The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Taking & making images.
We have a fine patch of milkweed in the back yard that attracts & nourishes the Monarch butterfly fleet. One of the plants also attracted a dense aphid population:
They’re pretty much featureless orange blobs, although the one on the edge of the leaf at the upper right does show off its legs & antennae:
Where are the ladybugs when you need them?
Another picture from the Quaker Hill trip, where good light made all the difference:
The flower is a Coreopsis and the insect is not a honeybee. The metallic highlights make it look artificial; if I wasn’t there in person, I’d think it was CGI, too.
It’s underexposed by about one stop to prevent those mirrored body panels from burning out and to saturate yellow petals in direct sunlight. Hand-held with the Canon SX230HS in macro mode, then cropped to 1600×1200 without any resizing at all; it’s now the background for the landscape monitor.
For some reason known only to them, one of our kitchen windows attracted a congregation of harvestmen for several mornings in a row:
A trio appeared on the end of a honeysuckle tendril that’s making its way up a pillar supporting the roof over the patio:
It certainly appears they’re deep in discussion…
They’re harmless and they’re outside, so we let them be!
The local Chamber of Commerce sponsors a hot-air balloon weekend that always seems to attract terrible weather; we got to see one of the launches at a nearby park on a hot afternoon before the storms.
The crew cold-inflates the balloon with a roaring gasoline-powered blower:
Way over there on the left, almost out of sight, one of the ground crew tethers the top of the balloon:
When it’s mostly inflated, they fire the burners for the hot inflation:
And then the magic happens:
The Montgolfier Brothers would be proud:
These are all hand-held with the Canon SX230HS at looong telephoto, with a bit of cropping & tweaking. They’re the usual low-res blog pix, but the originals aren’t much less gritty… the camera you have is better than the camera you don’t: we were out and about on other errands.
Some years ago we would see two or three turkey hens leading a creche of two dozen chicks. We haven’t seen that many chicks lately, which we attribute to the fox that’s been trotting through the yard and the hawks patrolling the treetops. Recently, a hen guided her five chicks (four visible here) across the front lawn:
The family proceeded along the flowerbed at the top of the new wall at the driveway, where the chicks showed that their camouflage works really well against leaf mulch:
If they keep their heads down, that is:
The hen jumped off the wall and flapped down to the driveway, which is no big deal for such a large bird. It provoked a bit of discussion and hesitation among the chicks, who eventually followed her lead:
Except for the last and smallest chick, who walked along the wall until the poor thing ran out of wall. It finally showed that it can fly just as well as its siblings:
Admittedly, turkeys don’t fly all that well, but they get the job done; those chicks can fly up to a branch and snuggle under their mother’s wings, safe from the foxes.
There I was, in the kitchen, minding my own business, when I felt something crawling up my shin…
It’s 5 mm from snout to rump, so it’s most likely a dog tick, not a deer tick, not that that makes me feel much better. It’s stuck to a strip of adhesive tape to prevent it from going anywhere and was flat enough to have not fed on anybody recently.
One could develop agoraphobia…
That picture didn’t require focus stacking, although I gave it a try anyway with inconclusive results. I must conjure up a much more rigid camera mount before that works well; a mini tripod isn’t good enough.
Mary took me along on a Master Gardener tour of the plantings at Quaker Hill Native Plant Gardens (*) in Pawling, NY. We saw plenty of good-looking plants with enough light to make hand-held pictures come out wonderfully well, at least when my other mistakes canceled out.
This is an Echinacea, part of a much larger planting.
It’s cropped from the original image, resized slightly to 1050×1680, and now serves as a screen backdrop on the portrait monitor.
(*) The owners are among the 100 richest people in the country, so a staff of 70 maintaining the estate seems perfectly normal. Over the last two decades, they reshaped the entire 400-odd acre landscape to make the property look exactly right, to the extent that the many (synthetic) cliffs & (pumped) waterfalls consist of enormous boulders that a stone dresser reassembled and blended together from the largest sections that could be trucked in. The water features are visible from low earth orbit…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 