Justfolk's photos

I've always had a soft spot in my aesthetic heart for over-processed pictures. This one is not *very* much processed -- just a little fill light (to brighten the dark trees); some white balance adjustment (to take some amber out of the foggy sky); and a little bit each of decreasing contrast and re-increasing it. And, oh yeah: turning it a bit to make up for my own lack of plumb. And a line around it all. That's not a whole lot of processing. :) This is in a neighbourhood up the hill and around a corner from ours.

I didn't realise how many street lights had changed to the deep amber of what I expect is sodium vapour. At least not until I started taking street pictures at night. it converts well enough to black&white; this was with a bluish filter. Even with a blue filter, the light itself gets burnt out.

I often rely on things like telephone poles and mailboxes to steady my camera because I am simply too lazy to carry a tripod. So the framing of my pictures is often determined, not by a sense of the shape of the picture, but by the serendipity of what the support-at-hand allows. This shot was steadied on a bench by a bus-stop while we were out walking in the drizzly weather this evening. I have cut away some of the rather boring foreground and I wish I'd got some more "head room." Oh well.

This was a few days ago on the secluded beach called Sandy Cove that I visited while tooling around on the Burin Peninsula. At the time, I knew this was some sort of piper, but had no idea what sort. At home, I looked them up and decided it was a sandpiper. It and its friends spent the hour we were there chasing the waves back and forth, only startling into the air when I got too close.

The past few years we've been trying to encourage the volunteers and wild plants that sprout in our garden and pots. (Well, as much as seems like a good idea. . . .) We've fed sunflowers to birds for many more years than that. This year is the first time any of the sunflower seeds have sprouted. Three or four have been coming up. This one is the first to open. It sprang from a hole in the side of one of the pots, a hole that was given lots of attention through the winter by the chickadees. I suspect the seed was planted by one of them.

There's a federal election going on and the MP whose constituency office this is (well, he has three and this is not the main one) is constitutionally unemployed for the duration. If he's re-elected, he'll be re-employed and his office will open again. Given the signage in his riding, I don't think there's much chance he'll not be re-elected.

The eggs were good.

Sandy Cove is a half-kilometre-long sandy beach, about three km off the paved road closest to it. It took about twenty minutes to creep the car along the potholed dirt road that goes to it. But it was worth the effort. I don't know enough birds to have known when I saw them that these are sanderlings. But, having looked them up when I got home, I think that's what they were. Sandy Cove had hundreds of them. Besides us and the sanderlings, there was a small group of people at the far end of the beach. Lovely visit.

What with retirement and general pandemic precautions, I've lapsed into being a photographer much less of people, and much more of the natural world around me. Tending to my garden, so to speak. But I tend too to some serious anthropomorphism in looking at bugs and plants. Thus I feel a kind of prurient interest in the apparatus of simple flowers, like this hosta. Until I looked closely at its flowers, I never thought much of the hosta as a garden plant. But it's clearly trying hard to, uhh, get it on, isn't it? And it's very pretty.

Not long before it started folding up its tent, this was today's lily from the unexpected day lily in a pot on the doorstep. "Unexpected" because it sat in its little pot for at least one winter at the back of the garden and we'd forgotten about it. Then it started daily blooms a few days ago, calling attention to itself.

Until about a fifth of my life ago, I thought these black & yellow bugs were gigantic dangerous wasps. Then I found out they are placid hoverflies, wasp-mimics, mimicking for their own safety. I've come to like them. And that flower . . . I used to call them "blue daisies" and eventually, because "daisy" was apparently ambiguous, "blue asters." Around the same time as my hoverfly epiphany, I realised people more widely called them Michaelmas asters, and so I followed. Now I understand the DNA-botanists have shaken up the barrel containing all the asters, and I no longer know what to call them. I'm going back to blue daisies. And I'm sticking with hoverfly.

They are not called day lilies for no reason.

I haven't figured out whether the air here is particuarly orange today (the low sun both early this morning and this evening was particularly warm in colour) because of what's in the air coming from the West (being Canadian forest fires) or the South (being the usual highly particulatised summer air we often import from the Eastern Seaboard of the USA). I may never know, though the jet stream *has* been mainly out of the south recently, so more probably it is the latter. One way or the other, it's man-made. This was the view from my garden a half hour or so ago.

We were out walking last November and ran into two friends we'd not seen in a long time, and it being the middle of the pandemic, they were especially good to see. The film in my camera (Rollei 35TE) that day was some very old Fuji Sensia II slide film that another friend had assured me he had bought in about 2001. He'd stored it in a camera bag in a closet since then. I'm not one to trust old E6 film, but I thought I would try. I shot the film at its rated speed (100) and then tried to get it developed. That took nine months and two labs. But this was the result. Not too bad, all things considered. And a lovely picture of Noreen and Phil.

I really blew it a couple of nights ago. I was with two old friends visiting from far away. I took a series of pictures of them in the open-air restaurant we were eating at. Most of the pictures were after dark, and I wasn't thinking about the settings: no flash and the camera accidentally set at 1/2000 second. At ISO 320 that doesn't give much leeway for exposure. Dammit.

Our next-door neighbours got a new cat a year or two ago and, I think without knowing the name of our cat, called her Minnie. So we have to distinguish by saying "Your Minnie" instead of just Minnie. Their Minnie sometimes watches the birds (and when I'm there, me) from a big window she sits in. Today I was watering plants on our deck when I realised she was watching me. So I photographed her.

One of the pleasures of having retired is trying to get straight in my mind the names and identification of various insects the names of which I've known for a half century or more. One of these is Milbert's tortoiseshell, a butterfly I knew existed but did not know I'd seen until today -- I took this picture and only later, at home, realised what it was. If I kept a life-list of flying things, today I would have added this one.

This is growing on the strip of ground about two by eight metres alongside our driveways that neither I nor my neighbour mows anymore. As a result, we've had a stream of beautiful flowers ("weeds") growing since early June. The bees and the butterflies especially like our decision. When I was a kid we just called this plant "thistle." Nowadays everyone seems to call it knapweed, and that is the accepted botanical name. It is Centaurea nigra, a visitor from Europe, probably five hundred years ago, who stayed and made this a new home. Much like my own ancestors.