How Do You Like Them Apples?

I was enjoying the sunlight streaming through a window and betwixt some houseplants this morning. I took a moment to play with some still life photos using strong shadows and sharp textures.

Weighty apple:

Keeping company:

In the spotlight and in the shadows:

Which apple do you think will be the tastiest to eat?  It's no contest - the first is a genuine Honeycrisp, the others are artificial.

[For my photo geek friends, these were shot hand-held with the Canon 100-400 L II IS]

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2015/01/how-do-you-like-them-apples.html

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Lonely Pear

A simple still life shot with an iPhone: pear with wood and granite.  Flat, uninteresting light, but that did allow the textures and colors to dominate, and the odd marks on the pear to show clearly, and emphasized the outline of shape rather than an illusion of third dimension.  Or, I'm just making excuses for the flat light and my failure to do anything to modify it!  Try this one: I got hungry!

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2015/01/lonely-pear.html

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Beautiful exoskeleton

Part of a Saturday project was to photograph this exoskeleton of a Murex pecten, or Venus Comb Murex.  The remains are so striking, I wish I could have seen the animal in life.  It is a type of sea snail, found in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.  This one is a bit over 15 cm long.

Another task was to shoot the coral sponge below.  I'll have to update with a more specific ID.  It may look like fabric, but it's not - it is rigid and very fragile! Well, not as fragile as I feared:

And here we go! It is an example of Eupectella aspergillum, or Venus Flower Basket. So, we have a linguistic commonality of these two unrelated creatures! Venus Comb (snail) and Venus Flower Basket (sponge).

A terrific nature photographer, Socrate Gentile, helped to identify this when I posted it on the Fred Miranda Forum. He also provided a link to a video which I highly recommend. The materials use and formation of the coral is fascinating, as is the way it functions as optical fibers to "pipe" bioluminescence emitted by micro-organisms on the seabed a kilometer and more below the surface of the ocean. The whole coral becomes a glowing organism, perhaps to lure food, and (my own speculation) perhaps also to draw the symbiotic shrimp which enter as a male-female pair when young, then are unable to leave, and create their own brood from within the sponge.

Do watch the video! By the way, on Fred Miranda, Socrate uses the screen name Shasoc, and mine is Photon.

I may have to try harder to make noticeable use of the fiber optic properties of this Venus Flower Basket!

From the essay attached to the YouTube video:

"Euplectella aspergillum, also known as the "Venus flower-basket" is one of the most unique and interesting lifeforms on earth. This is a truly alien-like organism as this species of sponge has a silica exoskeleton which forms an intricate cage, held together by protein filaments only a few nanometers across. In effect, this animal is almost entirely made of a nano-structured glass."

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2014/08/beautiful-exoskeleton.html

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Wood and wood products

If you came here looking for particle board, sorry to mislead your search engine. The oak leaves have curled into interesting shapes, and the existing light brought out the textures pretty well. I'd like to think that the subject matter complements my previous post. No experimenting with different cameras this time, just a quick tripod setup, compose and focus using live view, and a manual exposure of 20 seconds at f/13, ISO 100, 100 mm.

It's sometimes fun to look for animal-like shapes in static plants (not to mention rocks, clouds, etc.), but then the real thing arrives to show you a true action pose, if you can catch it:

I know squirrels are rodents, and commonplace, but I still think they're cute, and sometimes downright funny! Also, even urban squirrels are products of the woods.

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2012/12/wood-and-wood-products.html

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Apple and Strawberry

So an apple went for a walk...
We won't go there for any bad jokes, but let's follow the apple that I carried around for a while.
It became a fence post sitter, and I was on the fence about how to compose this little study in perspective. I chose to do it two ways. Both shot with the same 50 mm lens, by the way.

I tilted the camera for this image of an unlikely resting place because I liked the way it emphasized the balance point of the apple, which looked a little askew in any case.

The apple seemed to find a natural home in an oversized strawberry.

So that's where it ended up for its formal portrait. Classical Photography, you might say.

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2012/08/apple-and-strawberry.html

At last, some rain and a break in the heat!

Two days that Raleigh reached 105ºF, and one that touched 106º (41ºC), in a span of six straight days above 100º…whew!

When a protracted stretch of extreme summer heat - record breaking temperatures - is broken by a sudden thunderstorm, the feeling of relief we get is wonderful. I could almost imagine the plants all around me sighing with satisfaction. Dogs, on the other hand, are often nervous about lightning, and sometimes even upset by very heavy rain. We humans should have a healthy respect for lightning, too, of course. At any rate, I came in out of the rain, and soon thereafter the sun broke through the clouds. Even as the last drops were falling, the entry was flooded with light. Well, flooded is a relative term in this case. The light was pretty dim, but there were no interior sources, no lamps on. The translucence of the umbrella caught my eye, as did the textures of the basket brought out by side lighting. Sometimes we photographers will stop to try to make a photo out of almost anything. 

For those of you interested in technical matters, it was shot on a "full frame" DSLR (a Canon 5D III) with a 135 mm f/2 lens stopped down to f/2.8, a single exposure of 1/6 sec (I was resting on the floor) at ISO 100. I adjusted the raw file in Adobe Lightroom, pulling back the highlights and raising the shadows. 

Meanwhile, I found that our dog Photon had clambered up the stairs in my absence. She's getting very old, and has trouble with stairs. Apparently her fear of the thunder claps overcame her fear of steps. She didn't seem to have hurt herself, and even looked a bit proud to be up in one of her old haunts. She was guarding some framed prints that are strewn randomly while the proper home for each is sought. I don't think I'll show the clutter in the hallway, but here's a close shot of Photon guarding the "treasures".

That's all for now.

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