Monday, 4 November 2019
This is up in the back yard at 6:40am, new time. It looked much darker to my eye. Such is the magic of computational photography. Fits right in your hand.
Some robust azaleas are flowering for another round. This must be the sixth cycle this year.
(New to me) Concept of the week: blue carbon (sequestration ecosystems).
Monday, 28 October 2019
As the sun emerged, fogginess materialized. And dew.
In the later sunshine, evidence of the seasons changing: seeds are coming.
Holiday fun: a modern spider tickles a see-ment lion. Boo!
See: blazing sunshine! Or: autumnal afternoon blazing sunshine?
Sunday, 27 October 2019
We walked as far as we could north along the BeltLine. Seems like it’s usually “bridge closed,” but here it’s “after-bridge closed.”
Returning to the south into Piedmont Park, this big cooling fountain was going, although it wasn’t that hot.
Overhead: gorgeous blue, blue sky.
Tuesday, 22 October 2019
I was on my perambulation late this morning, and plodding my way up a hill when I saw this ditcher-machine in the ready position in a trailer.
I passed two more construction vehicles and then spotted this mess across the street. Out of the frame behind shrubberies above the tubing and waterfall were three guys busy with shovels. I’m guessing they wished the yard were flatter and they could use the ditcher. Red clay mud is no fun.
Later, I came across this birdbath. Are those stylized cardinals? I don’t think of the cardinal as a birdbath species, but I’ve never had a birdbath to watch to study/learn attendees.
Monday, 21 October 2019
New phone did NOT think this was a face; it’s pretty sharp!
I think of dahlias as fall flowers, but maybe that’s what they do in the Deep South, and not in cooler places.
Sunday, 20 October 2019
Lily pad droplets. Magic of surface tension.
Flower droplets. Lookit that color!
Busy bee.
Wide lens aka “ultra wide” to Apple.
Normal lens aka “wide” to Apple.
Zoom/telephoto lens.
This second trio are cropped to 16×9 aspect ratio, but otherwise unchanged. In the order presented, the lenses are digital-world 13mm, 26mm, and 52mm. FYI
Friday, 18 October 2019
Not sure what to lead with…I choose the seasonal, emotional, and possibly artistic image. Ghoul I thought, rather than ghost. Not sure why. “Ghoul” is from a late 1700s Arabic word for “to seize” that shifted meaning a bit to refer to a desert demon/monster that desecrates graves to eat corpses. That’s specificity; a ghoul is no city-critter.
Now, switch to the merely mildly mysterious. I cannot figure out for sure how this feather got so deeply embedded in the azalea foliage. Wind?
Tuesday, 15 October 2019
This morning I thought my day would be miscellaneous (dull, boring) chores, with the headliner being getting my hair done (D, B subject for a post…). [I’m so Midwest.]
Then I went for a walk and found these droplets spaced like a variation on a flat meniscus situation, and thought, well, that’d be a big improvement on hair salon tedium.
Just about rush hour, things turned topsy turvy. The Guru exercised his traffic mojo and we went “to the mall” Apple store and brought home a new phone for me. Lots of advertising focused (heh) on the three lenses, ignoring the one on the front for selfies. Now I have to study up on how to use all the lenses with technical intelligence and creativity. It was raining and getting darned dark when I made this photo (which would never win a prize of any sort). Still, the fancy algorithms produce an interesting image, no?
Monday, 14 October 2019
…spider. Duh. Secondarily: the sparkles in the web.
…potted plant. Secondarily: the geometric pillows.
…riotous autumnal shapes.
Saturday, 12 October 2019
Urban travel today is likely to involve routes underground, whether you are in a vehicle or afoot. A tunnel in the central civic-ceremonial zone of WashDC.
Ronald Reagan building parking/security team joke.
A rose to you for getting through the traffic.
How many US citizens under the age of, what?, 40? know what this is…that it’s not just an aesthetic combo of shapes and colors. Often, in my (limited) experience, the eraser would solidify and the bristles would get bent before the eraser was used up.
Our first stop: the Verrocchio exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. Verrocchio has many names in the literature (WikiPee indicates his birth name was Andrea di Michele di Francesco de’ Cioni), but most cognoscenti refer to him as merely Verrocchio, referring to the goldsmith he trained under, poor guy. He was an accomplished goldsmith, architect, painter, and sculptor. One of his mentees was Leonardo da Vinci.
Verrocchio’s Alexander the Great. Is that a dragon on your head, sir?
Love the sandal strap details. Many art historians think Leonardo painted the ghostly terrier.
This is Goliath’s head with David’s foot in Verrocchio’s version of the same moment as the famous Donatello statue of David. We saw the latter in Florence; I like both. Again: footwear detail.
We got lunch in a downstairs museum café, and headed to the mall. Left: view of Capitol Hill. We went that way last time. We went the opposite way this time.
Toward the Washington monument, all sparkly clean and open for business again.
And from the hill at its base, we could see our quarry, the Lincoln Monument. But first, at this end of the Reflecting Pool, the WWII Memorial.
Sobering to see over 4000 stars here, each representing 100 American war dead.
We climbed out, paralleled the pool, and worked our way through the crowds up the steps and into the main room of the Lincoln Monument, which the Romans would have called a cella. Many old guys in wheelchairs…this weekend’s groups of Honor Flight members and their attendees. One group whose members we kept encountering were from “Flag City,” Ohio.
We tore ourselves away from the Abe and visited the Vietnam Maya Lin wall. Sobering also. It’s all about the names, each life lost.
Enough malling, we headed back to our parking garage. [Ended up with 16K steps for the day. Outdoor mall-walking.]
The “island” out there is a sunken ship. There are over 230 of them in shallow Mallows Bay, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, a bit downstream and opposite Quantico. Look at GooSatView and see how many you can count. Many are steam ships and many date from WWI.
We paid $6(!!) to cross this bridge over the Rappahannock, the next big river south of the Potomac, both flowing into Chesapeake Bay. The beams are pretty, and the light was nice, but I prefer the bridge that spans the two peninsulas way NNW of here, plus the crossing is cheaper.