A Neighborhood Garden

Another drive-by on my bicycle.  These plants are growing in a street side garden two houses down the hill from us.  A lot of the details in this are hard to see, unless you click on the image so you can view it in a larger size.  I was taken by the "flow" of the green leaves, almost like water coming down a creek toward us.

The Composition of Star Clusters

We had a wonderful speaker at the astronomy meeting last night.  She gave a fascinating, and very technical talk on "Gravitational Lensing."  It is a complicated subject and she did such a great  job of explaining all the ways distant objects could be "lensed" by objects of high mass located between us and the distant objects. Turns out that star clusters, because of their mass, can do gravitational lensing.  So because the speaker has a great sense of humor, she included this slide to explain what makes up the composition of a star cluster!  Very clever and it beats a plain old graph!

Second Photo, New Camera

So just around the corner from my first photograph of the plaster sun on the garage wall, I noticed this plant that we bought the other day, sitting in front of one of the garage doors.  "A second picture" I thought!  And it does seem appropriate as a subject for an old camera.  Something about this - it just looks old.  What is interesting is that only the blossoms and leaves in the very front of the plant are in sharp focus, which adds to the old feeling.  So I am done for the moment, because when I want to take some more photos, I need to set up my darkroom with chemicals again.  I no longer own an exposure meter (!) so every exposure is a guess, so I need to process each negative right away.

First Photo - New Old Camera!

This is the first photograph I have taken with my new hundred year-old camera!  When I bought the camera, I just wanted it so that I could look at - it is such a beautiful piece of 1900's technology.  Then I started thinking that it might be fun to try and take some photographs with it.  Because I haven't used my darkroom for 25 years, I decided not to shoot film, but instead to use enlarging paper and make paper negatives.  Then I would scan the negatives, and in Photoshop, reverse the tones and end up with a positive image, as you see above.  I also toned the image a sepia color to add to the sense that the photograph is older.

I asked Kathy to take a photograph of me when I was using the camera to take the photograph you see above this one.  I have a black cloth draped over my shoulders, because that's what I put over the camera and my head in order to see the image on the ground glass.

And this is what the paper negative looks like when I scanned it.  It is reversed from left to right, because that's what negatives look like after they come from a camera.

Patterns of Nature

I was coming up hill to home when I went by the ferns on the front bank today.  The sun was setting in the west, and illuminating the ferns with flat light.  But it caused me to see the ferns in a new light, so to speak.  I usually don't like flat lighting, but it did something special for these ferns today.  I was stunned to see these patterns within the hill of ferns.  It almost makes me want to make a giant print because of all the tiny details in the photograph.  Please click on the photo to see more detail.  It's really pretty cool!

First Communion

We were waiting to cross the street on the way to church today, and I saw this young girl with her first communion dress on, waiting to cross the street with her dad.  I had to get the camera out of its pouch on my belt, and try and shoot quickly.  I only got three photographs.  There were distractions in the image, including two people in the background, and her dad was so much taller than her that I decided to crop some of him out of the photograph so the focus would be on the girl.  She is so pretty in her white dress!

The Flowers of Spring

I showed you one photograph that I took while on my bike ride the other day - it was the mailbox covered with Wisteria.  Thirty minutes later going uphill I saw these Azaleas, and then the white flowers, and then the magenta flowers.  OK, so you can see that I only know the name of one of the three flowers.  I need help again!  Please.  But the photograph is really beautiful, isn't it?  To see these colors surrounded with green leaves is really something.