Further behind than ever

It's been a lovely long long weekend, and now it's almost 3/4 over. It's gone quick, but oh so enjoyable.

I've crossed a few things off my to do list, which is good. The trickiest thing remaining is to pack up my camera bag and weigh it with all my current lenses. Then do it again with the 150-600 mm lens, in case I buy it. Though I know it weighs just under 2 kilos so I suppose I could just do the math. When I bought the bag I was advise to get a bigger one than I had been looking at. That was good, but now I'm not sure if I can get all the gear in it at once. I'll have to play tomorrow.

The other tricky thing is the photo backlog. Since July 1 I've taken 1826 photos (about 50 a day), though of course many get deleted right off. 306 (about 16%) got one star, meaning I consider it for editing. Then 168 (about 9%) got edited. They all go into a folder and I've set up a filter to ignore the ones I tag as blogged, and ignore the ones older than a month. So when I'm looking for photos I haven't shown you guys, they are all in one place. Right this instant, that place has 64 photos.

I don't always show all the edited photos. Sometimes I'm a bit generous about selecting photos to edit, and then later on I wonder what I was thinking. Those probably won't get blogged, unless I have a reason, or it fits with the blog somehow.

So here I am, half snapped on a lovely white wine we had with a salad and steak, wondering what photos to show you. I'm feeling introspective. I just edited some photos with the new lens, but that's a different blog. I could pick out flowers with rain drops on them. Red ones. Black ones. Pink ones. Flowers with ants on them (hairy butts too!). Back lit. Front lit. Side lit. Beautifully pristine full ripe blossoms. Hail damaged. Old tired dying blossoms. Buds. Macros. Close ups. Ordinary views. One has a spider web on it, glistening gently. Sunrise. Silhouette. Where to begin? Mix and match? By colour? Wet vs dry? Colour contrast or match? Decisions, decisions.

So you get Hens and Chicks. I think they're such cool looking flowers, with their hairy scales, and the tall tower they build to reproduce.

Washed off the tax taint

Today was the day. I've been building up to it for a while, and the time had come. Corporate tax prep. Every year I say I should set up a system to make the year end prep easier, and every year I don't. Not like it's particularly difficult, or that I have to do the actual taxes. No. Just filling out a few spreadsheet tables and organizing some paperwork. It all went pretty well. Perhaps the fact that I only worked one month of that corporate tax year has something to do with it.

In any case I had a long hot shower after, just to thoroughly remove the taint. There's still lots of weekend left.

I haven't had a chance to play much with the borrowed 150-600 mm lens yet. Been thinking about what sorts of shots I should try to get with it. Anything you'd like to suggest?

In the meantime there are 41 shots from the last month edited but not yet blogged. Here's a couple of the oldest ones.

Not hail damage, just a blossom slowly withering. Sometimes the colour on the withering blossoms is more intense than on the full fresh blossom.

Or texture, this looked almost plastic.

I was in the mood to try to capture those fine yellow hairs. This is from almost a month ago, so the details have escaped my mind, but I'm pretty sure I had extension tubes on for this shot. Those central white petals are about about a cm across. Other than the yellow hairs as a focus exercise, (more than a dozen shots) there isn't much else about this that is noteworthy.

I was out chatting to my neighbour one evening. I'd been photographing some flowers, and this bright red truck zoomed by. Just as a panning exercise I snapped a bunch of shots in a row. Between 6:57:32 to 6:57:32, I clicked off 13 shots. In the last several of them the driver is giving me some major stink eye. Pity about the light pole and trees getting in the way of most of the shots.

July image of the month.

It's been a busy month. In addition to the work thing, I had several photoshoots, including a pancake breakfast, a triathlon, and a couple photo rambles of my own. By my own rules, the events someone has asked me to shoot don't count towards photo of the month. Well, maybe if it was extraordinary.

I've really been looking forward to this long long weekend. One of the top things on the list is to get the image of the month posted. Here's the contenders. I sometimes post it in advance to build the anticipation, but you get it all at once. Maybe don't scroll down instantly, and let the suspense build. Of course there's lots of flower shots, being busy with work and not being able to get out as much as I'd like.

Second runner up. I tried a bunch of shots shooting the light through the blossoms, and I think this is the one that turned out best, though some of the yellow lilies were right up there as well. For some reason the red of the day lilies comes out really well on screen, but the red of the peony doesn't. Plus the background in the evening light really pleased me. You'd never know there's a truck in it.

First runner up. These dark lilies are difficult to shoot, especially the shadowed side. The morning light just caught the tips of the blossom, and there was enough light to capture the texture of the blossom without washing out the dark colour. The yellow background for contrast worked out just like I hoped.

And the winner! It looks like a panorama but it's not. It's just the way I cropped it to get rid of an ugly sky. This was during a photo ramble with Sean, taken not far from Chain Lakes. I love how the morning sun has illuminated that patch of fog, and the gently rolling landscape. The power lines hinting at the curve of the shadowed road, and the patch of sun in the upper third adding interest to the shadows.

As always, it's a difficult choice. The flowers are mostly eager to please, trying to show off as best they can. Well, not the dread Alberta Rose, it swears at me when I try to photograph it. I try to get out every day and see what's new, to capture it before the next hail storm comes along. We've had two big ones now, and a few lighter sprinkles. The garden has taken a bit of a beating, but it mainly affects the flowers in full bloom. Most of the buds are ok, so we'll be getting more blooms soon. The dahlias are still on track. I'm sure the bees can't wait for them, and me neither.

Did I miss your favourite? Not all of the ones in contention have been blogged yet, so if there's one (or more) you particularly want to see bigger, be sure to mention it to me.

These result in this

These.

This.

Fortunately, there are still lots of lily blooms left, and the dahlias seem to be ok. Given the size of the hailstones it could have been much worse. In a few more days there will be some more cheerful looking flowers.

Look what the photography elves brought me!

I found this in the bottom drawer of my cabinet at work. In case you haven't embiggened it to see the full impact, that is a 15 inch ruler. It weighs 2 kilos. Yeah.

Here's a few quick photos, hand held, all at 600 mm. The ball diamond across the street from our patio. Uncropped. I'm not sure how far the guy in red shorts is away, perhaps 100 m?

Minimum focus distance is about 9 feet, and I was pretty close to that here.

These are a little further away.

The focus point was on the left most flower and you can see the texture of the blossom. The others are every so slightly out of focus. I'm not sure that's a hand held thing, or just where the plane of focus is for those settings.

I'm loving the colour in the flowers! These are tweaked slightly, but not much. I'll have to do a more formal lens comparison, maybe this weekend.

My buddy doesn't use it much anymore, since she doesn't shoot on a tripod much, and this is a heavy lens. For my photo buddies it's the Tamron 150-600 mm, the version 1, not the new version. I've been wondering how much I'd use such a lens, and now I'll get a chance to find out, since she's happy to lend it to me a few weeks. Then we can haggle for price. Full moon is Aug 26. Hmmm.

Musing about social media

You probably knew I'd given up on Twitter, and don't miss it. Or maybe you didn't because you never got Twitter to give up on it. Right now the only social media I have going is Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn such as it is.

Plus the blog of course. I know that for many of you it's your favourite blog. For some of those people it's your only blog, and maybe that's more of a compliment. I don't know. I do know that I appreciate my readers, the small but mostly semi-loyal band that you are when you aren't too busy out doing other things.

Blogging has changed so much since I started. Way fewer people are doing it, and even more fewer are commenting. I think it's because people are looking at things on their mobile device now, and those are notoriously unfriendly to blog comments. They might mean to comment later, but later there's a zillion other distractions.

Even in the last decade I've seen a change in the span of attention that most people can devote to anything. It's much shorter. I watched one person scroll through their Instagram feed so fast they can't have actually seen, let alone appreciated the photos. Each got a like. I'm not sure how they hit that tiny little heart as it scrolled.

One of my buddies recently gave up on Facebook and doesn't miss it. I was texting with them and that reminded them they hadn't read my blog in a while. I get lots of readers from facebook, and a few from other blogs. At least that's what the stats tab tells me and I'm not sure I believe it. I get lots of readers from Shut Up and Run (hello guys, don't be afraid to comment!)

So indulge me please. How do you get here? Facebook? Are you a regular, checking to see if I've blogged the same time you check email and the morning news, and whatever else you read in a browser? You can respond in the comments, by email, or text, or visit me on Facebook. I'm not that hard to find. Please and thank you. Pretty please.

This discussion of web traffic inevitably leads to road traffic. As in the lack of movement of it because of construction. This is beyond construction season, it's construction climate. Ongoing and never ending. I've seen a few people just losing their shit, but fortunately no collisions. There's probably been some vehicles lost in the steep shoulders, which is a quaint way of saying the pavement has been cut and dug away to several feet of depth. On 14th at Anderson, if you swing wide sweet chariot by an inch to much you are gone. Over the edge and your car is probably a write off.

Here's some of the storm water drains going in. Those pipes are 10 feet in diameter, so there's some serious flood mitigation planned.

Clematis climbing

We had a couple clematis succumb to a fungus or something, but there are others doing really well. See for yourself.
These are out front.

 This is a new one, climbing the trellis near the back gat. It seems pretty happy there and wasn't affected by the hail. It's made it to the top of the trellis, but seems to be struggling with getting anchored up there.

There's another climbing an iron trellis in the back, and doing well. The blossoms are a bright red that  I seem to be having difficulty focussing on. I'll try again.