Josh Romney sees into your soul and he has found it wanting.
AND NOW IT’S TOO LATE FOR YOU HE HAS YOUR SOOOOOOOOOOOUL.
He’s Always Watching You, America
Open Thread
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.
Open Thread
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.
Open Thread
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.
Early Morning Open Thread: Unfolding
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Many thanks to commentor Shari for something cheerful to start the day.
What else is on the agenda?
Open Thread – Pretty Pictures
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.
Friday morning photograph Open Thread – Fish and cephalopod edition
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:
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 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.
Friday morning photograph Open Thread – Fish and cephalopod editionPost + Comments (58)