Monday color 44


I have no good idea what these are, other than peppers bred specifically for ornamentation. I also couldn’t tell you if this color works in their favor or not. The bright color of most fruits attracts critters to eat them, but in the case of peppers, the high capsaicin content (the stuff that makes them hot) targets their consumption by birds and not mammals, since birds cannot read more

November’s abstract (a day late)

Dammit, I meant to post this yesterday, and forgot all about it. I’m disappointing my legions of readers…


While I’ve had it in the back of my mind to maintain this new ‘tradition’ of posting an abstract at month’s end, it hasn’t worked out for every month. But I knew this one was in the running the moment I saw how it had turned out. With read more

Monday color 43


Today’s Monday color is another from this session back in August some days I get one or two solid ‘keepers,’ some days I get dozens. On rare occasions I’m pleased with nothing and throw out almost everything I shoot. On those days, I pretend I was busy doing something else…

BIAB: Colin Hay fourfer

Yes, we’re digging back into the deposits of ancient music again, because it’s a blog (see title.) The choice this time around is Colin Hay, formerly the lead singer and guitarist of the Australian group Men At Work, then going solo in the late 80s, then headlining the Colin Hay Band (curious coincidence, that) in the early 90s before read more

Monday color 42

Taken just a few days back, this is another current one for Monday color. Despite having a couple of overnight frosts, and the bare fact that the tomato plants never did well this year because of the sporadic sunlight in the back yard, one of the cherry tomato plants is still valiantly, defiantly producing fruit (and yes, tomatoes are a fruit.)

This, by the way, is another example of the lighting read more

Monday color 41

Today, a recent one, taken a few days back with the others but saved for this special occasion. The mix of colors on the same sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua,) combined with the backlighting and the clear blue sky photobombing from the rear, made this an obvious choice. A bit too complicated for read more

Monday color 40


For this week’s Monday color we have a variety of milkweed flowers (family Asclepiadaceae,) looking somehow unreal, possibly due to the heavy haze light conditions. Milkweed species have a wide range of colors, from white to pale pink to deep orangey-red, but so far I have found none that seem to have orange flowers with this magenta center, so this might be a hybrid. read more

Monday color 39


I was going to out this one in its own post, but it certainly makes an entry for Monday color that won’t be duplicated in hue anytime soon – or, well, maybe it will, if I dig out the old camera.

This is infrared specifically, using a 720nm IR filter on an old Canon Pro90 digital camera that has no IR blocking filter of its own. Digital sensors are also sensitive to infrared read more

I’ll have to do this in the front yard someday


Wouldn’t it be a great diorama, about a thousand times life size?

For Halloween this year, I feature a jumping spider, most likely an Habronattus pyrrithrix (what a great name,) peering out from around the edge of a dog fennel stalk. I captured this while in pursuit of another subject one evening a few years ago, and the flash angle was ideal to produce the ominous effect with the read more

Monday color 38

For this week’s Monday color, we rely on the brilliance of Aconitum blossoms, otherwise known by a zillion different names such as monkshood, wolf’s bane, devil’s bane, Queen of All Poisons, and flake attractor, the last of which is my own, coined after seeing the woo-related claims and usages for the plant that can be found online. While purported to have countless different read more

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