yet. One thing that’s taking getting used to is the lens being up in the corner of the body. I’ve taken several pictures that contain a fat-finger corner vignette.

It has performed very well on its first couple of kayak adventures–to Turkey Creek in Palm Bay during Christmas week and up and down the Ichetucknee River on New Year’s Eve.

I love the sturdy feel. The handling is good even with my big, thick-fingered hands, but I sometimes find myself pushing the wrong button due to unfamiliarity. The screen is good enough to shoot with in broad daylight which is good because there is no optical viewfinder.

I haven’t tried the panorama feature yet because I just got an Olympus xD card last week (a gift). I don’t like that Olympus makes you buy their memory cards in order to unlock features. I wish is used SD memory instead just because the world doesn’t need so many memory card types.

I wondered today, when I read the Olympus announcement of the Stylus 1030 SW, whether I should have waited. I like the look of the Canon-ish mode dial. 10 megapixels (vs. 7) and the more versatile zoom specs might come in handy too. This isn’t my first experience with this, I think I bought my Digital Rebel not long before the Rebel XT came out.