Little known fact: St Petersburg’s pier changes color at night.  It’s fairly subtle, every few minutes, the pier subtly changes from one color to another.  They have a full time staff of apprentice Wizards from Hogwarts on it.

A note of the photos:
I took special care to take great photos at night.   I think I did pretty well, those white dots aren’t dust on a paper photo, those are stars in the sky!  If you look close you can even see some of them reflected in the water.  Mmmm, maybe I should have edited them out cuz they look a bit like dust on a scan of a paper photo…  anyway the last photo is a close up of the pirate ship that was docked there the night I was taking photos.

This one will make a nice wallpaper I think, because it’s big and not cluttered at all.

Moon photo1600 x 1050 wallpaper

Way back in 2003 I was riding my bicycle home from work along harbor drive in Venice Florida.  It was exactly right here, except the area wasn’t taken over by that restaurant, it was still part of the park that was close by.  It was an area with tall ferns giving way to a forest (they ironically cut down all the trees, bought new ones and planted them there, all at taxpayers expense!) , a beautiful wild space.  Not three feet from the sidewalk I saw two VERY (each easily more than afoot around and eight feet long) large Eastern Diamond back rattlesnakes fighting.

Well I watched them for a while and it seemed like they had no interest in stopping so I hoped on my bicycle sprinted the few miles home grabbed someone else’s digital camera (a sucky kodak), then headed back.  I thought for sure they would be gone by the time I returned.  They were not.  They were still actively engaged.

Here’s a warning for all yo would be photographers out there.

No it’s not about the dangers of getting too close to venomous snakes, that goes without saying, My warning is about technology.  In my original photos you could still see things like the drops of that afternoons rain on the ferns leaves and the details of the snakes eyes.  But I had a hard drive crash and lost them all.  The only copies I have are these which were the highly compressed copies I put on one of the first versions of this website back in 2003.  The lesson?  Always back up copies of those important photos.

Black skimmers are truly a unique looking bird.  The have a special beak that allows them to feed by flying quickly along the surface of the water latching onto any small fish they encounter.  Doesn’t seem like a very efficient method to me, but it sure seems to work for them.

St Petersburg on the other hand went with the theory that it’s dangerous to build buildings on the waterfront (we have hurricanes in Florida) and the burden of making these building safe shouldn’t be placed on the public.

A view of St Petersburg Pier from North Beach Park in downtown.

  If a 20 foot tidal surge hits a park, it’s no big deal, but if it hits a series of billion dollar condo buildings with rich old people in them it’s a huge deal.  Besides, if they remove the beach and/or build right on top of the waterfront, they’ve destroyed the view for those wealthy people.  Having a park as a buffer between the high rise condos and the waterfront on the other hand solves all these problems.

St Petersburg is on a peninsula anyway, so there’s plenty of other waterfront property for the rich folks to hog.

This panorama is of the beach at Treasure Island, Florida. Treasure Island is another small township that’s located on a barrier island on the western edge of St. Petersburg Florida’s metropolitan area. This photo is special to me because I remember enjoying watching the storm roll in. You can see the storm in the photo, it’s an impressive one.

A Panorama showing storm clouds moving over a Florida beach