Category: photos

3 photos of broken glass

Here are 3 photos of scattered broken glass fragments on pavement that I’ve come across in recent years.¹


Train station parking lot, August, 2010


Sidewalk, May, 2013


Rest area parking lot, September, 2013

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I had to drive into Boston for a meeting yesterday, and traffic was a bit slower than is typical late morning, due to construction. I’d also had rough night, sleep-wise, so I’d had more caffeinated beverages than is typical. These combined factors led to me stopping at the rest area on my way in, which is not typical. I looked down at the ground and admired the patterns made by the cracks and the weathered paint, which is typical of me. And I was rewarded by the sight bits of aquamarine-colored glass, bits of someone’s broken car window, sparkling in the sunlight like cut gems. Naturally, I stopped to take some pictures. I was especially pleased that I now had a third photo of broken glass I’d come across to round out my collection. I find it funny that I can remember where I was when I took each of the previous broken glass photos. My mind is littered with this sort of largely useless information.

iron flowers (friday foto finder: flower)

One of the nearby farms we visit to pick fruit has a playground which prominently features a vintage tractor, long since retired from its days of labor in the fields. Kids love climb up into the seat behind the big steering wheel, and on busier days, there can even be a line to do so, with adults nearby taking advantage of the photo op. It’s fun to see the kids up on the tractor, certainly, but I also find myself drawn to the details of this old tractor. I see so much character in the peeling paint, the flakes of rust, the curves and lines and joints. There are several places on the tractor where the hardware (perhaps bolt heads) reminded me of flowers: the hexagonal shape was segmented such that it looked like a ring of petals around the central circle.

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to share a favorite flower foto. Archie chose this theme in celebration of Spring, which has now sprung in the southern hemisphere. Here in the northern parts, many of the outdoor blooms have already died back. While I have loads of old photos of real flowers in my archives, these iron flowers called out to me.¹ To see what flowers others have picked, stop by the fff blog. (And won’t you consider joining in the foto-finding fun, too?)
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¹ Writing about these iron flowers also gets the song Iron Flower by K’s Choice stuck in my head. ²

² I think this may constitute my first instance of embedding a video in a footnote. While there are plenty of footnotes in my academic writing, I have to say that they are much less amenable to multimedia.

green spaces of Hong Kong (friday foto finder: green)

Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, is known as an urban jungle. But the territory also boasts a wide range of green spaces, which more closely resemble “jungle” than “urban jungle.” When I visited Hong Kong in 2011 for a conference, I enjoyed exploring the urban jungle, and also managed to see a few of the greener spaces. The highlight of these excursions was a hike with my friend YTSL, a Hong Kong local who knows her way around the green spaces of Hong Kong. We met up and took a series of subway rides and buses out to Wong Shek, on the Sai Kung Peninsula. (I wouldn’t have remembered exactly where it was we went, but happily YTSL mentioned it in her post shortly after our hike.)

The day was hot and humid, and also very hot and really humid, but I managed not to pass out. I also managed to take several hundred photos. (Pausing to take a photo is a good way to catch one’s breath.) Did I mention that it was hot and humid? It was all entirely worth it, as the views were stunning, and I appreciated them even through the heat and humidity.

The blue skies were filled with fluffy white rather expressive-looking clouds.

Below the blue and white there was plenty of green to be seen.

There were splashes of other colors, too, among the green fronds.

The path was sometimes narrow, sometimes not, sometimes paved, sometimes not. But always surrounded by green.


A particularly photogenic cloud poses for the camera, trying to steal attention from the picturesque rocks, water and greenery.

We passed a small number of homes which appeared to be inhabited, and more that were clearly long abandoned.

Some of the abandoned buildings were taken over by green.

Our hike finished up with a ferry ride back to our starting point, which offered plenty more beautiful views of green peaks. (A few more photos from the excursion are included below, in the slideshow. And several hundred more are still on my laptop.)

This post was brought to you by the color green, which was week’s friday foto finder theme . Green abounds in my photo library, especially of the local greenery, but it seemed a good excuse to get back to posting some of my long-promised travel photos. To see what other green can be seen, stop by the fff blogfff 200x60

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a parking space with a view (friday foto finder: rooftop)

One of our favorite places to go in the Boston area is the Boston Museum of Science. We started getting a membership a few years back, which has resulted in more frequent visits to the museum. The museum has a parking garage, something important to consider when driving into Boston. The lower levels are typically a bit cramped, as parking garages tend to be, and empty spaces are few and tight. But the rooftop level usually has plenty of empty spaces, and a gorgeous view, to boot.


July, 2012


January, 2012. (This one you may recognize as the purple from my 6 unrelated photos post.)


September, 2012


July, 2012

We went to the Museum of Science again this weekend, and headed up to the rooftop to park, as usual. There were some others up there, too, apparently also enjoying the view.


August, 2013

These guys were remarkable patient with me as I got out my camera.

This week’s (fine, last week’s) friday foto challenge was to share photos on the theme of rooftop. I may have more interesting and exotic rooftops in my photo library, but this is one rooftop that turns up in my photos again and again.

To see others rooftops, and see what theme is up next, pay a visit to the fff blog. Won’t you play along, too?

grains of sand

I’m playing around with crops again, this time to show the coolness of the grains of sand from one of yesterday’s photos. (More of my zooming in can be found here and here.) Next I need to get photos of sand with a real macro lens set-up. Or a microscope!

sand and surf (friday foto finder: seaside)

This Sunday we headed to Salisbury Beach for what may be our second annual late August visit there. It was a beautiful sunny day, warm and breezy. We didn’t have too much time to stay, but we enjoyed lying on the sand and playing in the waves. I was supervising most of the wave-playing, so I didn’t get too many photos this time. These were three that I found quite pleasing. I was especially happy with the shell photo, as my telephoto lens captured more detail of the sand grains than I’d really noticed directly with my own eyes. (The sand is actually the same coarseness as what you can see in the seagull photo, though dryer than what the gull is walking on.) It made me wish that I’d taken more than one such photo! And also that I’d thought to bring home a handful of sand to photograph some more. (We did bring home plenty of sand, in our towels and sandals and stuck to the beach toys. But I’m not likely to scrape enough together to be photogenic!)

This week’s (okay, well, last week’s) friday foto finder theme is seaside. After spending some time looking through my old seaside photos, I realized that (what with the rarity of our seaside visits) I had already posted highlights from most of my seaside photo batches. (In fact, our last trip to Salisbury Beach was featured in a fff from June.) Rather than reposting, I opted to wait a few days to see what our weekend travels offered.

To see what other seaside delights have been offered, pay a visit to the friday foto finder blog.

Giant spiders of Northern California (friday foto finder: spiders)

Back in June of 2008, we had a trip to California to see my family in Oakland. One of our favorite things to do is to take the ferry over the bay to San Francisco. This particular visit, we were greeted by this cheerful fellow:

This is a sculpture by Louise Borgeois, and it apparently left the piers of San Francisco not too long after I saw it there.

The spider sculpture may have left, but I believe that there may be other giant spiders in the greater San Francisco area. At the Oakland Zoo, for example, the playground has a super cool spider web made of ropes for kids to climb on. At least, I believe it to be made of ropes. It is just possible that it was made by a giant spider who was scared off by the swarms of small children.

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to find and share photos of spiders. I’ve got quite a few photos of real spiders in my library, as well as photos of their webs. I have posted photos of real spiders before, too. (One of my favorite posts with photos was about a little green spider.) Come to think of it, I also have a fairly large collection of things with a spider or web motif, thanks to my love of Halloween. (I did, in fact, put spiderweb placemats on my wedding registry.) When it came time to post, though, this spider scuplture came to mind. (Perhaps because I missed the statue fff a couple of weeks ago.)

To see what other spiders have been caught, or to find out more about joining in on the foto-sharing fun, check out the fff blog.

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I feel I must offer an apology to Sally, who has a phobia relating to all sorts of arthropods, for the images and especially the title of this post. Sorry, Sally. I hope that I haven’t given you nightmares!

I also thought of YTSL, who has displayed many photos of interesting spiders and webs from her hikes around Hong Kong, including some real giant spiders. Check out her tag critter spottings to spot a few such critters. (Sally, I strongly recommend that you don’t do this…though you may enjoy some of her other photos of critters, some of which have fewer than 6 legs!)

the other corpse plant

This afternoon, as I walked Phoebe down our road to a neighbor’s house for a playdate, a strange plant caught my eye on the roadside. Emerging from the brown fallen leaves were some bundles of waxy-looking stalks with what looked like bell-shaped flowers on top. They were almost totally white. I don’t just mean that the flowers were white. The whole plant was white: stems, leaves and flowers. All white.

I bent down to take a few photos with my trusty iPhone. After chatting with my neighbor about school supply lists and other exciting news, I completely forgot about the weird plant.

This evening, I remembered. A quick google search (for “white plant”) led me to the identification of the Monotropa uniflora, also known as Indian Pipe (they do look sort of pipe-like), ghost plant (they definitely look on the ghostly side) as well as corpse plant.

When I did a google search for “corpse plant,” however, I was greeted not by images of this guy, but by stories about the more famous, but similarly nicknamed, corpse flower. In case you missed hearing about it, the corpse flower is a giant flower that blooms only every few years, and not even on a regular schedule at that. Sometimes it will go a decade or more between blooms. But it is not its blooming timeline or even its massive size (8 feet tall!) for which the titan arum gets its fame, but from its smell: it is said to smell like a rotting corpse. The corpse flower was in the news quite a bit last month, as one living in the United States Botanic Garden Conservatory in Washington DC bloomed, bringing in over 130,000 visitors to sample the putrescent delights of this this olfactory oddity with their own nostrils. (Boston has one, too, apparently, but I have neither seen nor smelled it. I am tickled that it is named Morticia, though, and hope to visit her someday.)

Anyhow, this post is (mostly) not about that corpse flower, but the less famous, and much less smelly flowering corpse plant. While not nearly as dramatic, it is still a bit of a botanical oddity. This plant, you see, has no chlorophyll. As such, it is not able to produce its own food, but must live off of other plants. Specifically, it lives off certain trees and fungi. Unlike many fungi, which give something back to the host trees on which they live, the corpse plant only takes. It is parasitic. And I’m thinking kind of vampiric.

I hope to go back another day with my real camera to get some clearer shots, but I don’t know how long these things bloom. Apparently they will dry out and turn black fairly soon. I find it remarkable that I had never seen them before, nor heard of them. From what I can tell, they are fairly rare. I suppose that it caught my eye due to my recently heightened roadside plant awareness–we are always keeping our eyes open to avoid stepping in a tangle of poison ivy (which is lush and green and sadly, not rare at all).