A.K.A. Cat’s Whiskers:
Seen at the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden (north of Hilo on the big island).
Orthosiphon Stamineus Lamiaceae
Category Archives: Blog
Mission Beach sunrise
This is a cleaned up scan of a slide I took in 2000 on Mission Beach in Australia. For a scenic image, it’s got an odd sort of back-story…
I took this shot near the end of our honeymoon — but it wasn’t a particularly romantic part of the trip. My wife has a tendency to catch various stuff when we travel, and this was my introduction to the phenomenon. By the time I took this image, she was sick as the proverbial dog — so I got a lot of opportunities for solo walks on the beach. Handy for photography, but obviously not what you really want on your honeymoon.
So I guess I have an ambivalent feeling about the shot — love the clouds, love the waves, sand’s perfect. But it always feels lonely to me.
Rock crystal
A picture from the Hopewell Rocks, in Canada’s Bay of Fundy
The Bay of Fundy has arguably the highest tides in the world, about 17 meters — the result of an odd resonance in the bay (a wave will travel from the mouth of the bay to the inner shore and back again in about the same time as the spacing between high tides). One of the offshoots of these tides is that a lot of ground gets uncovered at low tide.
Here, you see my daughter (just turned 7 when this picture was taken) standing under the middle of “Lovers Arch.” Come back in 12 hours, and only the green top of the arch will still be above water.
Remembrances
Another shot from the Yampa River Botanical Park; Steamboat Springs, Colorado. This one’s a bit more processed than the last one:
I basically turned up the blue saturation a bit and turned the green down to a similar degree — sort of a “poor man’s selective color,” because I didn’t like the look when I took away everything *but* the blue. The end result isn’t too gaudy, I don’t think…
Oh, the irony…
Seen at the Yampa River Botanical Park; Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Waterlogged
On a rain-soaked day, I saw these flowers in a garden in the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Park in Nova Scotia:
Even drooping, they’re still a nice looking group of flowers.
Still waters
Captured as we were heading to Juneau, Alaska — via the inland passage.
The inland passage is pretty calm to begin with — I took this shot early in the morning while the water was even more still.
Abandon in Place
For those of you that don’t follow the space program in the U.S., this is always a sad time of year in and around NASA. January 27 is the anniversary of the 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in a pre-launch test. January 28 is the anniversary of the 1986 loss of the shuttle Challenger in a launch explosion. Tomorrow, February 1 is the seventh anniversary of the shuttle Columbia’s loss during re-entry.
All in all, a rough week of the calendar for crewed space flight.
This is the foundation of Cape Canaveral’s Pad 34, site of the Apollo 1 fire. The steel structure was removed years ago (these things decay quickly in Florida’s environment), but the concrete base has been left in place as a monument to the astronauts’ sacrifices.
A memorial plaque was installed on one side of the structure, and when I visited, saw some remains of flowers that people have left at the site. It’s a tricky thing to get to, though — although if you’re lucky, you can occasionally get to it on a tour of the historic launch pads.
The (old) view out front
One of the precursors to actual photography was the camera obscura , in which a pinhole could be used to form an image on one wall of a darkened room or (later) a box. In their simplest form, these go back over 1,000 years — and if you’re lucky, you can occasionally find one to play with / in. Should you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, there’s a room-sized camera obscura at the Sherman Hines Museum of Photography in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Although, as is generally the case with walk-in camera obscura, you can’t exactly point it:
So this is what you get if you photograph the image that the camera obscura has projected for you, inverted on the wall. A nice little historical view of the folks across the street…
BTW, Sherman Hines doesn’t get much press where I live (“south of the border”), but he’s a really impressive photographer — go check out some of his portraits and landscapes !
Blowin’ in the wind
On our recent trip to Hawaii, I was happy to see that wind power seems to be catching on there. At one point we were driving along a highway that essentially parallels the coast, and saw a wind farm in the distance. Since we had a bit of time to kill, we headed off down a local road to get closer.
I took this shot from the side of the road (a single-lane access road for the local short-strip “airport”), just outside the fence. Pity the sky wasn’t clearer, but I still like the contrast between the windmills and meadow. If I find the time, I might just have to tinker with this shot in Photoshop to get rid of the clouds…