Author: -N-

Tomatoes & Roses

Today I noticed the first of the roma tomatoes I planted!

My yard is impossible for gardening.  Along the back fence is a row of about 15 trees, consisting of 10 podocarpus, 2 camphor, and one crepe myrtle.  When I get the chance, the podocarpus are all exiting.  I’ve taken out 2 already in the front of the house, and am just waiting to have a spare bunch of change for the rest.  There is simply way too much shade, and nothing grows except moss and mushrooms.  Yes, the yard is cool, but the darkness is not worth it.  The camphor trees provide shade, are nicely placed, and once the crepe myrtle gets more sun, should be quite lovely.

What this means is absolutely no flower gardening nor vegetable gardening.  Everything is in pots, on the patios.  I have blueberries and tomatoes and herbs and a fig tree and a key lime tree and some roses and a plumeria and some lilies and canna and orchids and galangal and spiderwort.  It gets a bit troublesome as seasons change, and messy, too, when it is time to re-pot.

Despite these limitations, the urge to plant and propagate exists.  Where I teach is a wonderful rose garden in the middle of the shabby buildings.  The roses are well tended by the gardener, and I expect they have been there easily 50 years or more.  During the annual cut-back, he kindly gave me numerous slips, which I have only now taken the time to put into the ground.  That is one of the things so wonderful about roses – you can really abuse them, but it takes a lot to destroy them.  The slips have been living in a bucket of murky water.  Some turned totally black; these I discarded.  The rest, I pulled out, and one by one, split the base and inserted tooth picks, and popped them in the ground.

Empty flower pots were filled with potting soil, watered thoroughly, and then allowed to drain.  I dug down about 4 inches, and placed the cuttings into the soil, firmed the dirt around the slip to keep it upright, and then watered again.  Watching the slips is critical – the soil has to be moist, but not overly so, nor allowed to get too dry.  We’ll see how things go over the next few weeks.

Ugly!

For the past three weeks I have had a cold, which continues with abandon.  Sore throat,  stuffy nose.  Allergies, too.  Add to this, the SD slot in my camera no longer holds the card, so it is in the shop awaiting parts and repair – probably won’t get it back till mid-July.  Hopefully under warranty, and won’t cost me a couple of C notes.

As a result of this thrilling life, nothing much interests me other than just getting by and getting well.  In my hours of tedium, I’ve been playing with some software, and really pushing pictures to the edge.  Sometimes bad or dull pictures can be made more interesting, but I can tell you right now, some only become far worse.  Here is my example, for your amusement.

Hardly attractive, perhaps interesting.  It opens some creative thought processes as well as makes me wonder if people who are into photography and post-processing images are logical and sequential in knowing what they want for results, or just play around.  I expect those who do specialize in post-processing are very well versed in problems and correcting them – me, I am not, and so just wander around.  I need to sit and focus on such things.  But, I would rather be outdoors . . .

The Little Luxuries of Summer

I love simple food in the summertime.  Fresh vegetables, fruits, breads, grains, yogurt.  There is a richness in flavor that is best at this time of the year because the world is full and abundant.  Self-indulgence in these areas is not a bad thing.  And when one is recovering from a cold, and the mere thought of handling food or eating is not at all interesting, it is a good time to go out and buy unusual and wonderful things.  So I did . . . and ended up with:

  • yogurt from St. Benoit from Sonoma County, CA
  • Wensleydale cheese with blueberries
  • organic rolled oats for granola
  • a custom-made sandwich with, among the ingredients, red onion marmalade and arugula
  • Firestone Wookey Jack Black Rye IPA

I’ve never heard of St. Benoit, but did a bit of research on them, and think they are really onto something.  You can learn about St. Benoit and see what you think.  Dinner tonight was a bit of their yogurt, a nectarine, and chopped almonds.  Very satisfying.

I used to make my own yogurt.  I’m rather tempted to again.  Yogurt is especially good with granola, too.

And, at the moment, I am baking a batch of granola in the oven, as I love the crunch of granola and the sweetness of fruit for breakfast.  The biggest problem with most granolas is they are horribly sweet if boughten.  I prefer to make my own.   Formerly, for sweetness I chose real maple syrup, but my husband doesn’t much care for maple.  I don’t like sugar in granola.  One day I ended up with some agave syrup and a craving for granola, and used the syrup.  The result was a bit of sweetness without a maple flavor (I like maple, personally . . . ) nor the intense flavor brown sugar can give foods.

Granola Recipe

6 c. organic rolled oats
2 c. walnuts
1/2 c. dried cranberries
1 1/2 c. raisins
1/2 c. agave syrup
1/4 c. canola oil

Preheat oven to 350 F. Mix together all ingredients in a dutch oven, and bake, stirring every 15 minutes, for about an hour, until toasted to your liking. Let cool to room temperature.

You can substitute or add whatever you want. This is what I had available.

Looking for Organic & Local

All this self-indulgence started making me look for what is around here in Ventura County.  Agriculture is a big industry in our county – the history of the county is tightly bound to raising crops, such as avocados, berries, citrus.  We have a couple of excellent producers of organic produce –  McGrath Family Farms and Underwood Family Farms are two with whom I am familiar.  I looked up local honey after reading about the potential that a lot of honey may be tainted and illegally imported.  Not a good thing.  Locally, it looks like we have a good source nearby at Bennett’s.  Meat is another issue.  We have free range beef from Watkins Cattle Company.

At heart, I’m a backyard farmer.  I would love to have the time to produce more of what we eat, but I have to work, and our backyard is too dark and shady at present for any real crops.  Instead, I try to support the local farmers rather than the large chain stores.  We also try to cook most of what we eat from scratch, but of course, not everything can be done this way.  When we go shopping, we never cease to be amazed at all the packaged foods people buy as the mainstay for their meals.  Our baskets are filled with very few boxes or frozen foods.

Kind of snobby, huh?  I guess I literally put my money where my mouth is.

Textbook

I am not a fan of manuals and how-to books.  My preference would be to just know everything and not have to learn it.  Osmosis.

That, however, is not something to be done.  For some reason, a painting book is more interesting to me, by far, than a textbook on the camera or software.  It is just not interesting.  But, I am forcing myself to read a text on the D7000, and truthfully, the one I am reading is far more readable than I thought it would be.  I actually am enjoying it, much to my surprise!

The author is pretty good, and besides not being an illustrated repeat of the Nikon manual, it also has little forays into subjects like focus stacking or HDR.  And opinions.  That surprised me.

Today I learned – not in any particular order – about:

  • Interval shooting
  • Setting the camera up to bracket
  • Different kinds of bracketing
  • Various buttons (refresher for some, new for others)
  • Ways in which to use the remote exposure – 3 ways!  (Didn’t always work, though – wonder if I need a new battery.)

Oh, and other things, but that is going to get dull.

On the other hand, I did get an Adaptall-2 mount in the mail yesterday, for a Nikon.  I have a Tamron Adaptall-2 lens, specifically the 80-210, model 103A.  It has constant aperture, and does macro at a about 1:2.  I bought it back in the 1980s sometime, and as I had a Canon then, it came with a Canon mount.  Luckily for me, I have a clever husband, and with some instructions, he dismounted the Canon Adaptall, and put on the Nikon.  It works rather nicely.  The colors are good, and it was easy enough to use.

This was shot outdoors, bright light, ISO 100.  The petals below were shot indoors, handheld, at ISO 2000, and using the macro portion of the lens.

I think I will enjoy using this lens – it’s really pristine, which rather surprised me after sitting around in various boxes for the past 30 years.

I also did a bit of photostacking with mixed exposures – bracketed exposures – which produced good results.  This is a bowl filled with yellow grapefruit, lemons, and bananas.

And I also just enjoyed shooting a box of tomatoes as I was putzing with the camera while I was reading the book.

I was just playing with the focal points, seeing how the camera responded to my choices.  I kind of liked this one.

So, not an enthralling weekend for learning things, but productive and useful.  And all because I read a textbook!

Slow Down

Last Wednesday, our little photo group met up to shoot a sunset.  The initial place we met was rather uninteresting, so we drove up the hill in search of a different spot.  A good decision.

We were up above the Simi Valley, and had expansive views in all directions.  To the north, the mountains and plains caught the rays from the setting sun.  To the south, the busy 101 provided light trails to contrast the twinkling of the city lights.  To the east, Santa Susana Pass gave light trails if the exposure was long enough.  To the west, the sun was setting, and spread out over the land, sculpting hills and fields, casting long shadows on rocks.  Where we were also had some trails, old oak trees, rocks, and fences – what this area must have looked like before the building booms of the 60s began.

I packed the Tamron 17-50mm lens, which is great for general and landscape photography, the Tamron 70-300mm, and the Kiron 30-80mm varifocal.  The final and only lens used was the Kiron lens, which is a manual focus lens from the 1980s.  All my exposures were manual, from f/stop to aperture to focus.  What I should have brought along was my flash – I had misplaced my remote for it, so the flash stayed at home.  I could have used it for lighting the foreground  in some shots.

Doing a total shoot without depending on any technology except my eye and what the camera says is a good exposure is stepping back in time.  I really enjoyed the slowness, and the fact I needed to consider so many elements.  In the forefront of my mind were a few major elements:  composition and placement of focal points and areas of interest.  In each frame, I tried to look at everything in the lens, moving from corner to corner, observing shadows, light spots, lines in the landscape, perspective.   It is not really hard to do, per se, but it is hard to do it quickly.  Becoming conscious of these bits and pieces eventually develops habits and trains the eye and mind; in turn, this will work in my favor as I continue this practice.  I can imagine this will work in quick-changing situations – having an eye to anticipate and prepare.

Above you can see the evolution of the final picture.  The very top one is a jpg, straight out of the camera.  The middle one is with some push of the color.  The sky was really quite lovely, and in retrospect, maybe I will go in and re-do the picture to keep that cerulean, rather than the ultramarine sky of the bottom picture.

Anyway, I couldn’t figure out why the middle picture kept bugging me, and then I looked again, and saw that the bright yellow spot in the middle tilted down, toward the right – it just wasn’t level.  In Lightroom, I rotated the picture ever so slightly, and was much happier.  In the bottom, final image, I pushed the yellows and the greens and used the gradated filter in LR, as well as used Viveza 2 to create a bit more zing in different areas.  I eliminated the spots (on the lens or the sensor – need to check) in the sky using Photoshop, and then Faststone and Photoscape for resizing, framing, and signature.

Compositionally, the lines and the light is what caught my eye.  The warmth of the sun on the slopes, along with their curvy lines was a nice contrast to the diagonals of the fore and middle ground.  The verticals of the weeds in the very front of the picture played nicely against curves and diagonals.  I think this is why the downward angle of the middle picture bugged me – the horizontal wasn’t there, and it is in the final image.  Instead, it is also a diagonal, and was one diagonal too many.

I am not displeased with this picture.  In post-processing the goal was to re-create the golden cast of the sunset on everything – that evanescent glow never stops fascinating me.  My hope is that the image does not look fake – but it could, depending on the monitor.

The above image is the middle one in the grouping above, straightened, and post-processed pushing the warmth of greens, yellows, and oranges.  Once more, sky spots removed.  Then framing and signature added.

And, I just realized now why having an electronic photo frame is not a bad idea!  Just a photo album in a different format.  Maybe I’ll go buy one . . .