Category: 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.

Mammillaria pennispinosa

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.

Continue reading “Hooks, blurs and frogs”

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.

Noisemaker

Continue reading “I’m still around …”

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:

Before
Before
After
After

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.

Continue reading “Noise and clarity”

The commonest rose in cultivation

Dr. Huey

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.

Continue reading “The commonest rose in cultivation”

More people in funny clothes

Shiny

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.

Continue reading “More people in funny clothes”