It’s been a mediocre fall so far here, but there is some color out there if you look for it.
Category: Photo gallery
Garish and bizarre
A few more pictures from this weekend. Click to greatly embiggenify.
Calling Brenda Starr
I hoped to take a picture of Dracula at the orchid show today, but there weren’t any there this time. However, I did find a black orchid for Basil St. John.
Hooks, blurs and frogs
Recently I’ve been going through my older pictures, taken back in the age of film, and putting some of the better ones on my Flickr page. Here are a few recent examples. Click to embiggenify.
Transplanting the seedlings of Mammillaria pennispinosa into individual pots requires an unusual technique. With the hooked spines embedded in your left thumb and index finger, hold the plant in position as you fill the pot with the potting soil with your right hand. Using a pair of embroidery scissors, free the plant from your fingers by snipping off the tips of the spines. Then extract the hooks from your fingers.
Good thing I’m not a guitarist …
… because every single one of these is out of my price range.
I spent yesterday at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. These are a couple of the sights there this year. There are more pictures at my Flickr page.
Caution: taxonomists at play
On the way to work this morning: Clematis terniflora, alias C. paniculata, alias C. dioscoreifolia, alias C. maximowicziana. I usually prefer to call plants by their Latin names, but in this case it’s less confusing to just say “sweet autumn clematis.”
I’m still around …
… but this site is going to be fairly quiet for a while longer. While things are not quite as insane as they were a month ago, there’s still too much to do. (Someday I may compile a list of anime for times when you wish everyone would just shut up, go away and leave you alone.)
Fortunately, I can occasionally make time to take pictures. Here are a few recent ones.
360°
I’ve been mostly taking extreme close-ups for the past month or so. I figured that it was about time to break out the fish-eye lens. Click to enlarge.
Update: The corresponding spherical panoramas are below the fold.
Where the weekend went
I spent the the past two days taking 12 gigabytes’ worth of pictures at a cactus and succulent plant show and at a powwow. Here are a few that I’ve run through Photoshop.
Zygomorphic vision
It’s been too muggy to do anything outdoors, so I’ve been playing with Photoshop. The above is a recent image from the botanical garden, modified a bit.
Hexagonal vision
I’ve been playing around with a “variable kaleidoscope” photo filter. See if you can guess what the original of the above was a picture of. (The original can be found at my Flickr page.)
Down on the corner
In front of the coffee house yesterday as I returned from another expedition to the botanical garden.
Noise and clarity
I’ve been playing around with the demo versions of the Topaz Labs photo filters. So far, the most useful one is “Denoise.” Here’s a before-and-after pair demonstrating the filter’s usefulness on noisy originals. Click on them to see them full-size:
Obviously there’s a fine balance between smoothing grain and preserving detail. Denoise makes a difference in nearly every photo I’ve run through it. It’s rather expensive, though. At $80, it’s twice the price of Neat Image.
Here are some more pictures that I’ve run through various Topaz filters. In most cases, I haven’t done anything in Photoshop except cropping and a bit of healing brush. They have not been resized, so they are mostly quite large. Click on them to see them full-size.
Odds & ends
A couple of commencement addresses:
I’m trying to convince myself that I can get along perfectly well with an extension tube and I don’t really need a macro lens. Well, maybe.
Wildlife
I made another trip to the botanical garden this morning, where I surprised an egret in the algae pond.
The commonest rose in cultivation
The hybrid wichuriana “Dr. Huey” is the most commonly-used rootstock for propagation of roses by bud grafting. When gardeners are careless about removing suckers, the understock will take over. The result is a brilliant but brief display of bright red blossoms at the beginning of the rose season. This example was blooming in a Wichita garden in mid-May, but you can find them everywhere grafted roses are grown.
Snapshot
Second rose of the year …
Celt and squid
I’ve got the rest of my Figments & Filaments pictures up. They’re all here. Squid Girl, above, was the only anime cosplayer I spotted.
Now back to making silly noises.
More people in funny clothes
The first batch of pictures from the weekend are up at my Flickr site. The event was “Figments & Filaments,” a costuming convention debuting this year at a hotel in Independence, Missouri. It was a small, friendly event, about equal parts SCA and steampunk. Although I brought a cotehardie with me, I stayed in civvies and just took a lot of pictures.