This recently appeared across the street. I suppose it’s preferable to gang symbols, but a blank wall would look better.
Category: Photo gallery
So much for fall
Many people declare that fall is their favorite season. I’ve never understood why. Sure, there are pleasant Indian summer days when you can read Keats and admire fall foliage, but it always ends in cold and desolation. This year winter came very early. The maples never reached full intensity, and other late fall trees were still mostly green when the January weather arrived. Where’s global warming when you need it?
From the archives
While going through old pictures, I came across this from a Renaissance Faire a decade ago. As threats go, that’s fairly mild. More frightening are promises to give stray children sugary snacks and free kittens.
Oranges and reds
It’s been a mediocre fall so far here, but there is some color out there if you look for it.
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.