Tag: photos

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).

Shooting the moon

The moon orbits the Earth in an elliptical pattern, meaning, among other things, that it varies in how close it is to the planet. When a full moon coincides with a day when it is closest to the Earth in its orbit, the moon appears both bigger and brighter. 2 years ago, the moon was closer to the Earth than it had been in about 9 years, and this supermoon was dubbed the mega moon:

The March 19, 2011 supermoon was 356,577 kilometers (221,566 miles) away from Earth. The last time the full moon approached so close to Earth was in 1993. It was about 20 percent brighter and 15 percent bigger than a regular full moon.

Even more remarkably (yet strangely not even noted on the Wiki page), on that 2011 date, I was many months into my own 365-day trajectory of daily photography. This meant that not only did I keep my camera handy, I also had by that time learned to use it on full manual, and learned the advantages of using a tripod. In other words, I was in just the right position, in time, space and personal circumstances, to shoot the moon.¹

Even so, it was a bit of an adventure. Living as I do in a heavily wooded area, there was quite a bit of trial and error finding the right spot for the tripod. Not to mention figuring out the right exposure.

This shot, for example, showed me the futility of trying to get a photo without the tripod.

This shot was overexposed, and while it is a lovely glowing white circle, it could just as easily have been…a glowing white circle.

The more I got the moon into focus, the more the surrounding trees made themselves apparent.

Moving the tripod around got me different views of different branches, many of which I actually quite liked.

Eventually, I both found the right place to get a tree-free view, and figured out the right settings to actually see more details with my telphoto lens than my naked eye could make out.

I admit that I was pretty excited. Perhaps not over-the-moon excited, but quite pleased with myself, nonetheless.

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to share a photo for the theme “moon.” To see more moons, pay a visit to the fff blog.

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¹ I’ve had this title in mind for a while, as this was a set of photos I’d meant to share ages ago. (As in probably in 2011.) I was reminded of this when I saw a post by my friend Sarah also called Shooting the Moon, though with a completely different reference. When Archie announced a couple days after that the fff theme was “moon,” I figured it was all a sign that these were the photos I should post.²

² Especially since, I’m sorry to say, I couldn’t even motivate myself to even go outside and look at last month’s supermoon. It’s not that I was, you know, over the moon, but without the push of daily photography, I am much less likely to get out the tripod. Plus I was tired.³

³ And besides, I’d already recently posted photos related to a different meaning of the word moon.

squeeze

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With the start of summer comes the end of structured school days. While there is lots of fun to be had, I still need to squeeze in time for my work. Picnics and visits with friends and fireworks and trips to the zoo don’t mean any less cooking, or food shopping, or laundry, or cleaning, (and in fact often mean more) and there are days when I find myself feeling squeezed. I optimistically promised my advisor that I’d get him a large chunk of writing done while he was away on vacation, but I foolishly did so without looking at my calendar, and observing the small number of child-free hours on it in those 2 weeks. When I find a 4-hour chunk of time to focus on my research, my thoughts start to get organized, but then comes the next over-full day and my thoughts scatter. Really, I’ve been enjoying the summer fun, and the extra time with the kids, but just now find myself wishing I could just do one thing or the other for a sustained time. Today I have maybe a 6-hour chunk to do squeeze out as much writing as I can while both kids are out of the house. (Just now I am trying to squeeze out this blog post as the kids eat breakfast. I have only been interrupted roughly 14 times.)

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Starting next week, the kids will both be in camps and childcare more-or-less full-time, so hopefully the squeeze will feel less tight. But if I’m actually going to finish this degree, I have to be prepared to keep on the tight squeeze, long-term. (Hold me.)