Posts Tagged ‘Picture of the Day’

Saw the moon appear under clear skies, and I decided to take another try at taking a picture of it — this time trying to see whether I could use my camera along with my little Meade ETX 60 telescope.

After about an hour of fiddling with the telescope’s focus along with my camera on a tripod and playing with many, many exposure settings, the following pic was arguably the best of the bunch I shot.

Worked up north at the cabin for the morning. Managed to see the girls off to their day camp at the Ojibway Club, and settled in there until lunchtime, checking emails and working away on the netbook that I had brought up with me.

Left not long after lunch. Just before I did, I took this pic of three lonely-looking Muskoka chairs on the deck of the main cottage on the island. I hope to return again sometime next month.

Came home by Ontario Northland bus via Got home to an over-ripe smelling Toronto (no, the garbage strike did not end while I was away) and settled in to finish the work I had started (and couldn’t really work on the bus, though I tried) on earlier in the day.

Another rainy day. Needing a picture of the day, I ventured out into our backyard garden with the macro lens to see what there was to see and photograph.

Easily my favourite shot of the day: the underside of a grape leaf that had been rained on. I like the way that the droplets magnify the cells in the leaf.

Close-up of a lily spattered with rain drops.

A tall, purple plant with flowers also displaying water droplets.

Looks a bit like some soggy mop. I like the contrast against the dark leaves.

Even our small backyard can reward the patient photographer equipped with a macro lens. I started shooting some flowers, but in the end got taken in by a couple of insects instead.

Hover Fly on a Leaf

Interesting bug #1 – a Hover Fly, which looks like a fly with bee markings (a type of bee mimic).

Hopefully it is the sort that eats aphids, which are currently plaguing our honeysuckle.

Interesting bug #2 – Nope, not what you might think it is at first. Look more closely at what seems like a bird dropping on a leaf and you’ll see an antenna, wings, and a fussy eye looking straight at the camera. Am pretty sure it’s a Codling moth, which is apparently a real pest to Apple farmers. And looks like bird poop.

Took over 70 pics today, mostly conventional shots of flowers from our back yard, and in the end I took about three shots of a grape vine silhouetted against the sky. Guess which one I liked best of the bunch.

To my mind it proves that experimenting with new angles and subject are always worthwhile.

Took the dog for a walk down by Woodbine Park, and I ran across a bunch of these purple flowers, which are arranged in a sphere at the top of a think stalk. Too cool for me to pass up, especially since I had my macro lens with me.

I had no idea what it was, but then I found that a friend and former colleague had posted similar pics on his blog, and somebody mentioned what they were in the comments section: Allium, which is from the onion family. A very fancy onion indeed!

I picked up a netbook today: an Acer Aspire One. I felt a little bit guilty about buying something which is powered by our main CPU rival, but I haven’t been able to find one made by AMD as yet and, well, this was on sale.

My plan is to use it for writing while commuting. You will likely will see more written blog entries as a result.

One word of warning for those contemplating getting one of these: it takes a good half-hour or more for it to set itself up with Windows XP before you can actually do anything with it. Didn’t get a lot of time to spend with it, though I did manage to install a few programs I expect to want, such as OpenOffice, Winamp, a movie codec pack and Stellarium to start.

Thought about going with a Linux-based version, but in the end I like convenience, and venerable Windows XP still delivers. (I have two machines that came with Vista, and much prefer the older OS, if only because it doesn’t get in my way and is as top-heavy as the new OS).

A couple of other observations: I hate the fact that somebody decided that it would be a good idea to sacrifice a double-width Shift key for a single-key sized version adjacent to the little-used pipette/forward-slash key (I wonder if I can easily remap it?). Also, am amazed that Microsoft or Acer didn’t reduce the multi-level nav-bar for Internet Explorer, as the default config takes up well over a third of the display. I ditched that almost immediately for a lightly customized Firefox browser.

Needing to take a picture of the day, I chose my new “toy”.

Here’s a close-up of its vast keyboard. 😉

QA

Close-up of the screen (displaying Stellarium) using the macro lens.

Labels: Acer Aspire, macro, netbook, Stellarium

Sick with a cold, so I stayed at home today. Still, I needed to take a “picture of the day”, so I bundled up and went outside to take some pics of the emerging flowers in our garden — in the pouring rain.

Trillium plants just shy of blooming

Labels: rain, trillium

The current window display at the Bata Shoe Museum. At night.

Labels: Bata Shoe Museum, surreal