Category: Photo gallery

Many orchids have attractive flowers. Others are bizarre, such as the bulbophyllum sticking its tongues out at you that I saw at the annual orchid show today.

Update: more pictures below the fold. Click to embiggen.

Update II: Welcome, visitors from AoSHQ. Orchids are here. You can find other botanical pictures here and here. Ballet and modern dance are here; contra dancing is with the other Walnut Valley Festival pictures. Stereo pictures, stacked focus and other photographic stunts are here. There are interactive panoramas here.

Continue reading “Today’s weirdo”

My nephew left his guitar at my place, which gave me an excuse to play with focus stacks.

I spent the morning at Wichita State University taking pictures of the sculptures littering the campus. Here are a few; there are some more at my Flickr site. These are all crossview stereo. To view them, cross your eyes until you see three images, then focus on the middle image. Click on them to see them at larger sizes.

Continue reading “Fat people and teddy boys”

More fun with focus stacks in stereo. This one is composed from 58 images in two stacks. It’s a cross-view stereo, i.e., the right eye focuses on the left image and the left eye on the right. Cross-view images are not as comfortable to view as parallel-view, in which the left eye focuses on the left image,¹ but they can be much larger.

You can view this at various sizes by clicking on the picture or opening it in a new window. At the largest size (1920 pixels wide) it probably won’t all fit on your monitor, but you will be able to see the upper half in great detail.

… and you can see this zinnia in three dimensions.

I’m tired of seeing that ugly car first thing every time I check my website, so here is the last poppy picture of the year. Below is the first nine o’clock picture. (The common name of Mirabilis jalapa is “four o’clock,” but heat and daylight “savings” time means that they don’t open until around nine in the evening during Kansas summers.)

For those interested in technical stuff: the top picture was assembled in Helicon Focus from 36 separate f/11 images. The bottom picture is a single shot at f/16.

Or scrap metal?

This elegant vehicle has graced the neighborhood for at least six months now.

Continue reading “Antique?”

Summer is here. Soon Tribulus terrestris will cover sidewalks. Cenchrus longispinus, pictured, one of the less-beloved members of the Poaceae, is already making its presence felt.

In the field, stacked focus close-up photography is iffy. Sometimes you get good results, but usually there’s too much wind, the light is constantly changing, or it’s impossible to control the lens with sufficient accuracy to get a workable stack of a botanical subject.

It’s much easier to do indoors, where there is no wind, you can control the light and background, and you have a focusing rail handy. The picture of the very three-dimensional Nigella damascena above was assembled in Helicon Focus from 110 separate f/11 images and has a total depth of field of roughly three inches — not bad for a macro. (Click the image to see it larger; right-click and open in a new window to see it at full size.)

If 110 slices at f/11 sounds excessive, you’re right. Here’s another picture of the same flower composed from a stack of 31 images:

Continue reading “110 layers”

Snapshots from the past few weeks, taken with my little go-everywhere camera.

Inside the burger joint.

Continue reading “What’s in my camera?”

… so here’s a California bluebell, Phacelia campanularia.

It’s recital season, and I spent a chunk of this weekend taking too many pictures at a ballet school’s dress rehearsal. Here are a couple of them. There are about 260 more to run through Photoshop.

This past week has been a bit too eventful for my taste, but I did get a chance to stop for lunch at one of the better fast-food places in town.

We had a brown Christmas here this past winter. We’re going to make up for that with a white Easter tomorrow, or so the weatherman says, with one to three inches of anthropogenic global warming falling after midnight.

Today was the first time in nearly three weeks that the wind wasn’t furiously howling all day long. I was finally able to get out to the botanical garden to take some pictures.

Continue reading “More Kansas weather scheduled”

From tonight’s dress rehearsal of The Firebird.

I spent the evening photographing a tech rehearsal for a dance program. Here are three of the pictures. There are about 1600 more to go through. The dress rehearsal is Thursday, and I’ll probably take at least as many more then.