Fuzzy Flowers in a Far-away Field

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Location Taken: Powder River Pass, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010

These are such pretty purple flowers.

I love the fuzziness they have. Well, at least the actual fuzziness, not the fuzziness caused by my not getting the focus right.

And the contrast between the purple petals and yellow stamens is marvelous.

Plus the muted colors of the background just make the brightly colored flowers pop all the more.

And the composition’s great, too!

…It’s times like this I wish cameras that let you adjust the focus AFTER you take the photo weren’t such newfangled technology that it isn’t in every camera yet…

Though that Lytro’s only in the $400 range… That’s almost affordable… Almost…

…I’m having trouble stopping playing with their example pictures…

  

Just a pretty flower on a pretty day.

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2010

My mom loves lilacs. She’s always delighted when the lilac tree by the pond blooms, and a bit sad when it fades.

Since I try to understand why people I like like the things they do, I’ve come to like lilacs as well.

Which wasn’t hard. I’ve always had a fondness for non-standard flowers, ones with odd shapes or multiple flowers on one stem or the like.

And lilacs always show off so prettily.

This isn’t my mom’s lilac, just another one in the neighborhood. But the light is better on this one, so I get better photos.

Mom’s got a large garden, but has a limit to what kind of plants she can put in it. It’s a north-east facing garden under a large oak tree, so it gets partial sun at best. And I can never get the best flower photos out of her flowers.

But at least the lilac enjoys the partial sun, so she can have one of those.

  

Is that a rock in your pocket or are you happy to see me? Oh, it’s a rock…

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Location Taken: Powder River Pass, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010

It’s a nice hill, isn’t it?

Actually, let me rephrase that…

It’s a gneiss hill, isn’t it?

I love it when the road signs actually talk about the geology of the area around them. It’s really rare, but awesome. This particular pass, in the Bighorn mountains of Wyoming, had a nice string of them telling the rock type and geologic era of the landscape.

I don’t remember what exact era this was (Ordovician, maybe?), but I do remember it was gneiss. Yes, gneiss is pronounced exactly the same as nice. I have made many many bad puns based on that over the years.

Gneiss is a metamorphic rock, usually formed from granite that got shoved back into the mantle and remelted into a different crystalline structure. Occasionally it’s from a different volcano-produced rock like diorite as well, but granite’s most frequent. It’s a pretty common rock, since granite’s quite common as well, especially in the older rocks when the primary land formation method was volcanism rather than water- or life-based methods.

Yes, life actually has a pretty big impact on the rocks. Heck, another rather common rock, limestone, is made from discarded shells of trillions of sea creatures, piling up over the eons. Banded Iron formations (one of my favorite rock formations with the pretty black and red stripes) only formed during the oxygenation of the planet, caused by life breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen.

If that seems backwards to you, congratulations! You remember your basic human biology! Humans and most other animals require oxygen, but the plants and the micro-organisms tend to break apart carbon dioxide and create oxygen. That’s why having a potted plant in your health improves air quality, and why deforestation is such a problem for the environment. We need plants around to keep the cycle going.

…Boy, do I go of on tangents sometimes.

This is another of the cases where knowing more about geology makes the landscape much more interesting. To the standard passerby, it’s just a pile of rocks. But I can tell, just from the rock type, that those rocks formed so long ago that they then sank back into the earth, remelted, were pushed back up in their new form, then pushed further up so that these mantle-kissed rocks are now at the top of a mountain, nearly 10,000 feet above sea level.

  

Tall Mountain, Thin Waterfall, Thick Clouds

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Location Taken: Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

There’s an odd fact about mountain photography that I hadn’t realized before I visited the Canadian Rockies.

The mountains actually look MUCH bigger in real life than they do in photos.

In real life, you’re there, a small ant staring up and up at the massive edifice of rock in front of you. If you drive past them, the mountain fills your window entirely, and you must press your face to the glass if you want to see the top. They are truly awe-inspiring.

In photos, they’re still gorgeous, but the sense of size is lost. You aren’t right there to compare its size to your own, to feel how much you are craning your neck to look at it. An entire mountain can fit in one image.

There are some photos, like this one, which do still retain some of that size. It’s the fog. Or rather, the clouds. It blurs the top, creating a sense of depth that tells your brain that you’re looking up at this mountain rather than at it.

Though my favorite part of the photo isn’t the fact that I retained the size. It’s that waterfall. I love mountain waterfalls. They’re so pretty…

  

Events just keep on spiraling away, like a fractal…

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Time Created: August 2012

I’ve just had my first weekend of the Renn Fest, which always wipes me out physically and mentally.

This included going home early yesterday, because it started raining really heavy and was at it an hour later when my bosses decided that they weren’t likely to send out the cart-based vendors and the walkers (I’m cart) again later that day, even if it stopped raining that second, and they might as well send us home.

I skidded some in the muddy tracks left in the grass parking lot by cars that had left earlier. I hadn’t known that that car had a little light warning you when you were hydroplaning! At least that only lasted to the other side of the mud puddle.

Dad wasn’t so lucky, and he’d lost traction in the rain on an exit ramp on the way to church, spun out, and ended up with the minivan on its side balancing on the curb. He’s fine, but the van’s totaled.

I’ve been running around doing things related to the broken car, driving around a noticeable chunk of the state, plus a few other errands. Including looking at cars at a dealer, trying to decide if we want to keep with a minivan or go for a different type.

At the very least, it needs to comfortably fit two medium-sized dogs, three people, and all our stuff for the regular trips we take. Our second car (currently our only car) can only manage two people and two dogs. And it’d be more likely for them to leave me behind than the dogs.

All that run-around in the hot, sunny weather meant I got an overdose of sunlight.

My brain has melted.

Enjoy the art.

That’s all.