Another Tour of My Community
September 19, 2021
Saturday I was delighted to gear up and go out with the camera. It’s nice when an experience can begin with delight. I think that sometimes I start with fear: that my back will hurt, that I’ll get worn out too fast, that I won’t engage my sight artistically. None of that Saturday. I came home excited about what I’d found and was not disappointed after downloading. (And I did not get worn out, and my back recovered quickly. Win, win, win, win, win.) Here’s what I saw.
1 Every once in a while, I feel as if an image has called out to me—as if I were about to look somewhere else when an object or a scene said, “Here I am! Take me!” The call came to me in the groundskeeping yard.
2 That’s not to say I mind searching for something to photograph. That’s what I was doing when I found this unidentified thing in a dumpster around the corner from the fencing.
3 The same thing looked different from the other side.
4 A fallen maple leaf interrupts grids of the built environment.
5 Same walkway, different leaves, two maple and three cottonwood.
6 Looking over the railing of the walkway, what should I see in the vernal pool below but evidence of my old pal Leptothrix discophora. This film is pretty young, so its colors haven’t developed. The film starts out as thick as only one cell of the microbe, when it’s this pale silvery blue. But the film bunches up when the organisms reproduce and can’t spread out (because its siblings are in the way, for example), so the film gets thicker and more colorful. The colors indicate the thickness of the film, sometimes going through the whole ROYGBIV sequence before being diluted by rain or washing downriver. All thin films, including soap bubbles, follow this sequence.
7 Speaking of color, this blue purple has to be one of my absolute favorites. Someone is going to want to know what this flower is. It’s an ageratum. Even David, my resident botanist, doesn’t know what species. It’s all over the place around here this year. Lucky us.
8 This gorgeous creature, a bald- or white-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) is not, I have learned, really a hornet. It’s a yellowjacket wasp, here sampling some goldenrod.
9 Is it any wonder that some of the words to Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing ran through my mind as I walked the ridge of Wildflower Hill? Not that our hill is high . . .
10 Another unknown, appearing for the first time—at least in the five years I’ve lived here—is this sunflower relative.
11 Have a closer look.
Romancing Reality 
It’s easy to see why the “metallic spiderweb” in #1 caught your fancy, played off as it is against the vertical and diagonal lines behind it. Similarly for #4. And goldenrod is one of the many-splendored things nature offers up in the fall.
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September 19, 2021 at 12:15 PM
Thanks, Steve. You read my first photo the way I had hoped it would be read: the lines behind the spiral are also important.
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September 28, 2021 at 8:00 PM
This is an excellent collection of images. Lovely.
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September 19, 2021 at 12:54 PM
Thank you, Joanne. I love being out in nature, but I think my best work is about objects.
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September 28, 2021 at 8:01 PM
Good pictures – particularly like 4. 🙂
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September 20, 2021 at 7:07 AM
Thanks, Adrian. The color of the leaf in #4 is unusual for fall. I suspect its demise is due to something other than the season.
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September 28, 2021 at 8:02 PM
The delight communicates and I’m delighted for you. The first photo is a gem; thanks to the guy (yeah, it was probably a guy) who spiraled that material up, and thanks to you for noticing. The second and third look like outer space! 😉 The maple and cottonwood leaves are beautifully seen and composed in that soft light. The physics lesson is appreciated – I had no idea about the growth of films and their colors. Did that one thicken or was it washed away? Ha, ha, David didn’t know because it’s a garden flower (that’s my thought anyway). Ageratums do have a uniquely cool kind of purplish-blue color, which is nice with those solid golds. That hornet looks serious! As opposed to the last flower, which is anything but. 🙂 Thanks for the Lindatour. 🙂
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September 20, 2021 at 12:01 PM
I didn’t notice the spiraled fencing (or whatever it is) in the first photo so much as it noticed me and called my name. Anyway, glad you like it. The second and third photos are some of what keeps me checking out dumpsters. I think it’s the black in those that looks like outer space. I don’t know if the film in #6 thickened; I didn’t go back to check. Probably it got rained on and dispersed. I think you’re right about David not knowing that much about garden-flower species. Did you see Steve Gingold’s bald-faced hornet? (Link is below.) Thanks for all your kind comments, Lynn.
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September 28, 2021 at 8:04 PM
Yes, I saw Steve’s photo back in July – it’s amazing. He knows what he’s doing! I’m glad that things in this world keep calling your name. 🙂
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September 28, 2021 at 8:26 PM
…was one of those ‘wins’ listed for our win, too? The joy of that outing really shows in the images, Linda. #5, #6, and #7 are favorites.
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September 21, 2021 at 10:20 AM
Thanks, Mic. You did something like what I did in #5, didn’t you—those leaves in the parking lot. I just realized that. I would have preferred a more colorful film in #6, but it’s such a thrill to find this stuff even when it’s this young. I don’t know why, but I feel like I fall into that blue purple in #7.
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September 28, 2021 at 8:04 PM
I like natural arrangements of leaves on parking lots and other surfaces because of the usually neutral background they provide…as in your photograph. As for the film in #6, I appreciated the explanation of the changing colors; I think I have said before, your posts about Leptothrix have expanded my world. I had always referred to them as “oil slicks”.🙄 I was concentrating on the film the first time through and totally missed the frog sitting in the middle of it. (🙄again.)
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September 29, 2021 at 9:33 PM
I’m so glad you are with me on the biofilms, Mic. They really are fascinating. Don’t feel bad about missing the frog. I didn’t see him, either. When my husband said something about the frog, I tried to show him that it was just a lump of soil. Hm. What do you know; it was a frog.
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September 29, 2021 at 9:46 PM
☺️
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September 29, 2021 at 10:22 PM
Another nice collection.. Those bald-faced yellow jackets have been hanging around my back door most of these cool mornings. I am not sure why but maybe they are attracted to lights. I got a pretty cool shot of one on the back door window a little while back.
I like numbers 4&5 as well as the lovely Ageratum blue in number 7 and the goldenrod in motion in number 9.
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September 21, 2021 at 6:02 PM
Thank you, Steve. Your bald-faced yellowjacket photo is great—like all your insect photos. I’m especially glad to know that you like #9. It was an experiment I wasn’t sure succeeded.
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September 28, 2021 at 8:05 PM
It is successful. I have not experimented with motion, aside from water, so am impressed when someone does a nice job with it. I am too hung up on sharp detail. LOL
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September 30, 2021 at 8:07 AM
I understand about wanting sharp detail. You are a total master of that. I could only accept this photo with motion blue because I could see a little part of the photo that seemed in focus. Do you ever make composites? I want to but can’t bear to sacrifice any part of what I think is a good photograph. Talk about hang up.
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October 3, 2021 at 5:48 PM
That’s a good reason to stay with what you captured. The only time I have done a composite was with the full moon in a landscape. Capturing one of the moon itself properly exposed and sharp and then replacing the smaller overexposed moon in a landscape. But that was a while ago and I haven’t done anything like that since.
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October 3, 2021 at 6:50 PM