

Saving space by using a comparison slider! The colors of this morning glory are beautiful, but the black and white image brings out a little more detail.

I thought all marigolds were, well, some variant of the warm colors. That’s all immaterial to the fact that there’s a crazy bunch of things going on at the center of this flower. I think it’s wearing a fuchsia feather boa!


I found the flower in figure 3 both beautiful in its delicacy but also terrifying with its ALIEN SUCKER TENDRILS OF DEATH. Again, the black and white image brings out detail lost in the color.

I’m taking a series of photos to illustrate the many examples of built-in art glass in my neighborhood. Here (figure 4) is a nice window, but check out the 9 yellow tiles inset just to the left in the chimney! Score!

My favorite ink at the moment is Rohrer und Klingner’s Helianthus. So I was immediately attracted to this sunflower (Latinate Greek ‘Helianthus’; figure 5). I actually had to desaturate the yellow a little, and then de-luminesced it to bring out details in the petals. The browns, by contrast, I deep fried.

These berries (figure 6) were just impossible to photograph and edit. The reflections are murder, and the low-contrast black, if exposed to bring out detail, overexposes everything else, and vice versa. Grrr. I see that someone has already plucked one of the berries.

The mystery mist with its tendrils of near fog lowering into the valley of the Lackawanna was something else this morning. I had to juice this to within an inch of its life to squeeze enough contrast out of it to articulate the clouds. And yes, as the photo title says, it was 100% humidity this morning. I had to lower the window to take the picture because the A/C had fogged it. Thankfully, my camera had been in a room with its window open and was the same temperature as the outside and was not attacked by condensation.

I love the OBX, I love glass, and I love color. I bought this vintage paper weight (figure 8) in Nags Head and it now sits in the window of our kitchen in Scranton where it picks up sunlight at different times of the day. I like it better for being manifestly cheaply made, and, thinking about it, it is for all that a one-off unique artwork.