To bee or not to bee: more micro-photography fun…

Posted on July 29, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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That little spike at the left, dear readers, is a bee stinger. I decided to play with my digital microscope. I might be able to get some wet web images with it when my younger daughter comes home later today from the camp for special needs kids that she works at when she isn’t going to college to learn to be a nurse. I need her help to click the camera button while I try to steady the microscope.

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That is a bee’s eye. While I was figuring out that I needed help, I spotted a dead bee.

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Why let a dead bee go to waste?

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We can give her death meaning by learning about bees.

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I don’t know what we are learning exactly, other than the fact that the bee was covered with dirt.

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Also that things are weird and strange when looked at too closely.

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But we already knew that, right?

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When you zoom out a little, and make things a little less huge, they are more recognizable. That is the eye again, but you can’t see the facets.

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There is the stinger again.

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Stripes.

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She’s got legs, and she knew how to use them… to pollinate plants.

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Anyway…

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The bee’s knees. Ha! I crack me up.

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More experiments with ‘wet web photography’…

Posted on July 29, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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I was out in the yard this morning, annoying my spider relatives again, using my mist spraying bottle to put fake dew on their little homes.

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This time, I played with an array of options, using all three macro lenses, with the regular lens and the zoom lens.

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I will be honest. I can’t tell from looking at these which I took with which combination.

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I did crop a few of these a little. Macro photography seems to want to focus only on one distance.

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Or it has a narrow field of focus, if that is what that means. Notice the annoyed spider in the right corner… not in focus.

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I was hoping to get some really big water drops, with sparkles of light from the sun. Little balls of rainbow.

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What I got were some marginally interesting pictures of moist webs.

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But, it is in experimenting that you sometimes find something new.

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Not that I found anything new today.

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I suppose I could have cropped down the pictures more.

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Like way down to a small group of drops.

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Oooooh… I wonder if I can use my digital microscope camera on a wet web. How would I do that???

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I will mull that idea over. Notice the little bug in the center of that photo. Funnel webs are not only a home, but a hunting ground, a food source, a trap skillfully and cunningly planned and constructed. The front lawn of doom! The devil’s doorstep!

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I mean, when humans were still mostly hunter gatherers, how many times do you think a guy just sat in the mouth of his cave and waited until a mammoth walked by into spear range?

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Anyway, now I am thinking about my microscope, and I think I will play with it.

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So I should have some more photos soon. Bye.

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My dogs love me…

Posted on July 28, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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Epic web photo failure!!!

Posted on July 28, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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All I wanted to do was get a good picture of this garden spider and her orb web with my phone at work the other night.

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I tried it with the flash too, and ended up with a ghost spider.

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I was hoping the parking lot lights back lighting the web would be enough for a good photo.

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But it is hard to get your phone to focus on thin webs and small spiders.

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So I guess I like the ghost spider ones best.

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And there was a nice sunset earlier.

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Real history; it makes Game Of Thrones look like a boring birthday party for a three-year-old…

Posted on July 23, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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Don’t get me wrong. I love that show. Yes, the Red Wedding was gruesome and shocking. Do you have any idea how many millions of people were murdered in World War Two? Dragons raining fire and death from the sky. We dropped bombs on Germany and Japan that wiped out cities and started fire storms, and we dropped even more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs dropped by all the planes of all the forces in World War Two. Napalm and Nukes might just put dragon fire to shame. The Lannister incest was controversial, in a small way, but for most of the last 1,000 years or so, most of European royalty has been marrying their own cousins. That is how Prince Charles got those goofy ears. Inbreeding.

All I am saying is, if knights and swords and brutal battles and steamy love scenes interest you in fiction, read some history. Listen to some historical books. It is all in there.

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Nobody Move!!! Where did my mustache go??? Don’t make me strip-search every last one of… oh… wait… I shaved it off… never mind…

Posted on July 23, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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Oh yeah, there is some skin that hasn’t seen the sun in a while. I have already done posts about why I have kept a mustache since I was 14-years-old. If you are curious, I suggest you do some digging, down in the swamp.

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I met this lovely lady at work the other night…

Posted on July 22, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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I think the tarantula was less scary, even though it was much bigger.

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More ‘wet webs’… and yes, that might be a dog hair stuck to that web, over on the left…

Posted on July 18, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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I had fun taking some photos of those funnel-web spider webs on that misty morning when they were covered with little drops. And I said that when the big garden spiders showed up, I would do the same thing. But they come now, and they aren’t big yet. Also, it is dry in San Diego today, so I broke out the little mister/spray bottle from my camera bag, the one I use to make fake ‘dew’ on flowers, and used it.

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There is a dry orb web.

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A little artificial nature, and you have magic… and a pissed off spider.

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I did not damage the web. He was already repairing it.

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I should have put my macro-photo lens on.

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I will do more of these later, when the webs are bigger. Sooner or later, the camera, the lighting, and the wet webs will come together.

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The perfect shot is always illusive. I am still trying to get that perfect photo of a dog shaking off water, when the sun lights all the drops like diamonds.

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I found a few other webs, and the pictures got better.

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It is actually tricky to focus on a web.

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Sometimes it works.

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And sometimes it is blurry, but still interesting.

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You just never know until you see the pictures big.

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Okay, I leave you with one artificially moistened funnel web, just for old time’s sake.

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History: The longest running soap opera in… uh… history!

Posted on July 17, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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I was trying to explain to my wife and kids why I enjoy listening to hundreds of hours of the history of England podcast by this British guy who records it in his shed. I came up with a good comparison. I asked my wife why she likes watching the soap opera called ‘The Young And The Restless’. She has spent more hours doing that than I have with my podcast at work.

So I tried to put it to her that history is basically just a soap opera that has been on for a long time.  She likes that there are characters on her soap that have been there since she was a kid. Hey, history is full of people who were around for a long time.  But my main point is that history has all the same elements of a soap opera. People screwing one another, literally and figuratively. Businesses rising and falling, family drama, relationship drama, human drama. People coming and going, and doing interesting stuff to and with each other. Murders and back-stabbing, plots and mysteries, who-done-its and psychotic behavior. No writer can make up stuff more filled with vile treachery, lust, revenge, betrayal, power-grabs, and byplay than real history. Throw in the wars, the inventions, the rise and fall of empires, the mass movements of peoples… and people, the exotic locations, the medical advancements, religious fervor, greed and romance, and history makes quite a story. Think about it, all the famous people were there, helping to make history.

I have always been fascinated by history. I wish more people were. Maybe, I they were, history would be even more interesting, because I could talk about history with more of them.

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Imagine a world where everyone was exactly the same…

Posted on July 16, 2019 by pouringmyartout

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Try to picture it, we are all the same color, size, and shape. We all believe in the same giant nonentity. We all eat the same bland porridge. We all do the same things for fun… nothing. The world is a flat, beige/grey landscape. We do not reproduce in a sexual manner.

I admit, for one brief moment, when I had this idea, I liked it. No more racists or religious zealots! Sweet.

But, like most of my ideas, as soon as you look closely at it, it gets deeper and stranger and more complex. No food from other countries? No new experiences? No love? What would you give up for safety, for security? Would you do away with love to end heartache? Would you do away with spices to end heartburn? Every good thing in life comes with the potential for a bad component. That is what life is. Life itself comes with a heavy price at the end… death. Do we give up on life to avoid death?

So what if you hate people that have a sexual orientation that does not conform to yours, and I told you that you could get rid of all of them, but to do so, you have to give up sex yourself? What if I said that you could live where there are only other people of your color, and it was a segregated prison camp? What if I pronounced that we were abolishing all religions… including yours?

What is your feeling of superiority really worth? Why do we dislike those that differ from us? Why is it so easy for us to convince ourselves that what we learned as a child is more true, more right, more moral, than what other people learned?

I don’t have answers. I just want people to think about my questions. I know I will never change a single mind with this blog, but someday, when the Great Orange God/King is no longer on his throne, and history looks back on this period of time, I want it on record which side of the road I was on.

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