Josh Romney sees into your soul and he has found it wanting.
AND NOW IT’S TOO LATE FOR YOU HE HAS YOUR SOOOOOOOOOOOUL.
Here are pics of some hops vines that I plan to harvest this week and turn into beer. Don’t bother asking what kind of hops it is. I have no idea. A neighbor had them because a friend of his gave him rhizomes as a housewarming present but forgot to mention that hops vines run riot over any bed that you plant them in and once established you CAN NOT get rid of them. We transplanted some rhizomes to the side of his garage, put up some nylon rope for the vines to climb and now we have a good thing going. Of course the first vines that grew exploded out of the ground last year and produced a magnificent crop of not-brewable male pollen anthers (bottom pic), but this year we added some gender-normative vines that have produced bajillions of appealing and (we hope) tasty flowers.
Details of the pic are more or less the same as here.
Chat about whatever.
No dogs today. A free subscription to the blog for whoever identifies this critter!
How I took it will take a little explaining, so find that below the jump.
Chat about whatever.
Speaking of not-sucky pictures of my dog.
A brief description of my thinking behind this photo:
I shot with a medium wide 40mm-equivalent lens because I like to go out with one prime at a time, and as my second favorite lens the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 sits on my GH2 quite a lot. I could have just as easily taken a few steps back and shot it with my #1 favorite lens, a medium-long manual OM 50mm f/1.8 from the 1970s. The wide aperture let me fuzz out the background a bit, creating an illusion of depth between the scenery and Max, the subject. The late-day sunlight is hitting him at a low and oblique angle that is almost head-on. This throws every hair and blade of grass into sharp contrast. Light from a setting sun has to travel through a lot of atmosphere, giving it a warm look (dust scatters blue more than red) and making for a more pleasing portrait. One touch that I particularly like is how the darker background isolates Max in an obvious but natural-looking way. One of the hardest tricks in photography is finding a way to set the picture’s ‘subject’ apart from the scenery. People buy wide-aperture lenses in part because selective focus is a great way to isolate a subject (they also make it easier to shoot in low light). However, IMO, people can go a bit overboard. If one eye is in focus and the other eye is not then you should probably stop down a little.
To me the composition is only so-so. It kind of respects the rule of thirds and definitely leaves space in the direction that the subject is moving/gazing, to the point of being rather unbalanced in that direction, but nothing about the framing makes me say ‘wow’. It is just a nice pic of Max that will go into my regular screensaver rotation.
Chat about whatever.
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Many thanks to commentor Shari for something cheerful to start the day.
What else is on the agenda?
Just because I can. These were taken at the Mosteiro Santa Maria da Vitória in Batalha in Portugal.
It is quite an extraordinary building. The church is narrow, but its sparse, almost willowy columns draw one’s eyes up to the breathtaking height of its ceilings. Out the back, there are the Capelas Imperfeitas, the Unfinished Chapels – a massive, unceilinged, octagonal space of curlicued stone where swallows swoop and squabble. The charming cloister is made even more pleasant by the sight of several handsome soldiers – stern faced, yet shyly amiable, and oh so young – guarding the tombs of two Portuguese unknown soldiers.
Feel free to share links if you have photographed (or otherwise made) something you like recently.
Edited after posting for more photoey goodness.
Hello, my dears.
I can’t abide reading or writing about American politics tonight, so I popped a Haldol and have been looking at pictures from my visit to an aquarium a few years ago. Cuttlefish are very relaxing.
The aquarium was the Aquarium of Western Australia. I was in Perth to check up on one of my mines – originally a strictly off-the-record gift from a grateful Frazer government to Keith after he was so successful in getting that nice Mr Whitlam kicked out in 1975. So much nicer than a knighthood.
Perth is quite a nice city in a thrusting kind of way – a little priapism of towers surrounded by red-brick houses, lovely parks and the gaudy, black-glass-clad abominations built for the newly rich to live in. These last are everywhere – lines of waterfront houses the size of small office-blocks, each looking like the architect had sold his artistic soul to a particularly malign and vengeful older god and then built an altar to it made entirely of glass and concrete reproductions of Michelangelo’s David. There were atria you could house 97 pensioners in and still have room for their dogs and a year’s supply of Depends.
Anyway, the aquarium was quite lovely, and dedicated to reproducing the various aquatic environments of Western Australia. The shark tank is incredible with a moving walkway (similar to the one in OceanWorld in Singapore) which takes you beneath rays and sharks and some quite terrified looking fish. My pekinese Fuzzbutt was desperate to tackle a particularly dyspeptic looking white pointer, but only managed to get a lot of dog slobber on the three-inch-thick perspex.
I hope you might indulge me if I post a few of my pictures. The quality varies due to the lighting, but these have been making me feel happy this evening. Click to embiggen massively.
Scorpion fish:
Scorpion Fish
This is the least blurry picture of a Leafy Sea Dragon I managed to get. All the others are just cute yellow swirls. These things are simply incredible. It must have taken God hours to get each of those leaves right.
This is the best picture of a Leafy Sea Dragon I managed to get. All the others are cute yellow blurs.
This Little Pineapple fish is a little blurry too, but it’s just so pretty. Its scales are thick and clear and almost crystalline.
Finally, the cuttlefish, who I communed with for quite a while. He’s quite adorable and peered out at me with great interest, circling around his tank to get a better view at each of the punters.
ETA: When Great Cthulhu comes back to crunch the world in his slimy maw, it will look something like that, although probably with more screaming and rending of flesh.
Happy days.
I’ve only got a couple more Pet Rescue stories stockpiled, and I know you all have many tales to share. Send me your photos (AnneLaurie@verizon.net, or click on the link near the top of the right-hand column) and you too can cheer up Glenn Greenwald be a front-pager for a day!
The last roll of Kodachrome produced by Eastman Kodak has been processed at the last Kodachrome lab in the world, which will close down at the end of the year. I wonder how many Kodachrome sunsets that place developed. This one is by Flickr user rappensuncle.
(via)
Real Americans don’t need fancy museums, because art is all around us. Here are a few examples from the local fireworks stands.
Here’s some political art (click for a bigger image), containing some unflattering commentary on Bush and the Iraq War. Even Real Americans are sick of that guy.
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I’m old enough to remember the excitement of the Polaroid SX-70: it spit out a piece of paper, and you watched a picture develop in front of your eyes. Pure fucking magic, at a couple of bucks a shot.
Polaroid went out of the instant film business a few years ago, after a complete marketing failure. One highlight of their decline was the official response to the OutKast video “Hey Ya!” (Shake it Like a Polaroid): a warning that shaking a Polaroid might distort the image.
After Polaroid failed, a couple of artists bought their plant in Holland and started The Impossible Project, an effort to resurrect that plant and create new instant film. Today, they’re launching their first new product, a line of black-and-white film that fits in old SX-70 and Polaroid 600 cameras. Color’s coming by the end of the year.
Their site is gorgeous, and the whole thing is testament to what a few very determined people can do. I hope they make it.
Many thanks to JeffreyW for linking to this morning’s Moment of Zen:
The mechanics of hovering had been explained to me, but I’d never realized how much these little guys would look like swimmers treading water…
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For those who were impressed, and moved, by the Esquire profile of Roger Ebert, he will be debuting his “own” computer voice on Oprah today:
A company called CereProc has taken voice samples from Ebert’s DVD commentaries and created a computerized voice that Ebert can use to “speak.” This could even lead to Ebert using the voice for other media, including podcasts, video, and commentaries.
(h/t TV Squad)
*****
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My SNOWPOCALYPSE pics are up on Flickr.
Email me a link to yours and I might post a few in some new photo threads.
Here’s some pics from the San Francisco Balloon Juice Event of 2010.
Patrick Power, Le Gout.
Dayv, Pigeon on a wire.
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
Click on the photos for a link to the photographer’s website. To see all photo threads, click on ‘photo blogging’ at the bottom of the post.
If your computer cannot read our email links at top right, my email is (remove the zeroes): portus0jackson0ii at yahoo dot com.
