An image from the days of black and white film and wet darkrooms. I took this picture 15 or 20 years ago in the Friends University dance studio.
Tag: Photo gallery
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.
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.”
Wildlife
I made another trip to the botanical garden this morning, where I surprised an egret in the algae pond.
Hanami 2014
The only Japanese cherry left in Wichita that I know of was at the height of its bloom today.
Barely spring
Spring is running about three weeks late this year. There still is not a lot of color at the botanical garden, but I found a bit more yesterday than on my previous visit, including the very first blossoms on the last remaining Japanese cherry tree.
If you’re heading to Japan in the near future, here’s the blossom forecast.
Sprung
For a while yesterday it seemed that spring had finally arrived, with temperatures around 70°F. There even were thunderstorms in the later afternoon and evening, with hail. All that was missing was the tornado warning. It couldn’t last, of course. It’s back to winter this morning, with north winds and temperatures down in the lower 30°s.
While it was pleasant out yesterday, I made a trip to the botanical garden with my toy camera. Very little was in bloom, but I did find some color.
Enough already
Fluffy white stuff
We got about four inches of snow last night. I snapped a few pictures at a nearby steel company this morning. It’s possible that some of it will still be on the ground Wednesday.
Fog, with ducks
On the way to work this morning.
Maple leaves
This post is brought to you by the color red
Thanks probably to the cool and wet summer, fall is unusually colorful this year.
Continue reading “This post is brought to you by the color red”
Inside the rose
Blues this morning
New toy
I recently bought a new little go-everywhere camera, a Nikon S3500. The specifications are a bit silly: how often does anyone need 20 megapixels? I took it to the botanical garden yesterday to give it a workout. The pictures are very good overall but not utterly fantastic. (If you want ultimate image quality, you need a DSLR (or better) with a large sensor. (Or better yet, a view camera.) That requires real money.) The camera doesn’t record purples and violets accurately (a problem with every digital camera I’ve ever used), a nuisance but not a deal-breaker for a cheap camera. The surprise is that the “macro” mode actually is useful. The image above is cropped but is otherwise unaltered, and was taken hand-held. Right-click to see it at full size. The flower is about an inch across.
Strings attached
I’ve posted the best of my Winfield pictures at my Flickr site. The photo above is of the old-time band that supplied music for Saturday evening’s contra dance. Roger, the fiddler on the left tapping his foot double-time, took home yet another violin in the old-time fiddle competition earlier that evening. ((You can listen to his performances here.)) Here’s the band late in the dance:
Here’s a panorama from early in the dance.
Update: Here’s a complete dance: