Tag Archives: macrophotography

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.

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.

So Fancy Mandala

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Put that on your hair ornament and wear it. 

There’s a nice string of pretty fancy mandalas coming up. I must have had a great run of calm focus and serenity a couple years ago. Trying to remember what that’s like.

I thought I’d start a Tumblr to promote my blog, but not that I’ve poked around Tumblr, I realize that I should have just started the blog on Tumblr. Oh, well. Too late now. Still, having your own website is useful, too. Twenty-six dollars a year isn’t that much.

It’s full-on springtime, edging into summer, around here. Winter usually breaks by mid-February around here, but still. This el nino global warming weather is getting ridiculous. The man commenced to showering outside in the unheated garden shower last week. Anyway, with springtime in the desert comes an explosion of wildflowers, which inspire a lot of macrophotography. You can see some of it on Imgur: here’s a tiny fleabane wearing a tiny insect as a hat, and here’s a red poppy stamen.

That’s about it for art this weekend, although I scripted some comics. Not really feeling the Wacom tablet right now. Maybe it’s time to switch to pencil and paper.

 

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.

A Lively Mandala

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Life...don't talk to me about life...

Life…don’t talk to me about life…

Complexity. I really, really want a macro lens for my camera so that I can take pictures of minuscule insects; they tend to have really complex patterns on their little carapaces. So much of the world is not merely beneath the notice of human beings, but beneath the ability of human beings to notice. Yesterday, while helping the girl with vocabulary words, I helped her understand the difference between a telescope and a microscope. Telescopes show us things that are big but too far away to see, while microscopes show us things that are close but too tiny to see.

“But not germs,” she told me. “They’re too tiny for microscopes.”

But of course, they’re not. “They’re too tiny for the microscopes in your school, but not for scanning electron microscopes.”

Those pictures are amazing. Have you seen these high rez images of tardigrades swimming along like the kings of the universe? How about simple viruses and bacteria? There is an entire alien world living in your bellybutton. And smaller than that, photos of atoms: like, the actual building blocks of matter atoms. I remember having my mind blown by this 25 years ago. And then tinier still, subatomic particles whose existence we can observe only in partial glimpses, whose physicality we possibly couldn’t even comprehend even with visual perception.

Extremely small things really demonstrate how large the universe really is. We can’t even sense its superlatives.

Anyway, this mandala looks to me like something a scientist in a movie based on an HP Lovecraft story would observe when asked to magnify small sample of an alien organism. And the pallid, bespectacled academic explorer who’d acquired the sample, which was discovered 100 years ago buried under the Antarctic tundra, would bemoan the fact that the species was long extinct and the world would never know this beautiful creature, but then the scientist would notice that the cell was only dormant. Awakened by the heat of the electronic equipment, the cell would begin rapid mitosis. Within twenty hours, the scientist would be dead and the wild-haired, wild-eyed explorer would be ranting in Arkham Asylum about the ancient menace waiting to devour the world.