humor, photography

Looking at Lichen

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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Organic ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #147

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Lichen looks like flaking paint.
Inorganic? No, it ain’t.

Do not try to watch it grow.
Each micron takes a day or so.

Nerdy 😉 Note

Dunno enough lichenology to say how slowly my lichen grows.  From the wide range of known lichen growth rates and my very casual observations, I could go with either “hour” or “day” as a crude monosyllabic estimate of long my lichen takes to grow a millionth of a meter wider.  Compared to watching lichens grow, watching grass grow would be like watching hockey.

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haiku, photography

Looking Up or Down

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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Clouds ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #146

How something looks may depend on how it is viewed.
Consider storm clouds.

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Storm Clouds #1
|Looking up, I see
|trees wary of churning clouds.
|Wish I could look down.

~ ~ ~ ~

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Storm Clouds #2
|Looking down, I’d see
|clouds caress dear Mother Earth.
|Rain for thirsty trees.

Image Sources

  • While doing a little yardwork before predicted rain, I glanced upward and noticed how trees framed a bright cloud in a darkening sky.  I ran for my camera and took a few photos.  For this post, I tweaked the image to mimic the ominous look I had often seen but not photographed.
  • The Blue Marble image was downloaded from NASA Visible Earth: The Blue Marble.  Making NASA’s image cost a lot more than making mine.  That’s OK.  It was money well spent.
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photography

Diagonals: Found and Made

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Diagonal Line(s)

On slopes and stairs, we move up or down while moving in some other direction also, so we find many natural diagonal lines in the world around us:

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Sometimes we make diagonals when we compose photos and other images.  (Googling “baroque diagonal” is informative.)  The horizontal lintels of ancient Greek temples look stodgy:

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Diagonals made by camera angles can rescue lintels from stodginess:

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The soft vertical flutes of window curtains are so ordinary; we are likely to ignore the mundane miracle of sunlight seen thru closed curtains.  Diagonals made by camera angles can rescue curtains from banality:

curtain-complex

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humor, photography

The Towel Brothers

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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There are grander true stories of failure and redemption,
but this one can be illustrated by photos
with many horizontal lines.

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Horizontal Line(s)

Ken is a colorful “kitchen towel” but …

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… can’t keep up with Hank (a “hand towel”) at drying.

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What else can towels do? I repurposed Ken to …

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… block glare from the light over the sink …

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… and left the drying to Hank.

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8
humor, photography

Columns Still Vertical

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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The roof they supported is long gone, but many of this Greek temple’s columns have not noticed.

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The images were scanned in 2018 from slides taken at Paestum in 1977, with pushed Ektachrome film in a Canon SLR with a 50 mm lens.  The slides were in remarkably good condition when Indiana Jones unearthed them.

The temple is even more ancient than the slides.

 

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