Shed Snake Skin
I found this shed snake skin while out walking the dog. I expected it to be fragile, but when I picked it up, I found that it’s actually quite strong and flexible. Without the head, which is missing because it was wedged under a stone wall, the snake was 24 inches long. Not a large snake, but not too small, either.
Honeysuckle
Ironweed Seed Heads
Poke Berries
Goldenrod
Asters
These, such as they are, will likely be the last of the flowery things for the year.
While taking the trash out and peeing the dog, I spotted this on the sidewalk. A maple leaf had fallen and left a perfect image of itself stained on the pavement.
Banana Bread
It was it was grey and sprinkley this morning when I walked the dog. Not cold, but windy, with a definite feeling of fall in the air. I came home and decided it would be a good day to bake, so I made banana bread.
My recipe doesn’t call for vanilla, but that seems very wrong, so I added it anyway. I also used half whole wheat flour and sucanat instead of sugar. The result is darker and richer than normal banana bread. Dark brown sugar or adding a touch of molasses will yield a similar result. Mmmm.
Of course, not long after I turned on the oven, the sun decided to come out. It looks like it’s going to be a gorgeous day after all.
Come Ye Blessed
Grace Rutherford
Died Mar. 19, 1901
Aged 24Y 11M 4D
Elmo Son of
J. R. & G. Rutherford
Died Jul. 26, 1901
Aged 4M 13D
I wend back to the Mount Gilead cemetery earlier this week, intending to take another look at what appeared to be a veteran’s headstone. I got sidetracked looking at infants’ and women’s graves, though. This one caught my eye. It wasn’t until I got home and did the math that I realized that Grace died not in childbirth, as I’d assumed, but six days afterward. Her son, Elmo, lived for four and a half months. I assume Grace’s death was related to giving birth. I wonder what killed her son? Disease or malnutrition?
Something else that caught my attention is the lay-out of the graves in the cemetery. Most of them are in orderly rows, but in the older section, there are doubled rows, where the headstones are either stacked one in front of the other, or staggered slightly. There are also half rows of children’s and infants’ graves, which I thought was clever. The first row of graves is right up against the dry stone wall, with at least one headstone facing the wall. I have no idea whose grave it is, because there isn’t enough space between the stone and the wall to see the inscription.
Thompson
Silas E.
1866-1949
Mary A.
1871-
Where the heck is Mary?!
The rest of my Mount Gilead photos are here. I did a little Googling, and it appears that the church was founded by a member of the Skirvin family, which would explain the plethora of Skirvins buried there. Supposedly they are linked in some way to Hoagy Carmichael.
Harvestman Spiders (mating or fighting?)
Crane Fly and Moth
Both of these photos were taken in low light. The first one turned out a little blurry and grainy, the second, much clearer, but in need of some tweaking of saturation and contrast.
I have a higher end cheap, consumer grade digital camera. Meaning, it’s pretty decent. It’s flexible, has a nice lens, and the color tends to be pretty good. However, it’s not a DSLR, and it’s incapable of doing as good a job as a high-end camera. I’d like to get a digital SLR some day, but even the cheaper ones are way out of my price range. Besides, I just can’t justify spending that kind of money on what amounts to a hobby, so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about my current cameras, in order to get as much out of them as possible.
One of those things I’ve been working on is figuring out how to get usable close-ups in low light conditions. The problem is that low-end automatic cameras don’t allow you to control the shutter speed. If you try to take photos in low light conditions, you are either forced to use flash (ptoui!) or a tripod (not always possible), or your image will be blurry because the shutter stayed open too long, trying to accommodate for the insufficient light. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t territory.
But! You can trick your camera into a short shutter speed without the flattening effect of the flash. All you do is set your camera to close-up/macro mode, compose your shot, then, before pressing the shutter release, cover the flash with one or two fingers[1]. Et voila, the shutter is fast enough that your image is sharp, but the flash is not allowed to flatten and wash out the image.
One problem, though. Your image will be a little dark. Because it is sharp, though, you can correct this in post processing. There are several ways to go about it in Photoshop, including levels, curves, saturation, and color balance layers
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[1] You can also put a piece of electrical tape over the flash, but then you’ve got adhesive residue on your camera, and that’s no fun. Something else that might be interesting to try is to use colored fabric (silk scarves or layers of dyed cheese cloth) over the flash.
These fungi were growing on a tree stump. I nearly decided not to photograph them, because there were much cooler red fungi on the other side of the stump. But those photos didn’t come out, so boring white fungi are all I have to offer.
I thought I posted these here, but I guess not. The other morning, while I was in the shower, Harriet dragged the comforter off the bed, into the living room, and made herself a nest. Miss Brown is all about Teh Comfortables, but it was 5am and a little early for me to find it amusing.
Nest-making is something she does fairly regularly. Her most amazing nest was made from two brand spanking new bags of pine cat litter. I thought for sure that cat litter would be of no interest to her, so I left them sitting beside the couch when I went to work. I came home to a mound of cat litter with a Boxer-shaped depression in the center. Again, not very amusing!
Last week’s nesting was not a singular event. When I got home, this is the sight that greeted me.
She’d dragged two blankets from a Rubbermaid tub in my bedroom into the studio, and built herself a cozy little nest in the middle of my studio floor.
Not bad, considering she doesn’t have opposable thumbs.
I’m not a big Rose of Sharon fan, but as they were the only thing blooming, beggars can’t be choosers. The flowers are pretty enough, but the shrubs are kind of uninspiring.
This particular shrub was uncooperative, too. All the blooms were at the top, which was way above my head. I had to climb half-way into the darned thing, then jump up, grab the branch the flower was on, and pull it down. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the entire shrub was full of spider webs. O ick. Turns out, jumping up and down from heebie-jeebies while trying to take a picture of something you have to hold still with your hand is not as easy as one might think!
red paper boat 