Justfolk's photos

I have a fondness for radio, for radio history, for radio towers, and for radio sets. Somehow that fondness, that mania, locked itself inside my brain sixty-odd years ago and has not diminished over the decades. So when a friend said she was selling an old radio and that it worked, I couldn't help myself. I bought it. It arrived this week -- my friend and her husband actually brought it to my door! -- and I'm pleased as Punch with it. It will require a little work cleaning noisy switches and getting some new buttons, but that's minor stuff.

For twelve years this car has been in and out of our driveway. But for the past year it has just sat there, not getting driven, then not being able to be driven, and leaking fluids on the bricks underneath it. And, thus, finally it wasn't even saleable anymore. We'd missed that boat. A local charity takes such useless things. They arranged to pick it up today. Sigh.

I don't like posting two pictures of the same thing. But I like this one as much as the other, so here it is. This was at about 1:15 am NDT this morning, not long after the moon had entered the "total" phase of the eclipse. At 1/5 second, the stars here are little dashed lines. Oh well.

I would probably have slept right through the lunar eclipse early this morning except that my wife knew I wanted to see it. So she got me to come out on the back deck to look. This is what we saw. We were looking through the big trees that overhang our yard. Luckily they have not leafed out yet. And I was lucky enough in this picture to even get a few stars nearby.

The urban moonrise earlier this evening. Well, a little *after* actual moonrise, but pretty close at my back door since there's a hill the moon has to climb before I see it. Then it rises over houses and radio towers and looks at me through trees and wires. Its fullness is about 28 hours after I took this picture so it was 98% illuminated in this shot.

Outside the kitchen door it is raining.

This was last night when there was only a light fog above us and the moon was still glaring down through it to our back door. She's getting closer to being full but was still only 94% when I took the picture. The dark area was the lower left, that non-circularity making her look a little slewed, perhaps a little drunk. I didn't focus on the moon. I liked the poplar catkins better.

This is where I do most of my reading these days, in the living room with a nice even light during the day from the front window. Sometimes, as this morning, I have a little shortwave radio next to me. I was listening to RAE, Radiodifusión Argentina al Exterior, or as it is today "Argentina to the World." They put out a half-hour of English in the mornings via an American commercial shortwave station in Miami and I can hear it easily here. You can see my current reading: Pablo Neruda's memoir which is a kind of autobiography, but it is also part poetry, part stylization of reality, and probably part fiction. Hard to tell sometimes, but excellent reading in any case. The picture was taken on my little computer tablet and then emailed to my computer where I converted it to b&w in PSP.

This morning, looking up at the catkins from the European poplars backlit by the sun. Populus alba, I think.

I like this time of year when the junipers (what others call larches, or tamaracks) put out their conelets, making a tiny burst of pink and green here and there along their branches.

More Moon mooning us. It is Monday after all. The trees are budding out; soon the buds will leaf out and the Moon won't be easily seen from the back door. I may stop then. It is just past the Moon's First Quarter; this picture was an hour ago when the sun was still lighting up the tree in orange.

That's what my mother would often say to me, as I screwed up my face at something I didn't like. "You've got a face only a mother could love." So with this picture: only the taker could find it wonderful. And I do. It reminds me of a lovely rainy day trip through some northern Italian hills and valleys in a bus in spring 2014. If I remember correctly, the bus was travelling under a bridge when I took the picture. For some reason I took the picture with my phone rather than with my camera. Converted to b&w with a blue filter.

We stopped the car on French Mountain, watching the showers moving over the water toward us. We were looking toward Cheticamp. This was August 1988. Kodak Gold 200 film (in my Minolta X370, I think), converted to b&w with a yellowish filter.

Fog moving in on downtown Quebec City one bright morning in 2016.

Almost every day I post a b&w picture or two to a small group of friends interested in b&w photography. The majority of them are old pictures newly processed, often from colour negatives. I never think to post them here too, but I think I'll start. This was in April 2004, a foggy day when I visited the mainly shut-down town of Port Union in Trinity Bay. The original picture was Reala film shot in my Rollei 35TE.

The crossbills are fairly tame and don't mind me coming up close with the cameras.

A friend of mine remarked on the cute chesticles on this Baltimore oriole. All puffed up. Puffed up just before he flew up from our deck-rail to the trees above to announce his presence again. And again. And again. There are not many others of his type in this city. But he may make the connection.

The Baltimore oriole is not a normal visitor around here, but one spent the entire winter about five km to the NE of us in a river valley in another part of town. This may indeed be the same bird. In any case, this one has taken to daily excursions up our river valley, stopping very quickly to check out our supplies and not being particularly impressed by the seeds we had out. So a few days ago I put out an open-faced orange and today it stopped for a few minutes and ate some. I think she'll be back.