Just because, part 15

red nandina leavesIn abject denial of the actual readership of this blog, I must apologize for being away as long as I have. What with the Grammys, and the Superbowl, and Groundhog’s Day, and then all the celebrity activity, well, you know how it goes. The up side of all this is, of course, that I have so much to post about now!

Yeah right. When you see me posting about anything of the sort, that’s the time to assume crash positions or go deeply into debt buying that new helicopter, because the end times have arrived. Or perhaps that I’ve suffered some kind of traumatic head injury – I wear a medical alert bracelet that advises everyone, in the event that I give the slightest shit about sports or current music, to immediately unsuscitate. Spellcheck doesn’t believe that’s a word…

Even so, a couple of major posts (at least I think so) are coming up – in the meantime, I’ll fill in with a few photos and some light music. Say, shouldn’t pretty photos be called, “light music”?

Both of these were taken while out with students – this one, in fact, is the same type of plant as seen in the previous post, only a few meters away though not the same actual organism. I missed the narrow window of capturing it while snow was present, but that would not have been ideal in conditions like this – the light is too bright to handle the high-contrast subject of colors and pure white snow well, and something likely would have suffered. You can be excused if you think the background greenery is a different species; nandina really can get this diverse in color on the same plant, though I suspect it takes a hard shock of cold weather to pull it off.

The other is just an interesting effect of heavy bubbles throughout thick ice, exaggerated by a wide-angle lens. I could have done without the pine needles, which ground it from being completely abstract, but they were frozen into the ice and not going anywhere soon. Don’t get the impression it got that cold here – this was a small raised pond in the botanical garden, able to get far colder than any typical body of water. But yeah, I found it pretty cool either way.

ice bubble hyperspeed