I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does

It’s ridiculous that I call myself a pet photographer and can’t get any shots of my own dog except with the iPhone. I hope I never have a photo session with a dog like Violet. What the hell would I do?! It’s impossible to outsmart a dog like this so I don’t think I’d have a chance. Don’t think for a minute that I pulled one over on her by using my phone’s camera. She knew exactly what I was doing because she refused to look at me. I guess she found the cell phone a whole lot less offensive than my Canon camera and decided to allow me to have  a little fun.

Here she is on the bed I made for her:

In this one you can see her bum foot, sans two toes;

She rolls and rubs in the bed every day. I never expected her to like it this much but she spends every evening lounging in it.

I had the opportunity to photography two dogs yesterday in York, Ruger, a mastiff-shar-pei mix and Stella, a pit bull. Both are from shelters in Ohio and nicer dogs are hard to find. I’m finding that the clients I get for pet photos are really cool people, the kind I’d probably choose as friends had we met otherwise. I guess anyone who values their pets enough to have their pictures taken is just the kind of person I’d like.

EDIT: Wrong! Someone on bugguide.com corrected me. This is not a luna moth caterpillar, but a polyphemous moth caterpillar.

Yesterday I left the house to go for a walk but didn’t get far when I spotted this caterpillar on the sidewalk:

It’s the larval form of a luna moth, Actias luna.

I have no idea what this black spot might be, but I posted the same photo on www.bugguide.net asking for an answer.

There’s a good chance that the mark could be of parasitic origin. Caterpillars are unfortunate hosts to a myriad of wasp parasites that lay eggs inside them. The eggs hatch and the developing larvae live inside the caterpillar and eat all but its vital innards to keep it alive as long as possbile. The wasps emerge from the caterpillar, leaving a gutted husk.

If you’re the kind of person that thinks about these kinds of things, you might be wondering how the wasp eggs and larvae go undetected by the caterpillar’s immune defenses. I wondered the same thing until I found a paper in which researchers discovered that certain species of wasps use viral particles to commandeer the caterpillar’s physiology and avoid detection of the invading eggs and young.

Tomato hornworms are parasitized by Braconid wasps. The wasp pierces the caterpillar’s body and injects its eggs along with viral particles that are manufactured in the female wasp’s ovaries. Scientists analyzed the genetic information in these viral particles and found that the genes from these viral particles match the wasp’s own genome. How can they match? One is a virus, the other is an insect. In other words, the particles are indeed viral in nature, but their components lie within the wasp’s own genome. The wasps make the virus!  More that twenty different genes coding for characteristic components of nudiviruses – insect viruses often used in biological pest control – are expressed in the wasps’ ovaries (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090216100425.htm). This most likely happened millions of years ago when the wasp integrated the genome of a nudivirus into its own and used it as a vector to transfer their own genes.

Here’s a photo of a tomato hornworm covered with 154 braconid wasp cocoons.  As if it’s not bad enough that the larvae develop inside the hornworm, they then force it to carry them around until they emerge. Hornworms are pests of tomato plants so, as a a person obsessed with tomatoes, I can’t say that I feel too much pain for this worm.

There are over 100,000 species of wasps known to science with many more yet to be discovered. Most of them are parasitic, so there are untold numbers of examples of insane and scarcely believable host/parasite interactions going on.

Again, I say you can’t make this stuff up. If you think that the scene from Alien where that youngster creature explodes from that guy’s chest was unique and scary, think again. Far worse things happen in nature. Far worse. Like this (please watch this video, it’s unbelievable):

I remembered once hearing a news story on NPR about a fabulous art collection somewhere in the Philadelphia suburbs. There was some kind of flap going on but I can’t remember what it was. I forgot about it until just recently and did an internet search a few days ago. I found that the faded memory was of a place called the Barnes Foundation which houses one of the most extensive collections of French impressionist art in the world…and it’s privately owned.  From the website:

The Barnes Foundation houses one of the finest collections of nineteenth and twentieth-century French painting in the world. An extraordinary number of masterpieces by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse provide a depth of work by these artists unavailable elsewhere.

The Barnes Foundation houses one of the finest collections of French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modern paintings in the world, including an extraordinary number of masterpieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (181), Paul Cézanne (69), and Henri Matisse (59). The collection also includes important works by Pablo Picasso (46), Chaim Soutine (21), Henri Rousseau (18), Amedeo Modigliani (16), Edgar Degas (11), Vincent van Gogh (7), Georges Seurat (6), Edouard Manet (4), and Claude Monet (4).

“Extraordinary” is no exaggeration. We went today and both Gene and I were flabbergasted. Here’s the website. If you live in PA, Delware or NJ, you owe it to yourself to visit. It’s really nice to have something like this so accessible.  Don’t just show up though – apparently they can’t have too many people traipsing through the museum at once so advance reservations are required.

I was at the Humane League yesterday. This is Senorita, a beautiful American bulldog who needs a home with a strong and active human:

She’s a very nice dog, but strong as an ox and in need of lots of exercise. I always liked American bulldogs and haven’t met a nasty one yet. They were originally bred to hunt boar in the south USA.

Chancey is about as cute as they come and won’t last long at the shelter.

Skip, a kind and friendly male beagle, was adopted a month ago and returned. I can’t imagine why because he’s a great dog. It’s hard to get a photo of a beagle without their nose to the ground, so here’s a shot of his undercarriage:

This is Grandpa, a shepherd mix, found as a stray. He’s active for an older dog and should be lounging on someone’s porch instead of at the shelter. Who the hell allows their senior pet to end up homeless?!

Seriously, people. Adopt some of these dogs!

I’ve been feeling better than I have in a very long time since starting some new medication two weeks ago. I had an appointment with the neurologist and presented him with my headache log – 9 days of pain in 5 weeks was too much for him so he started me on another medication. I can’t even explain the difference, but I just feel almost normal. I must have had background migraine activity going on the whole time, not enough to notice, but enough to make me feel like crap. I have a 3 month recheck MRA on September 13th and I am really hoping the dissection has healed. I ran a mile today and two hours later still no headache.

We just booked a trip to Amsterdam for November and I am almost nuts with excitement. We’re going to take the train to Brussels for a day and possibly Düsseldorf if we have time. The weather isn’t exactly balmy that time of year, but tourism drops sharply and most of our activities will be indoor since we plan on visiting art museums and eating/drinking.

Little Buddy continues to putt along. His abdomen waxes and wanes with fluid retention but not enough to keep him from walking or enjoying the couch. Violet is doing well but I can’t get a picture of her no matter what I do. Treats have no appeal and nothing will convince her to mug for the camera.

Lots of seniors turned in by their owners this week.

Here’s another dog from our shoot in Madison Square Park last weekend, a dachsund/pit bull mix names Sparkles. Her dad’s last name is Sonshine and it’s the perfect name for this dog. It tells you all you need to know about her:

Cats from the Humane League in need of homes…

I had a blast at the workshop and it was one of the best things I’ve done for myself. I left with my head spinning and  not even sure where exactly to start when I got home. We were presented with an enormous amount of valuable information, not just on pet photography, but how to run a business. I can’t imagine trying to do this without having attended.

I stayed at The MAve hotel which was in the Flatiron district on Madison Avenue, just a mile from Penn Station and a block from Madison Square Park. I have always loved New York and post 9/11 it’s better than ever – clean, renovated and proud to claim that it has the lowest crime rate of any major American city.  I arrived at 8:30 am Friday morning which gave me enough time to pop into Paron Fabrics and dash to Kalustyan’s to pick up a variety of spices I wasn’t able to find anywhere else. If you like to cook and don’t know about it, you need to check it out, preferably in person but their website carries everything they have in the store. They have almost every spice known to the human race and I could have spent hours there. I bought several Middle Eastern spice mixes, aleppo pepper, Spanish paprika and the second best dates I have ever eaten, still on the stalk and straight from Jordan (the first best dates I’ve ever eaten were those that I found lying on the ground underneath a date palm in Alice Springs, Australia). Fresh dates and a glass of milk – heavenly!

Sunday was probably the most fun. We spent a few hours in the park photographing canine models under the instruction of Jamie and Nichole. A few times I looked around and realized we were surrounded by a small crowd of people wondering what was going on. Given the shocking and interesting things ones sees on a daily basis in NYC, it came as a surprise that we were the center of so much attention, but I guess that’s the power of dog-love at work. We even had more models than needed since so many bystanders offered their pets as photo subjects. Here are a few things from the shoot:

One of our models for Sunday morning was the cutest dog I have ever seen, a tiny little white chihuahua named Jake. This might be my favorite picture from the shoot and it just about brings tears to my eyes:

The workshop was more than I had even hoped. I got so much information, I don’t even know where to begin. Most of the morning on Sunday was spent in Madison Park photographing dog models under the instruction of our leaders, Jamie and Nichole.  A family walking through the park was nice enough to stop and offer up their pug for a couple of shots. They said she’s an apricot pug, but that face looks more like a prune. Prune pug, I’d call her. This is Mops:

I’m off to Manhattan tomorrow for the Cowbelly photography workshop. Jamie Pflughoeft is the owner of Cowbelly Pet Photography in Seattle and is teaching the workshop along with J. Nichole Smith from Dane + Dane studios, also a pet photographer in Seattle. Jamie is a fabulous photographer and artist, but an even better businesswoman and web wrangler. Do a Google search for “pet photography” and she comes up first. That’s saying something. I really want to learn some of her photography techniques, but what I really need is business training. After this weekend, I’m going to seriously start pushing my photography business. I haven’t done much advertising other than word of mouth and my website and still ended up with six clients, so I am really looking forward to seeing what happens when I start spreading myself around.

I leave you with more dog shots from this week’s Humane League shoot.

This is Danner, a beautiful, gorgeous, perfect specimen of Labrador Retriever:

Tabell, a gentle but energetic senior pit bull who was once someone’s companion:

Duchess, an adorable Mini-Pin:

Cocoa, cocker spaniel:

I don’t talk much about food in this blog, but I probably should because I’m something of a food nut. I love to cook and am one of those locally-produced, no-chemical freaks. Lancaster is a great place to live if you’re into food – not cuisine – but fresh, untainted produce. We’ve been a lot of places and nowhere have we found better sweet corn or tomatoes, both which are in ridiculous abundance here this time of year. I like to know where my food comes from and if I can’t see the animals, we don’t eat it. I get eggs from a woman not far from here who has very well-kept chickens running about the property and whole chickens from Meadowbrook Farms at Central Market that have lived real lives; running around in the grass, eating insects and doing all the chickeny things chickens should.  Food like that has always been the norm in Lancaster for many people and the latest “locavore” rage has made it even better.

As much of a food snob as I am, I do cave to the periodic consumption of the all-American culinary horror, McDonald’s french fries. I hate McDonald’s. I loathe their factory farming practices. I hate that everything they make is essentially a corn product, including the “meat”. I detest the fact that they blight landscapes and towns in virtually every country on earth. I abhor their use of monoculture in crops. Yet several times a year, the siren song of those greasy, disgusting, awful, artery clogging grease sticks beckons me and I cannot resist. I am editing this to add that I also love macaroni and cheese which isn’t so bad, but things go downhill quickly during times of desperation when I am not above indulging in the boxed variety, the kind with that foil packet of artificial, velveeta-esque, cheese goo. Man, does that taste good for lunch on a bad day, or what?

Just today I found this article in which James Oseland, editor of one of my favorite cooking magazines, Saveur, admits his guilty food pleasures. He lists Dr Pepper, BBQ potato chips, McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, Hershey’s chocolate bars, and Swiss Miss Creamy Vanilla Pudding Cups. And he makes no apologies:

I’m sorry, I know it is the height of foodie irresponsibility even to admit to setting foot inside the Evil Death Star that is McDonald’s, but the mega-chain’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches are perfection on a bun. (The editor-in-chief of Saveur likes McDonald’s? Call the President!) From the crisp wedge of battered, fried fish to the dainty dab of tartar sauce, they are a miracle of food science. I remember that the first thing I wanted to eat upon returning the States after spending ten months in a South Indian village sleeping on a mat and eating a strict vegetarian diet was a Filet-O-Fish sammy. They are that important to me.

He opines on BBQ potato chips:

All varieties. All the time. From Kettle Chips to Wise to Ruffles, BBQ-flavored potato chips kick ass. They are salty and sweet and smoky and crisp and crunchy, and they come in the most gorgeous, sunset-y hues known to man. Is there anything more you could want from a food? (And they’re even better when washed down with a salt-counterbalancing swig of straight-from-the-can Dr. Pepper – which, in effect, kills two of my long-standing trash-food obsessions with one stone. Oh, rapture without end!)

Ever heard them described like that?

Coming from a man who has the regular occasion to indulge in the world’s finest cuisine, I don’t know which is more shocking – the fish sandwich or the pudding cups. Oh well, everyone has their epicurean Achille’s heel. So, reader, I pose the question to you – what’s your most embarrassing guilty food pleasure? What’s your indulgence in the underbelly of American food?