Justfolk's photos

As I was returning from lunch, N, on the right, introduced me to K, her new summer co-worker, and I asked for a picture. I got three good ones.

Chickadee picking at spanworm eggs and newly hatched larva. I'm glad they like to eat them. This was taken with my Olympus E-P2 with a lens a friend gave me last year. It's an RMC Tokina 80-200mm zoom (f/4) in a Pentax K mount. I bought an adaptor for it and it works fine. I'm no lover of zooms though, and it makes me think I should be looking for some K-mount primes to fit on my two M4/3 cameras. This is a crop of about half the area of the original image, and it is rather more sharpened on the bird than perhaps I should have done.

It was just getting duckish when I tried to get a picture of the circle someone had made on the road doing doughnuts (or do-nuts? dough-naughts?) with their dirt bike. The dust had settled.

Alders are treated as weeds by most people in these parts where, by the way, they never grow very tall, maybe seven feet, two metres, at most. Almost no one plants them in their gardens. But a neighbour of ours grew them as a hedge along the length of his curved driveway, and it was a huge success. I love the smell the unopened buds have in the spring. And they are very pretty as they open up. So I tend to let them grow up wherever they try to establish themselves.

No, I'm not growing these, but they are pretty. I only stopped long enough at this part of the nursery to take this picture. I'd never seen this blue-centred strain before. It looks like summer in the nurseries, but today it was cloudy and never got above about seven degrees in our neighbourhood. For F-thinkers, that's about 45 degrees F.

Tonight, 3 June, we have a frost warning, keeping most people from putting out their more fragile plants. So the nurseries are still pretty full.

I can't remember when I first walked through this tunnel but it was when it was new. It was about 1963 and I was about eleven years old, walking this way most mornings, delivering the Daily News to some buildings at its end. The tunnel runs between several university buildings and it was a great addition to the new, modern campus in the early 1960s. Only the two big, padded-with-insulation steam pipes ran through it back then. Nowadays dozens of cables and glass fibres snake through the tunnels. Yesterday I walked through here to get part of the way to the university graduation ceremonies. As ugly as the tunnel is, I've always had an affection for it. Like some people's ugly pet dogs, I suppose.

Andrew, graduating this morning with his BA, is my first-cousin-once-removed-in-law. Or should that be first-cousin-in-law-once-removed? His grandmother, Imelda, is my aunt-in-law. And Tim, Andrew's father and Imelda's son, is my first-cousin-in-law. You got that straight? There may be a test. Although I am besotted by vignettes, I did not add this one. It was an artefact of the strong light beaming down from the ceiling. I hate using flash, but I am not good at working out exposures for colour when the light is harsh. The couple of dozen shots I took this morning under lights like this suffered as a result. Or their colour suffered. But converting to b&w makes a good work-around. :)

The rain looked pretty good yesterday when I was talking pictures of it.

I don't know if he was complaining about the rain, but it was coming down pretty hard.

This was about two weeks ago when five of us and the dog walked up the steep hill that rises from Butter Cove and gives the climber a 360-degree view. Until a year or so ago, there was a television tower on this spot.

What with the high ISO and the low light, the details are pretty splotchy, but still I like what happened here, catching a bit of the post-sunset light. We were walking back to our car on one of the walking paths ("The priest's Road") very close to downtown. This is the view over the harbour, across the East End of Town.

The female purple finch isn't much to look at if you're expecting purple. I don't think she shows any purple at all. It's her boyfriends who have that. Even that splash of green on her belly isn't hers -- that is just reflected light from the nearby bird feeder. This is a very tiny crop but not bad sharp just the same.

The pigeons in our neighbourhood spent the holiday weekend showing off.

One of the ground-feeding birds that eat from our bird feeder, yea though the pigeons have been by to spill the seed upon the ground. The pigeons commit the sin of Onan, yet their sin is the sparrows' glory. Here endeth the lesson.

Not *my* firewood, although I wish it were.

About three metres up from the beach I found this piece of glass, an alley we called them when I was a kid, a marble in someone else's speech. This one appeared to have been the painted kind, with all the paint worn off and the surface chipped and repolished by the beach. It made a lovely reversing lens. The image is turned 180 degrees.

Some coltsfoot just seems to wither away. It's a pretty sturdy roadside flower, though, and I imagine it withers back to its leaf stock while working quietly and obscurely on its seeds.