Category Archives: photgraphy

What is this thing?

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I have achieved sufficient wisdom in life that I knew better than to touch this thing.

We wanted to see some friends out in Silicon Valley before we headed back to the desert, so The Man used one of those apps that allows you to rent someone’s car for a day, which didn’t cost much more than the train would have for 2 of us, and allowed us some extra freedom. He got this zippy little Fiat, which was insane, because who drives a manual transmission in San Francisco? I was a little worried that we would roll backwards down Lombard Street and die in a blaze of fire before we got out of the city, but it worked out quite well.

Before we met our friends, we stopped at Gray Whale Cove and hiked down to the beach. It’s not too many stairs, compared to someplace like Wreck Beach in Vancouver, but it’s a decent number. Great view, though, even on a foggy day. We didn’t see any whales, unfortunately.

Down at the bottom, growing out of the cliff wall, I found these weird flowers. Some of them were more normal flowers, with yellow petals, but there were a bunch of these with bizarre little spikes and no petals, all exuding this strange, milky sap. So unusual.

We also saw a bunch of ducks surfing, and I took some fun macros of tiny dead sand crabs. There’s a very old bunker, from WWII, I guess, which people were climbing because obviously the stairs and the hills aren’t enough climbing. The Man thought he saw Wilson the volleyball rolling in the surf but I think it was actually something that broke off a buoy.

Wednesday we go home, which is where I need to be. Depending on how late we get in, there could be a Dragon Comic, or there could be more macrophotography. I don’t know why I even bother bringing the Wacom tablet when I visit my family. It never gets used.

Up Close with a Wild Strawberry

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Mmm…nodules. This photo makes it look a lot juicier than it probably is in real life.

The Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park would be one of the most beautiful places in the world, except for all the tourists. The experience of drinking tea there is pretty much the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of a Japanese tea garden. But it can’t be helped. It’s a public garden. It costs $8 to get in and $8.50 for a cup of matcha tea, but it’s a public garden.

Still, it’s pretty beautiful. These wild strawberries were busting out all over and the small details were just as astonishing as the large ones. There are a week’s worth of perfect macros, at least. It may take a while to identify all the flowers.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that, when this photo was uploaded to the Internet as a JPG, the colors were all wrong and it looked terrible. Only a PNG file maintained the original values.

The Luscious Saguaro Flower

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Any feedback from professional photographers on how I could have captured this image even more clearly would be greatly appreciated.

This macro showcases the 24-hour saguaro flower. The flower usually appear in June, but what with all this wacky weather here on planet Earth, they’ve blossomed 2 months early. Saguaros, for the initiated, are those iconic Sonoran cacti, tall and long-armed, like a green army marching over the hills. They are only native to this small region of the planet, although they can thrive in other deserts. The buds are about 6 inches long, and appear on the end of mature arms, and on the very top of the cactus, in clusters of up to a few dozen.

Bats with long tongues pollinate these flowers, which have a delicate but delicious aroma. You can see how deep the flower goes here. Each flower blooms for a single day, but only some of the cluster bloom on any given day. When the flower shrivels, a red fruit remains, but I’ve never tried one. They are generally difficult to obtain, often 20 feet overhead, and the birds usually get at them first.

I’m sort of pleased with this image, which was the best out of a dozen, but it could still be better. Maybe if I’d had the tripod with me. I can never figure out how to line up macro shots of thing that have various levels of depth, particularly is the center is the bit that’s farther away from the camera. I’d like to go back to this particular cactus (it has a very low-hanging arm with a huge cluster and it’s very close to the road) and try to get a sharper image, but I’m not sure that I’ll have the time.

Gardens in the Rain

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This image has been cropped and color corrected.

I went out to photograph some tiny tomatoes in the rain, but I didn’t realize that the reason all my macrophotography has been looking weird lately is that there is a filter on the lens and the filter was filthy. That accounts for the soft focus-looking bit on the right side of the image. Still, cropped, it looks nice, I think. This is the peach tree in my back yard. It’s been back there for year but never managed to do much growing, because it is apparently tasty to caterpillars. So I’ve been super-vigilant about caterpillar murder (I use a bacteria that actually murders the caterpillar for me; I’m not much of a killer) and now here we have the testimony: tiny peaches bursting forth from the dying flower.

Now, apparently, I have to start killing ants before they eat the baby peaches?

I would have liked to have drawn a comic tonight, but I think my allergies have achieve sentience and are building a more enlightened society in my sinus cavity. I tried to appease them with some soup from the hip ramen shop downtown, but I suspect I may have consumed some MSG, because now my temples are as seized up as the rest of my face.

Ain’t No Party Like a Star Party

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Ain’t no party like a star party, because a star party takes place far from human civilization, and you can’t play loud music or jump around because the vibrations could interfere with the telescopes and also you’re only allowed to use red lights so you don’t mess up anyone’s night vision while you’re stumbling around in the dark. Also, they’re usually freezing cold.

Technically, they’re not all stock photos but hopefully people have a good sense of humor about it and see that it’s all in good fun, or else don’t see it at all.

Tonight wasn’t feeling like a funny night but you can only do so many jokes about not feeling funny so we gave it the old college try and thought of something that was sort of like something funny but not really. Which then led to Googling “star party,” which brings us to that first stock photo. It’s crazy. He’s out there by himself and he can’t even look through the eyepiece. Clearly, it would be too much back strain. He climbed all the way up that mountain and spent an hour setting up his gear and all he can do is stand wistfully gazing at the cosmos with his naked eye, his $1000 functionally useless.

After that, finding 3 more silly looking telescope pictures to caption took a matter of moments. Telescopes are inherently unwieldy, and from experience I note that that the people vested in carting them around tend to be fairly peculiar themselves.

Tiny Flowers of the American Southwest

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Lime bud

Springtime starts early in southern Arizona. We’re halfway to summer already, and there are tiny flowers everywhere. This first image is from a lime tree in my backyard. It took years to make up its mind as to whether it was going to live or die, but it finally decided to live and be 8 feet tall and make limes. Last year it made 3 limes. This year should be better; there are tons of flowers.

I took another picture where the tinier bud is more in focus. I might play with combining the 2 images, but this one is not retouched. None of these images are retouched.

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Tomato buds

My husband’s ex is a professional grower of exceedingly large hydroponic tomatoes, so we often end up with her extra. Sometimes it’s tomatoes (her major customer is the food service at the local university, so she always has extra when school’s out) and sometimes it’s plants (since she only has room for a fixed number of starts). These plants seem pretty happy in the back yard. We’re keeping them in pots, because tomatoes are so sensitive to the heat. I have trouble keeping them alive in beds.

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Santa Catalina prairie clover

Now we move out of my backyard and into the desert. I had a little trouble identifying this one at first, but I believe it is probably a Santa Catalina prairie clover. I was confused at first because there’s another type of prairie clover that doesn’t look at all like this one, but when I dug a little deeper, this seemed like a good match. The fact that I took the photograph in the Santa Catalina Mountains lends credence to this hypothesis.

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Baja Fairy Duster

I could photograph these things all day. And every picture would be different. Different bits of the flower could come into focus. In different light, the colors would change. I like this image because you can see the tips of each petal-like structure. I assume there’s a name for the parts of this kind of flower, but I’m not finding it.

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Common fiddleneck

I’m not 100% on my ID of this one, because you can’t see enough of the stalk to be certain, but I looked at a couple 100 pictures of yellow desert flowers and common fiddleneck seemed like the best match. This was the only tiny trumpet-shaped non-tree flower of the lot. And these things are tiny. They’re the tiniest flowers in this post, even tinier than the lime bud.

 

Simplicity of Emotion

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I don’t know how many times it’s magnified. But a lot.

This picture seems to encapsulate my emotional state: grains of pollen on a red tulip leaf. There aren’t adequate words, but the image works. It’s not retouched or Photoshopped at all.

The tulip, needless to say, is dead now. It was a cut flower. But The Man bought me some bulbs, which are set in this glass jar, and are supposed to bloom without being planted. Potentially, I could keep them alive for a while.

Seems like I’m getting a migraine every night. I probably need new glasses, but I don’t have eye insurance, and my prescription is an expensive one. Originally, I started sketching out a drawing that would accurately express my emotional state (hint: it was a porcupine) but there’s no way. Actually, originally I was going to paint or draw with Misses Kitty but we just spend an hour yammering. I can’t focus on anything lately.

Grains of pollen. On a red tulip.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, you can also see some other images in this set on Imgur: the stamen of that tulip, and a fleabane wearing an insect like a hat.

Mildly Unsettling Macros

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There will be no trigger warnings. This post encapsulates my mood right now with a fair degree of accuracy.

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Here’s a momento mori for you. We all die. Tomatoes sooner than humans, usually.

Feeling positively nasty today, a fine combination of chronic pain, sleep deprivation caused by chronic pain, and that weird, crusty, dirtiness of a day-old tattoo that begs to be washed but at the same time prevents you from taking a good shower or hot tub soak, because you spent a lot of money on that tattoo and you need to baby it if you want to keep it.

So, even though I had a comic idea, there’s no way I can use the tablet tonight. I can barely type. So, here are some macros. The first one is a dead leaf from last year’s tomato plant. Not my plant even; I’ve never successfully grown a tomato bigger than a marble out here.

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Yech. Blech. Meh.

This is an aphid infestation on a bean plant. They are fava beans, to be specific, but I hesitate to mention that fact, because the second you say “fava beans,” people’s brains fall out of their ears and all they can do it babble on about a nice chianti. This picture isn’t even that great, but it makes me kind of itchy.

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No, thank you. Feel free to leave at any time.

Finally, this is a mouse that The Man found inside his gym shoe. Apparently my cat was losing her freaking mind over it. Most likely, she brought this little vermin in the house to play with and then got annoyed when it didn’t want to play. I didn’t want to play with it either. I wanted The Man to remove it from the house. He wanted me to photograph it, which is why it’s in a mason jar here instead of a shoe. He thought that he should put a mouse inside a vessel I use to store food.

Hopefully I sleep tonight, because 3 days without sleep renders me pretty useless. And allow me to point out that yesterday I was so tired that I literally forgot my car. I mean, I left it downtown and came home without it and then realized well into the night that my car was very far away, which would have a large impact on my day today. So, if yesterday I lost my car and today I was unable to go to my volunteer job or draw a comic, just imagine how hilariously I’ll screw my life up tomorrow if I don’t sleep again.

Dotty Mandala and Macrophotography

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It’s a bit spotty, isn’t it?

That was another breakneck weekend. And now it’s over.

This mandala is stark and cold, like the snow icing the mountains, making the desert look like Denver. It being somewhat threadbare, here is some macrophotography to fill in any gaps the white space may have left in your visual pleasure receptors.

Humans have visual pleasure receptors, right? Feast your eyes on this:

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What else are you missing?

This is the bud of an aloe flower. Tiny and pretty!

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Twisty!

This is a detail of a small garden sculpture my mother bought me at a street fair. It happens to be the curly hair of a little fairy, a very specific fairy, in fact: the first year dance fairy. You can tell by how she holds her feet. It’s a long story. But a small detail.

There ya go. Happy Monday.

The Season of Lights

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Luminarias show the way on the darkest of nights. 

I fully intended to draw a comic today. I fully intended to do a lot of things. But none of those things happened. Other things happened instead, but very few of them were intentional or productive. The season of very little natural light does funny things to my brain.

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The fountain in the cactus garden under red and gold lights

The biggest bump to this day was the publication of my article about Travis Hanson, who draws awesome dragons and other things like that, sometimes with magical tales to go along with them. I urge you to check it out if you’re the least bit interested in that sort of artwork and storytelling.

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Do you know why this tree is blue? Maybe it hates winter as much as I do.

In lieu of something hilarious, please accept these photographs from a luminaria event at the botanic garden down the street. It’s a fun evening of lights and music, and even though I’ve lived here for 6 winters and have had a garden membership for a lot of that time, I never attended before, in part because it cost money and in part because I don’t tend to do a lot of Christmasy things. But in this case, I got in free, because The Man’s band was among the many musical acts of the evening. Since it’s a klezmer band, it wasn’t too Christmasy, either.