Fall Colour 1

I think over the next little while I'll publish some colour photos from Fish Creek from a ramble on Sept 17. Stay tuned, there will be some red here and there! With the trees awash with orange and yellow, I've been trying some different effects, playing with camera settings. So far nothing has worked out like I'd envisioned it, but I'm going to keep working at it.

One of the experiments was to get the leaves of foreground tree out of focus in an artistic way, with the branches still discernible, and the background in sharp focus, but it didn't look nice.

This is on top of the hill above Fish Creek. I was trying to get the thistle in perfect focus, and play with varying degrees of focus in the background. There were some orange patches that I thought would make a nice contrast, but I couldn't quite make it work.

Autumn is generally a lovely time of year for Calgary, but this year has been disappointing. I hope this isn't a precursor to a long and dreary winter.

More lilies

These are several weeks old now. It's the last of the not-day lilies. I'm not sure if they're tiger lilies, or some other kind, but I know they're not day lilies. The transition from the red to the white is fascinating.

An update as of the 19th. We didn't cover this lily. We figured it would either make it through the cool and rainy weather over the last little while, or it wouldn't. As you can see during the sunny afternoon the other day, it's still hanging in, though looking a little worse for wear.

We are getting a bit more almost sunny warmth this afternoon, and have to soak it up while we can. Even though I swam this morning (500 m 9:20 moderate pace, 300 m backstroke easy, water yoga and water running) I might go for a bike ride while it's nice. Maybe I'll take the camera.

More Curtis and Celina, cute alert!

Do I really need to say anything?

Macro Monday 29, hair revisted

Some time back I took some macro photos of hair,  here, and here. It wasn't quite as complete as it could be. For one thing, the hair was still attached to the person. This creates obvious limitations on what you can photograph.

All these macro shots were at 5x with my MP-E 65mm macro lens, shot with my T6i which has a crop sensor factor of 1.6. So I don't know what the actual magnification is. All I know is that the hair samples were a small fraction of a mm in diameter, and on screen I'm seeing 5 to 8 mm in diameter. None of the photos are cropped. From the top to bottom you are looking at at about 2 mm of hair length.

Michelle has been excited about macro photos and managed to collect some hair samples. (I'm told nobody was harmed in this process.) Here she is, hard at it, working to focus on a hair in my high tech setup in the basement. She hadn't realized just how sensitive the whole process is, and how just breathing on the camera produces a visible wiggle on screen.

Strand from A

Root from A

Tip from A

Strand from K

Root from K

Tip from K. (this was brutal to capture.)

Root from M, brown

Kinky strand from M, brown

Tip from M, brown. (Again, difficult to capture.)

Root from M, silver

Strand from M, silver

Tip from M, silver. This one was easy, not sure why. Sometimes you get lucky.

Here I am, hard at it selecting and editing the photos. I'm not sure why I have my hands cupped together like I've captured a small animal. Yes, I need to clean off my desk. Later today. First things first.

I have a particular hair project in mind, but the tricky part is coordinating schedules with the people involved.

Towers of veg and manure, a rant

The hens and chicks normally clump really close to the ground in a nice cluster. Then suddenly a giant stalk appears, thrusting upwards. In previous years it's up and then it droops over again fairly quickly. I'm not sure when these first appeared, but it's been several months, I think.

These guys are beside the garage, under the protection of the Dread Alberta Rose. These photos are from a little while ago. If you look carefully at Tuesday's State of Green post, you can see them in the first photo. Last time they had the big bright blossom at the end of the stalk, but I don't remember the other blossoms along the stalk itself.

It will be interesting to see how much longer they will last. As of today (the evening of Sept 12 as I write this, it's getting cold out. It's supposed to rain, and maybe snow. Linda has wrapped up all the plants as best she can, but it won't be nice enough to unwrap them till Friday. Who knows if any of them will still be with us? I suspect this is it for bee season, and I hope they are all tucked away in their hives with lots of food to last till spring.

As of the 16th, it still hasn't been nice enough to unwrap them. I don't think it's actually frosted, but it's been hovering around the zero mark for a while. The towers are still up, perhaps drooping a little more. No idea how the dahlias are doing.

At least we don't have a hurricane bearing down on us. I feel for the poor people in the Carolinas. The rich people can easily go somewhere else. The poor people have a lot fewer choices.

Right now I just have a big orange cat bearing down on me because he thinks it's suppertime. It isn't. His tummy runs fast. Which reminds me, I think some of you missed yesterdays cat panorama.

Another 5K run today, just under 36 minutes.

I finished up Fantasyland yesterday and it's back to the library. It ended up being depressing reading. Just power-mongering politicians pandering to their base by spouting fear, and building the towers of manure even higher. I was hoping at the end there'd be some suggestions about how to get on track, but there wasn't.

So you get mine:

• Get out and vote for the grownups on the slate, especially the female candidates. Generally that means not voting for the parties much to the right of centre. Note that what used to be moderate right is now considered centre, and the right fringe has moved substantially rightward and become substantially louder.
• Avoid one issue candidates, they tend to have forceful and probably simplistic opinions on that issue, which closes their minds on alternative opinions. 
• Non-grownups tend to have an old fashioned view of the world, with simplistic solutions that usually involve scapegoating some identifiable group and pushing them out. Note that it' never them or their buddies. It might be Muslims, or First Nations, or LBGTQ people, but it doesn't matter. They are generating divisions in society, and that's the last thing we need.
• Encourage grownups to run for office, preferably female ones. Encourage your grownup friends to vote. It's important.
• Push for a replacement of the first past the post voting system. We need some form of proportional representation, so that a minority of votes (the right 37% of votes is enough) to give one party a majority government. Yes it's possible to have a stable country with such a system. Remember the first rule, vote for the grownups.
• Reject sloganeering and sound bite policy. Push for details, and the facts to back up those details. Call  out the candidates when they lie. This means doing some research and being prepared. 
• Beware the candidate that talks about rights for a group, as in parent's rights, or responsible gun owner's rights, or taxpayer rights. This translates to that group getting a free pass on the rights front, and other people getting their rights restricted or removed. It's a tricky issue to balance rights (free speech vs hate speech, or private property vs public good, and many other issues) and we need to openly discuss the choices without demonizing anyone.
• Most issues are considerably more nuanced than they first appear. It is very possible for reasonable people to disagree, and they should be able to discuss the issues without losing their cool. Anyone trying to tell you an issue is simple, and they have the solution, and is saying so loudly, is trying to hustle you. Hold firmly onto your wallet.

Zoom!

It's nice being busy. Three photoshoots in as many days. Two for the community association, and one for my buddy Jayne that got mentioned yesterday.

Today was community clean up day, where the City sends some garbage trucks, and a compost truck. A big bin for metal shows up, as does one for e-recycling, and a paper shredder. Paint and tires can be left as well.

There are some mixed feelings about these clean up days. All the paper! The paper shredder guy was going steady. People dumping paper into the bin, and the guy running the controls to dump the bin into the shredder. I have paperwork going back decades that I probably should shred at such an event.

I overheard one couple asking for help getting a biggish TV out of the back of their car. Well, small by the standards of today, I suppose, though only a few years ago it would have been viewed as impossibly big and impossibly thin. Now it can't be given away.

All sorts of stuff shows up at the swap table. Some of it just sat there. I was happy to see 4 bicycles being taken away, though 2 more went into the metal bin. There were a few people hovering, eyeing the stuff as it came in. They made constant trips out to their truck. I'm not sure if they were collecting for a garage sale, or for personal use or what.

As always, the volunteers were champs, helping people get to where they needed to be. When I'm feeling depressed by world news, I need only think about one of these events. Local people helping out their community. If you go to the photo folder (link below) you'll see lots of smiling faces.

I got this selfie out of it.

Yes, it was a misty day out. If you have a mind to, you can go over to my photoblog and look for the WCA page.

Plus a cat panorama, playing with the behemoth lens.

I'm not done. There is a macro photoshoot tomorrow, and I have tentative plans for a really exciting photo shoot last week of the month. Both of them have me quivering!

Snow, again, so soon

It seems like only a few weeks ago that the snow stopped falling. And what the heck, it really only was a few weeks ago. Some photos from late April still had lots of ice in the back.

It was only last night that it started falling again. There I was, doing a photo shoot for Jayne on the occasion of her book launch, and there the snow was, falling.

The more tender plants are wrapped up, but it's been cold enough for long enough that I think almost everything is done for the year. Linda is thinking about what needs to happen to put the garden to bed for the year, and planning for next year already.

Still, there are some nice snowy roses shots, though I don't know what that first one is.

Oh, and you might have seen this one on Facebook already, but this is my buddy Jayne doing a reading from her new mystery novel, When the Flood Falls. Available at Owls Nest Books in Brittannia, or on line at Amazon, and maybe other places too.