Trivia that matter
I’ve never been able to positively identify this. It’s either an aster or a close relative (my best guess would be a species of Senecio), but there’s nothing quite like it mentioned in any of my books on Kansas wildflowers. This is surprising, because it’s quite common around here. Normally the plants grow two or three feet tall, but if they are in a spot that periodically gets mown, they’ll form a mat an inch or two high, such as the plant pictured.
I don’t know which is more depressing: the fact that about half the buildings I passed downtown on my way home from Mass today had been vandalized this weekend, or that the vandals did such a perfunctory job. Don’t they take any pride in their work?
You can expect to see more botanical pictures than usual for the next few weeks. We’re probably about a month away from the first hard freeze of the winter here, and after that it will be around March before there is good reason to take my camera to a garden again.
Cobwebs.
My well-used 4×5 Crown Graphic. I think I paid $125 for the body and $75 for the lens. Cheap though the outfit is, it is capable of superb results. For sheer quality, nothing beats large format:
For some kinds of photography, this is absolutely true, and if I were primarily a landscape photographer, my principal tool would be the Graphic or perhaps a 4×5 field camera with more movements. The large negative also makes contact-printing processes such as cyanotypes possible. The downside is that large format photography is slow in every way. If you want to catch dancers in mid-air during rehearsal, you need fast film in a quick-focusing camera with a fast lens (or a digital SLR that performs well at high ISOs), and you need to take a lot of pictures quickly. Even so, I have taken good studio shots of dancers with the Crown Graphic.
The moon and wires.
Thsi used to be Clematis paniculata. Then it was C. maximowicziana. Nowadays, it’s C. ternifolia.
A pair from the David Munnelly Band, plus feet.
I stopped by a garage sale this afternoon. I didn’t see anything I wanted, but I did spot a passion flower.
Granite reflections.
Through a windshield, wetly.
Hiding in the weeds this morning. (Update: attempted to minimize the green cast.)
9:20 p.m.
The orange sticker man strikes again. (Here’s an example of his ecumenical spirit from last year.)
Buckeye (Junonia coenia) on allium.
The weather may in fact be quite innocuous, but with a little Photoshopping it can look like the tornado siren is about to sound.
