Where did the birds go?

March 14, 1015

I started to put this in my http://xraycrystallographer.blogspot.com/
blog and realized that it has nothing to do with gardening, so I decided that it fit here!  I have been quite remiss in non-garden posts, so this is hopefully a new start.  

After seeing (and hearing) hundreds of Sandhill Cranes fly over the house earlier in the week we decided to take a quick trip to Goose Pond to see if we could see them or the pelicans.  What I didn't check on was how much rain we had on Thursday/Friday (actually we only had 1.5", but I found out later that Linton had over 3").  When we got there the only roads that were passable were the state highway and one county road that went away from the marsh!  After slip-sliding on the gravel (mostly mud) roads, we decided it was not worth getting stuck and headed back for Bloomington.

There are actually a few birds in the photo above, but the only large groups we saw were Coots. It was a pleasant drive in any case!

My other blogs

I suddenly realized that I have not added anything to my "Retired Xray Crystallographer" blog for nearly two years.  This does not mean that I have quit blogging, only that I jump from one blog to another!  If you want to see what I am doing, you might try:

My Garden Blog  (which I mainly use to keep track of when and what I plant and how it is doing).

I also have a blog I work on occasionally which shows some of the "research" I have done on the history of the Huffman family in Indiana.  To find out a bit about my family, check out the Huffman Mill Indiana blog.

If you are looking for my tutorials (mostly photography stuff), check out Just Stuff.

Comments are always welcome (either through the blog or to xraycrystallographer@gmail.com)

It is still cold in 3D.

I realized I have not had a 3D image on my blog for some time.  I shot a few of the snow this morning, so I decided to go ahead and post one.  You have to have red/green glasses for this to work. (Click on the image to enlarge!)

Last snow? (I hope!)

Last night it was "Saturn" (for those of you who like to know the NWS winter storm names).  It was one of those fast traveling wet snows that left about three inches of fresh snow everywhere.  I love the way a wet snow will stick to anything.  The image below was taken of my patiently waiting tomato cages in the garden.

I would go sit on the garden bench, but it too looks a bit chilly....

Why my coriander won't germinate....

My wife loves cilantro (coriander, Chinese parsley).  I gathered as many seeds as I could last year, but absolutely none would germinate.  I decided to cut one apart to see if it looked ok internally, but when I put the seed (approximately 1/8" in diameter) under the microscope I found out why they don't grow.  A large percentage (well over 60%) had holes 0.025" in diameter "drilled" into the shell.  I don't know what the bug looked like, but it was certainly small!

Scanner photography

It's rather amazing how much junk I carry around in my pocket all the time!

Does it count?

"Scanner  Photography" is kind of fun.  If you place an object on your scanner with the lid open and scan in a slightly darkened room you get an amazingly good image.  I have been playing with the technique recently scanning various items and came up with the following.  The image consists of a single layer of coins (all US, pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters) placed in a hoop on the scanner.  How many coins are there, and what is the total amount of money present?

This is MY squirrel!

I was taking a walk when I saw this Red-Tailed(?) hawk grab a squirrel out of a tree.  He (she?) obviously wanted me to know that this squirrel was taken!

I love the way he is making sure the squirrel doesn't take off (or maybe he is just trying to hide his treasure).

 About an hour later dinner was still in progress.

I love windmills...

Enough said?

Taken in the Potomac State Forest in West Virginia.

A good way to end a vacation!

This was taken this past summer from a Paddle Wheeler on the Connecticut River near East Haddom Connecticut.

You have to take an old steam locomotive to get to the Deep River Landing and then take a cruise up to the large bridge at East Haddom.  It was a wonderful day and a great way to say goodby to the kids!

Another Topaz

Perhaps I should worry that the images produced when using the Topaz filters (http://www.topazlabs.com/) are not photographs at all (even though they start out that way).  I spent some time seeing what the different filters did to different type of photos.  The photo shown below, taken at my sister-in-law's house, struck me as really neat.  The photo was terribly underexposed, taken at sunset, and was not really worth saving (but I seldom delete anything!).  I tried using the "simplify" filters and came up with:

Real? No!  Interesting? Yes! For those wondering, the following is the original photograph.

As always, click on the image for a larger view.

Are you laughing at me?

This has been a strange winter so far. 

This is a shot of the bench in the back yard a few days after the "blizzard of 2012" (December 26th).  I like the way the snow is drooping, making the bench smile at me!  I took the photo of the picnic table just before the snow stopped.  According to the National Weather Service we had 12.5" of snow during the storm.  It took two weeks for the snow to finally melt.

A little more Topaz

I am still trying to see what all I can do with the Topaz programs.  I like the fact that they can be accessed directly from Lightroom, and I can see where it will take a bit of time to really learn their true value.  Here is one that surprised me a bit.  This is a snowflake photo that shows some amazing colors--presumably because of slight color differences that are not visible in the original image.

Keep in mind that the snowflake itself has no color!  As usual, you can click on the image to get the full-scale version.

Photography (or art?)

I recently purchased a copy of Topaz filters (http://www.topazlabs.com/) and started playing with them this past week.  I am actually hoping to  use the program to increase the readability of some old civil war letters I have, but decided to test it on some of my photos (the Creative focus group of the local photo club loves this program!).  It is amazing what one can do with a photo that you think should be interesting, but turns out to be a bummer for one reason or another.  Below is a photo of a sculpture on the IU campus that was "OK", but didn't really look all that good.

I think it is much better than the original!  I will try and post a few other examples over the next few days.

Making it look better!

I was pleased to see that the county commissioners had done a "makeover" on the Huffman Mill covered bridge.  While their work was excellent I decided it could use a bit more touching up, so I removed the  guard rail, moved the bridge sign to the South end, removed the support cables on the West side, and straightened the slight lean that had developed (click on images to enlarge).

If you want to see what the bridge has looked like over the years look at the following images!  A great deal of credit for getting the work done belongs to the Spencer County Historical Society--Thanks!

This is an old photo showing the bridge in one of its worst conditions.  I don't know the year, but it is definitely pre- 1960.

In this photo, the bridge was a "natural wood" color (or perhaps painted brown).

The bridge also went through a green-white phase.  The beech tree to the left is the dominate tree today (seen above the bridge roof in the top photo)

Really small critters

I finally spent the time to replace the rather expensive incandescence bulbs in my Nikon Model M with high intensity LED lamps (using a small desk lamp from Ikia).  The result were better than I expected!  Here is a dark field image of some rotifers that were in a dish filled with rain water in my flower garden.

They are not sharp since they are moving rather rapidly, but all in all they don't look bad!

Soon......

Many of my summer garden seeds have germinated and are thriving in the garage!  It is predicted to be in the 70's most of this week, so maybe I can get started turning the soil.  I checked my garden yesterday, and the winter greens (spinach, kale, arugula) are still thriving, and a number of plants that normally don't overwinter look like they will revive if we don't get a late hard freeze.

Photoshop playtime

Mostly I was just bored, so I started playing around with the various blending modes in Photoshop.  I still don't understand them, but I like some of the things you can do.  This is actually a vertical panorama that didn't look very good, so I used the edit/fill command to fix the empty parts and then flipped part of the image and played with the blending.  Chances are I could never repeat the process!

Action Stereo

I love stereo photography (no kidding!).  Most of my images are taken using the so called "cha cha" method, where you take one photo and then shift the camera a few inches to the right for the second image.  One setup I have uses two Canon "point and shoot" cameras and software developed to override the built-in firmware.  This allows the cameras to be synchronized quite well, as shown by the ax in mid-flight below.

and in anaglyph...

These shots were taken at the Lincoln Village in Rockport Indiana.

I have no idea

Just another bug.  The total length of this one was about 12mm.  I am not sure why, but I thought his head and "shoulders" looks almost robot-like.  I guess I have been watching too many sci-fi movies.