Friday, August 9, 2013

Today's walk report: 080913

The scavenger hunt.

I often feel that's what weekend walks are. My Friday-Sunday walks being focused on taking pictures as much as taking a walk. It's usually the same territory and I scavenge the area trying to find something new or different enough to be interesting. There's often disappointment in that approach. Although one really nice photo out of 100s of attempts is all it takes to make the rest worthwhile.

This is just disgusting. I took this picture because it should embarrass smokers with how disgusting they can be. I used to smoke so don't give me your shit. It's a vile, filthy habit and it kills. This is on the sidewalk, in front of someone's home. How can anyone think this is an okay thing to leave around?


Three crows on a lamppost. Well, you can see that, right? Crows have an interesting social comportment. They're smart birds. They're also really annoying for the most part.


A dead green fruit beetle. I wrote about fruit beetles here. I believe this will be a trend, I don't think their life cycle lasts more than a few months once they become beetles.


I might want to say that this was planned and inspired by the beauty of nature around me, life energy or some other nonsense but I can't. What's going on here is I'm reaching up into a tree with my left arm and pulling down a branch that's over my head. I'm holding the camera in my right hand. I have a closeup attachment on my 70-300mm lens set at about 220mm. That will give me very little DOF and focuses at about 30 cm (11.8"). There's a live green fruit beetle on the branch I'm holding but it was exceptionally difficult to get the beetle in frame and in focus and hold onto this branch which was initially about 1 meter above my head. This is one of my attempts to get a photo. That said, I think it's rather nice, especially the full frame shot that you don't get to see.


Here's another picture I missed focus on. I was walking toward the squirrel on the trash can and was talking to him. I don't remember what I was saying but I realized all of a sudden that he was sticking his tongue out at me so I rushed this shot.


I posted a couple of night shoots of these San Pedro cactus blooming in this post. They bloom at night. This one was getting an early start and the bees were loving it. I'll mention that San Pedro cactus are a decent source of mescaline which is a psychedelic alkaloid of the phenethylamine class. I don't need to look this up. This is part of what I studied in college believe it or not. I wouldn't recommend going through the process of extracting mescaline from this plant and ingesting it. It's a pretty nasty way to get high and I can promise you you'll be sick before you experience any sort of cosmic getaway.


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