OK, I’ll freely admit it. A side benefit of buying my wife flowers is that I get to play with them too. In a few spare moments, I did a little macro experimentation on some of the “survivors” of the crop I bought her for Valentines Day.
I like how the DOF worked out in this shot — gives it a semi-abstract feel.
In a post over on the old blog, I talked a bit about (and shared some video from) the green sand beach near South Point, on the big island of Hawaii. If you find yourself “in the neighborhood” but can’t (or don’t want to) hike to the beach, you do have alternatives.
This isn’t “the” green sand beach, this is a little tide pool about a mile away — but it’s managed to collect some of its neighbor’s sand just the same. It only covers about 200 square feet (so 20″ish” square meters), but it’s considerably closer to the trailhead.
A.K.A. Cat’s Whiskers:
Seen at the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden (north of Hilo on the big island).
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.
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.
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…
Seen at the Yampa River Botanical Park; Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
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.
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.
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.