Justfolk's photos

There were six of us, and the dog, on our way to a small island that J's family lived on for a century or more, until sixty years ago. A day or two after this picture was taken on the occasion of J's birthday, we got to the island and walked around her family's old property. J is wearing the sunglasses. The depth of field here is entirely due to the 75mm f/1.8 lens I used on the Olympus E-M1. But (in PSP X6) I added the vignetting to set the people off a bit. Looking at it now, the next morning, I am thinking there's too much vignetting.

An annual family get-together for at least thirty years has been this nearly-shared birthday of two sisters. This one was yesterday. They *both* had their tiaras on a few minutes beforehand.

Forty-five years ago, a university teacher of mine built a house about a half kilometer from the nearest road. She couldn't drive to the house -- everything to build it, and to live in it, had to be carried by hand over that half kilometer of footpath through the woods. It was, and still is, a beautiful spot overlooking the ocean. I spent a couple of days there about 1976 when a friend, another student of the teacher, had the job of looking after the house for a time while the teacher went to the Arctic on a research trip. Today, my wife and I went for a hike along the seaside path that goes past the house and met Lori, the current owner, cleaning up her yard. (She bought the house three or four years ago when my old teacher got too old to get back and forth to her car, and so moved to a place that actually is on the road.) The house has electricity but I doubt it has cable or high-speed Internet. While we talked, the phone in Lori's pocket rang; she does have cell phone service.

The annual civic holiday, the Regatta is (likely) tomorrow. It's been a growing tradition for people to go to the site of the Regatta the night before, to feel some of the crowdedness but reduced in intensity. Tonight was the pre-Regatta night and while walking around the Pond I ran into a friend, Kelly (at bottom), who was doing the same with friends. She asked me to take their picture in one of the official boats with her cell phone and the cell phones of her two adult friends, so I did on condition I could take one with my camera. I took four with mine. One wasn't very sharp (it was getting dark and these were an eighth of a second with a long lens) but the other three were passably sharp. For this one, I asked them to look pissed-off at me. Most couldn't do it. :) The Regatta is only "likely" tomorrow because it isn't decided until about 6:30 am, and it depends entirely on the weather. So no one knows tonight whether or not they have to go to work in the morning.

My brother (right) and his family have come home for a week's holiday and today one of our sisters hosted a party at her cabin on a pond. So there were about 25 of us there enjoying what was the first real day of summer weather. People were swimming, boating, catching pricklies (a.k.a. sticklebacks), skimming rocks, and the like. A good time for all.

I like turning reflections upside-down and seeing what I can get from them. This is about 20% of the original picture. I wish there had been more headroom (= foreground in the original), but this is all I got. I could have faked some extra sky but didn't. Being a reflection on a cloudy day in a muddy puddle, the colour in this picture was pretty flat. But, strained through a red filter and noised up a little, it had more contrast.

I don't know exactly what happened here. Clearly it was out of focus, but somehow I got a kind of tunnel effect. I was using the 75mm lens on the OM-D E-M1. The vignetting came with the shot but I desaturated it in PSP X6 using a yellow filter.

Me, I mean; *I* am illiterate. I can't read most graffiti these days. It's very unlike graffiti when I was a teenager because that stuff was meant to be read and understood by a wide audience. This stuff is meant to be seen by a large audience but, I would think, to be illegible to most of us. Particularly old geezers like me. But I do recognise the peace symbol. I *hope* it still means the same thing.

There is a point when a coat hook cannot withstand the weights on it. Too bad; it served well the lighter weights.

Part of the walk to Turtle Island. My friends' house is just out of the right side of the picture.

Locally, people call it Turtle Island but on the maps its official name, Timber Cove Island, is used. No one uses the official name. But no one knows why it's called Turtle Island either, though they say that from above it looks like a turtle. (But *who* had planes or drones to see it from above back when it was named?) It is no longer a true island and we walked over the rocky neck to get on it. Someone kindly put a picnic table there some years ago. Ten of us were there this afternoon for a walk and a meal at two friends' house. This is some of us and one of the dogs. You can tell how warm it was -- about ten degrees Celcius (50 F), fairly typical of this month. Good temperature for a walk.

From a distance of ten or fifteen metres these looked like Agaricus mushrooms. Most Agaricus are edible; I do not pick them though I always like to look at them. When I got close to these 18-cm wide mushrooms, I saw not Agaricus but the scabby spots of Amanita muscaria and the fleshy ring around the stipe. However, there was almost no yellow colour in the tops. A. muscaria is red in most of North America, but around these parts they are usually yellow. If these really are A. muscaria, I don't know why they are blond -- maybe the poor summer that we have been having; maybe something in the soil.

When I allow the Epson V700 scanner to find the frames itself, it sometimes chooses interesting areas to scan. I never would have scanned this bit of film end myself. But, given it by the scanner's software, I left the dust and hairy bits and smudgey bits, and put a border around it. Voilà, a sky. Or something. The film was Kodak Color Plus 200. It had gone through the Olympus XA, but I am not sure I should give the XA any responsibility for this image.

I try to keep my eyes open for new things. So we were walking to the car at my wife's work and I saw this, and three others like it, in amongst the hawkweed. She recognised it as an orchid but other than that we were stuck for a name. I looked it up when we got home and saw that it is a European Marsh Orchid; later a friend, a botanist, told me it is more specifically a Leopard Marsh Orchid (based on its spotted leaves). Nice. They are fairly rare, but it seems they are spreading. And thus I find them on the grassy verge of a big parking lot. The battery had died in the digital camera I was carrying and so I used my telephone. Not bad close-up stuff. The orchid is about 15 cm (six inches) high.

I was wandering today around a small garden that was designed and set about thirty years ago, but left for some time to its own devices. There are a lot of flowering plants there, mostly shrubs and small trees, and very few smaller plants. But in the dense brush of deliberate plantings and thriving weeds (nettles, Queen Anne's Lace, dandelions, etc.) were two poppy seed pods.

That is a saying I hear from time to time: "It's a good thing we don't live here for the weather." Yep. I often say it. Along with "Good weather for being outside." And this *is* good weather for being outside at least if you are working, or walking. In any case, this is our situation today with a high so far of eleven (= about 52 degrees F). It was eight degrees when I got up this morning. We've had this weather pretty well the entire month of July. (My cousin in Connecticut was just saying a few minutes ago that it is 94F outside her door.) The weather, ten degree highs, is the Number One topic of conversation in this city. And on some talk shows. Myself, I don't mind it very much. I'm counting on some below-ten temperatures in the next few days to murder a colony of wasps under my deck.

In Canada, the swan is considered an invasive species and thus tightly controlled, with federal licenses to some municipalities for specific numbers of birds. St. John's has a license for exactly six swans; City officials go around each year to oil the eggs that are laid (addling them) to prevent the number from growing. But this smart swan couple hid their nest, and out of it came four cygnets who have become the object of much curiosity by local walkers and photographers. Myself included. The City decided it would let the cygnets grow up and be handed over to a legally entitled municipality somewhere else to live out their lives according to law. I like to spread the word that here in Canada, as in England, the Queen of England owns all swans and only she is allowed to take them for meals of swan breast soup, or roast swan, or fried swan's eggs. Thus they are licensed and controlled here. That's more or less true in England, but I think I am spreading mischief when I tell people that about here. This was Kodak Portra 400 film in the Round-the-World Zeiss Contessa camera that I hosted for a few weeks.

I taught Steve earlier this year. Since then he drops by my office from time to time to chat about his final master's research project. This day, when he came by, I had the Zeiss Contessa that was staying a few weeks with me on its round-the-world trip, organised by a friend on another web site. This was on (fresh) Kodak Portra 400 film. Steve and I have something in common: we were both electricians before we went back to university. I rewired old house for electric heat for a year or two in the 1970s after I dropped out of school. I returned later to get my graduate degrees. Steve was an electrician much longer than I was, a decade or so. But now he's a dedicated academic. :)