Justfolk's photos

The bluejay was getting all chatty with me this morning.

I enjoy taking pictures in tunnels. I never know what I might get. Here, one of my camera batteries failed on the first day of a visit to Zurich. Another battery failed later the same day, leaving me with one good battery. I made do. In any case, I like the result here, here converted to b&w (with a neutral filter). (It wasn't really at night as my album suggests, but tunnels are like man-made nights.)

This insect and dozens more like it were populating the outside of a big window at the Montreal airport. I don't know what it is.

I liked the fact that someone other than me was taking a picture of this lovely portrait of Tonia Stieltjes-Milgens. She was a political activist in the Netherlands a hundred years ago. And she was also a sometime model for the artists she knew. This picture, by Jan Sluijters, is from 1919. It is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Not a big crowd today at the Syndics of the Drapers' Guild. A few metres away, Rembrandt's bigger and older painting, The Night Watch, is walled off with glass because it is being restored or newly scanned or something, but there was a bigger crowd there. This is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

I was told that this bridge, a post-WW2 railway bridge across the Rhine River in Cologne, is built sturdily enough to stand the accumulated weight of the tens of thousands of love locks, and that the city has no plans to remove them.

I admit it: I was in Trier and it never crossed my mind that Karl Marx was born there. And then suddenly, with ice-cream cone in hand, I was in front of the house he grew up in. My wife kindly took the picture while I held her ice-cream.

I was just passing by, not camping. It was just after dark, and it was very quiet.

Two mice in Heidelberg.

Just as dusk was gathering.

One day each year there is a public swim in Zürich's Limmat River. One at a time people, most with bright yellow air-filled floats, jump into the river and swim, or float, the two kilometres to the finish line. They are timed and a winner is declared, but most people just do it for the pleasure. Today at noon when they started their Schwimmen, the air temperature was about thirty degrees Celsius. It must have been a big pleasure to be in the river in that heat. I heard six thousand people made today's plunge.

Blue jay, behind some petunias, hoping he couldn't be seen taking a peanut. Or not caring that I did see him. He's nuts for the nuts.

This was the view from our kitchen door a few minutes ago as the nearly full moon rose through what appears to be very smoky air.

This evening before supper, while we sat comfortably on the deck lubricating our esophagi, this fellow was busy ferrying chuckleypears from our bush to his fledgling about twenty metres away. And I say "his" because -- apparently -- among American robins, it is normal for the male parent to take care of the young while the female is busy building a nest for the next brood.

If nothing disastrous happens, and the crows don't discover them, I'm expecting a couple of dozen tomatoes off the three plants I'm growing in a box outside the kitchen door.

There's a small flock of mixed wahbluhs that comes through every few days and stays for ten minutes. Sometimes twice a day. Good thing I obsessively glance out the back windows. There was a similar flock last year and it included an immature Wilson's warbler. He appears to have matured, but acts very much as he did last year, right down to sitting on the same branch in the apple tree behind the holly bush in our backyard to survey the bug situation. This is a tiny crop of the best picture I could get of him today, perched on his branch.

Every autumn my wife saves the corms from the year's dahlia plants, and she replants them in pots the following spring. The floral fruits amaze me each summer. This is what one of her potted dahlias looks like today. By the way, I have not yet got used to the focus stacking capability of my OM-1. This is not a stack. Rather it is one of the seven images the camera brought together to make a stack. I didn't like the stack, so I chose this one image out of it.

This is a sibling shot to one I posted a week ago. A friend suggested the similarity of this shot to the street scenes of a local artist we both appreciate. Mmmm, maybe so. In any case, if I could paint, I'd paint like this.