Today's walk report: 011919

After several rainy days... 75º and sunny. It's hard to imagine nicer weather.
 Right now, 2:45 PM, it's 78º.  So there!

Bee and a couple of ants on Peritoma arborea.

Canada geese.

Female/Immature Allen's hummingbird.

Same bird in eucalyptus, 'Moon Lagoon'.

This is the same male Anna's hummingbird, not Brad, that was photographed on January, 12th.

Nada mas. Adios.

Today's walk report: 060113

June, she comes in blazing.

My A.M. plans were to get out early and start digging, moving plants and planting some others before it got too hot, only thing was I didn't foresee just how hot it was going to get and how long it was going to take me to get stuff done. In retrospect, I should have thrown some clothes on right at 6:30 AM and headed out but I didn't get started until about 8. If you glance at yesterday's report, you'll see what I was putting in the ground. I also had to move some stuff, like 4 perezii statice because I'm not very good at this gardening stuff and when I started I made a few poor logistical choices.

I only had one one hole left to dig but it was the biggest and I wanted to think about it because it's the first tree I am putting in (the Crape Myrtle) and a tree is a big deal isn't it? I mean at this stage in my life a newly planted tree could certainly out live me. So I took a break. Besides it was heading into noon and I hadn't eaten yet.  As it turned out, that was it for the day's yard work effort. Temperatures went into the 90s quickly and by 2 PM it was pushing 100º. It felt worse though. When I went out to survey my earlier work at 3:20 it was slightly over 104º but it felt like I opened the door to the convection oven while baking cookies and stuck my head in. It was hot! So I showered, changed clothes and waited for my walk... and waited and waited...

Finally about 6:20 it was 83.2º outside and 84º with the AC on in my office so I figured, time to go.

Air quality was again pretty bad and my guess was the Santa Clarita, Powerhouse fire was still way out of control. Once I got some elevation that was confirmed.

But first....

Boxelder bugs. I always see these bugs coupled like this, usually walking across the sidewalk. This time there were several pairs on narrow-leafed milkweed along with 100s of these yellow aphids. Those are not the young of the boxelder bug. I have no clue as to who their parents are. For the most part the boxelder isn't considered an agricultural problem but they certainly are everywhere around here.

More tiny flowers. I thought I had a better composition than this. I have to say I was perspiring profusely. This "day cream" (there's so much of this crap here) I tried, Desert Essence SPF 15 just before leaving seemed to contribute to my perspiring and it was also beading up and sitting on my skin. I wasn't comfortable and the two paper towels I brought with me were quickly soaked. Anyway, this wasn't making picture taking any easier.

Yesterday I mentioned that I was waiting for this agave stalk to open its flowers. Today I started to think this might not be such a grand event, with a few rather banal looking flowers open. At least now I know this is, Agave celsii.

There are several mystery eucalyptus in the garden. This is one of them. I've mentioned before there are more than 700 species of eucalyptus, mostly native to Australia and I'm not about to figure out what's what. At this point I was trying to get a few more images to fill things out here.

One of the Opuntia genus in the cactus family, Cactaceae in bloom.

Finally, back to the air quality. Without going into the issues on my dirty camera sensor again but just to let you know this was cleaned up a bit on that level, this image should give you a pretty good idea of just how much smoke is surrounding the area. This is, of course, looking west. The fire is to the north. Santa Clarita is 23.34 km or 14.5 miles north of where I'm standing.

Today's walk report: 052513

What I leaned today...

• Bring a towel. How could I forget? Today of all days. I was even reminded of that earlier in the day. I spent several minutes dripping over my camera setting up the first shots. After I left that spot I went 50m over to a restroom and grab an arm's length of those wonderful tan paper towels off a roll dispenser. You know the ones, slightly more pliable than cardboard?

By that time I had basically cooled down anyway.

• Make sure to have deleted the previous day's images off the SD card. I've never done that before, left old images on the card and I only carry an 8GB SD card (plus I have an "emergency" 256MB card in my wallet). Without getting into details it wasn't just a matter of deleting yesterday's 800+ images from the card. I did, however, delete some 200+ images. So I ended up filling my SD card (and the emergency card) rather quickly. There's also a 4GB card in my point and shoot but I decided not to bother.

• Most importantly, I learned how to make adjustments on the fly with... MY NEW TRIPOD!!! This came via USPS today, four days earlier than expected. It's a Vanguard Alta Pro 263 AT (less than $100--delivered) and it's a really nice tripod for the money. My previous tripod was years old and I think it was about $39. It broke the other day. I'd been thinking about getting a decent tripod for... oh... I dunno, about 10 years, I'd guess. I already had a Manfrotto micro-ball head so figured that keeps the cost down.

Basically that made today experimenting and getting comfortable with a new piece of equipment... sweating on it, learning too what it's like to lug around over the course several km. Etc.

Once again, it was all about image stacking. This being one of the main motivations on pulling the trigger for the tripod.

To some degree choosing a composition was more about the process than the end product. That's something I've said about my creative work in general for years... "The process is the purpose not the product."

• Another thing I learned. If I'm planning to stack images I need to pay attention to shadows crossing my subject. It was breezy again. I tried for the most part to avoid subjects that would be waving in the wind but I didn't think a lot about nearby plants waving in the wind and creating shadows across my subject. Not that it would have me do anything differently--just something to consider. 

 This is an 8 image blend and the lighting was distinctly different across each image.

I was back over to the straw flowers today mostly because they're only about 35-40cm tall and tend not to be too effected by the breeze. They also look nice. Each of those ants and one or two under petals moved about an inch during the course of taking the 10 images.

Flowering eucalyptus.

Another windy challenge with 8 stacked images...

Agave polyanthiflora. 3 images (card full.)

From the "emergency" SD card...

Bog sage (Salvia uliginosa), 6 images. Can you "see" the wind?

Purple sage (Salvia leucophylla), the same 6 images, cropped to separate and a little more stable in the breeze.