Some piccies

[pecunium]

Summer is a time of easy photography. Birds, flowers, mushrooms and bugs are all going about their business with great vim and vigor.

Today I saw a most amazing mantis. Tomorrow I intend to take pictures. The usual run of mantids here is all imported stuff, the Carolina, Chinse, and European. California has a native (Stagomantis californica) but it lives in the Foothills of the Sierras (if I've interpreted the literature correctly). The Carolina is brown, the other two the "classic" green (classic is in quotes because mantids are amazingly diverse. I kept one in my my hotel room one year in Sierra Vista, Ariz. It was a wonderful shade of cigarette ash grey. There are some which look like orchids).

This little one is a sort of cross between charcoal, and oak bark, with stripes/checking on the grasping arms.

So today was a three mantis day. I released about 600 this year, and have been counting them as I see them. There are some which live in the Anaheim peppers, A carolina which lived in the lavender, before the lavender died [the Huntington says it was the January frost, with a delayed effect], a large Carolina [almost certainly one I didn't release, as it was a good five-six inches long, and that more than a month ago] one which has been hanging out in the orchid/maidenhair fern/mouse houses; I saw it eating a fly today. That was the first time I've seen one eating, in the wild.

This one




has been hanging out in the gourds.

Here




is a female blossom. The next is the same, in B&W.




In the back yard I have puffball mushrooms in the grapes.







The grapes themselves look something like this




And as a sepia treatment



Clicking on the pictures will, as usual, link to a larger image.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I think your puffballs look more like our shaggy ink caps (Although it's always dangerous to extrapolate fungi identification outside your local species). If the second photo is the same species later on, then they're clearly not ink caps, but they're still quite different to what we regard as "puffballs" in Western Europe.

Can you / do you eat them?

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

Agreed--those aren't puffballs. Puffballs have no stems. If I had my mushroom book with I could probably ID them, but it's in IL and I'm in PA.

I don't think they're shagy ink caps either--they open too wide, looking at the second pic. They might be Parasol mushrooms.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I'm with the "nope, not puffballs" camp. I think they're called shaggy manes in North America, but I am a severely amateur mycologist. And I'd spore-print them before I'd eat them.

We found three puffballs this weekend and harvested them, with intent to eat. Unfortunately they were all infested except for a bit of one, which I fried in garlic and we shared around.

K.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Learn something new every day. I'm no mycologist at all; unless I'm buying it, I don't eat it. I'm curious, but time is at a premium, and I've not had the drive to make the time to avoid the mistakes.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Following the link, I don't think they are those. They don't blow open to convex, and they have a distinctivly swollen base. The ring doesn't slide.

When they mature, they are a trifle below flat, and then they collapse.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The second is later life in the same type of mushroom.

I don't know/I don't.

TK

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

What method are you using for your B&W conversion? (I'm thinking it could be a bit more luminous.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I'm using serial channel mixers in Lightzone 2.1.0.5 (the last stable beta of the version which never really saw light).

I'm not completely happy with that version. It's a little muddy and flat, losing something when it's larger.

The low range of contrast in the color range doesn't help, and making it less dark makes it really flat. I think it needs a few more layerings of channel edits.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

How about this version.



TK

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

Yes. Bright and a more pleasing contrast. The stamen in the center looks three dimensional and the delicate details around the base come out nicely.

How do you like Lightzone as compared to Photoshop? I picked up CS3 when it came out earlier this year (yeah! for educational discount! it's good to work for a university), though I haven't explored it very much yet.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The version I have?

Much better. Version 3.0.x(6, I think), I don't know.

My father thinks 3.0.x is ok, but he's pulling a workaround. They changed one of the tools, from sliders to a color wheel doohicky, or somthing, and he doesn't like it.

So he opens things in the older version, saves them, and gets the old controls.

But for actually editing? It's cleaner, layers just happen, and no file is ever treated to destructive edits. Changes can be cancelled, or merely suspended. They can be moved around the stack, so the effects cascade differently.

It never hard crashes. If it fails on you, it will write the changes, and save them. The only time you don't get that is a slower failure (Lightzone has encountered a problem and needs to close, whattaya wanna do?).

It loads a little faster, has an easier RAW browser, and things like Exif, etc. are always not more than a click away.

I'd like a shot at CS3, but for what I'm using CS2 to do, it's not worth the money (I'm using it to clean up spots, rezise, and save as jpg as well as printing, because Lightzone has some quirks. They might be things I could call Fabio and find out how to fix, but CS2 does it just fine).

I confess that I like the newer version better too. Oddly it seems something I did in photoshop borked the first one, because in LZ it's brighter, and holding more of the contrast style I was trying for.

As released in that post, it's a so-so picture.

Chalk it up to lessons learned (and perhaps some odd lighting in the working area when I did it; not sure but the light was a little orange shifted while I was working).

I think the new one will print well, esp. on a lightly textured paper.
TK

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the overview.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Re-reading that comment, I see that I made a grammatical inclarity.

I am using 2.0.5, which is a beta, for a version that wasn't released for long (being superseded by 3.0).

I like it.

I suspect that, if you didn't have the previous versions, and the thought patterns/habits, that come of learning a method, the things I said would still be true.

TK

[delicata77.livejournal.com]

Love these :)

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I really like the grapes in color. Lovely bokeh.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

Bokeh is such a tricky thing. To get that soft background the lens was stopped down to 5.6. The background leaves were about six feet behind (it's nice that the grapes are in half-barrels on wheels).

But that was the 200 Micro-Nikkor f/4. Up around 8, the bokeh gets angular. Below that, it's wonderfully soft; it can leave the a background only a couple of inches behind the focal plane as a blanket of color.

Above 22 there's some diffraction, which changes the bokeh differently.

I have a hard time with bokeh, because the edges of the iris are impossible to see when focusing, and lost in the darkness when stopped down to check depth of field.

But when I get it, I am so happy.

TK

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

I like the sepia grapes myself.

DV

[2890.livejournal.com]

The color grapes are beautiful.

I like the mushroom pictures for the setting. The soil looks healthy.

And I like that you're a student of natural history.