Showing posts with label season. Show all posts
Showing posts with label season. Show all posts

Friday, March 02, 2018

Almonds of Tejeda, 2018

Heart-stopping beauty

Every year, the almond trees of Gran Canaria put forth a beautiful show of blooms. The almond flower festival is also supposed to happen every year, but this year, it didn’t, first time in decades. Bad weather hit it, bringing first a good(ish) snowfall to the mountains, then wind, then snowfall again... First, the festival was postponed, then postponed again and finally cancelled altogether, when it became clear that almonds are already past the maximum blooming stage.

Sunday, January 04, 2015

Caldera de Bandama in winter

Gran Canaria received its share of long rains in the end of autumn - not as much as Tenerife, but sufficient for the local flora to wake up. It is not the time of most flowers yet, but the mountains look green and you can see the occasional splash of color here and there. Some of the early bulbs managed to finish flowering and wilt "when I wasn't looking", as I discovered in a local botanic garden. So now I am trying to go and check out what happens with the plants as often as I can.


Wednesday, December 22, 2010

on snow, disrupted travel and isolation on white

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along with thousands of other travelers in Europe we didn't travel anywhere. So we are probably not really qualify to be called travelers at all.

We were supposed to fly to Fuerteventura on Sunday morning (very early morning, so favoured by cheap airlines). We didn't, because the evening before a lot (I mean A LOT) or snow fallen and settled on the ground. It was very respectable amount of snow for single snowfall, even if I apply russian standard to it.

Anyways. On Sunday, while the snow was still fresh, I went out with my camera, and got pictures of a few trees, isolated on white background, small twigs and all. And just wanted to stress again how easy it is if the original lighting is right - be it natural milky-white sky or studio setup.

I am pretty sure I first saw a variant of this technique described by Laurin Rinder on shutterstock forum. He wrote something like "just call up Levels dialogue in photoshop, take a white pipette and click on background". And it works perfectly well if background was white and uniformly lit.

A goodish while ago wrote up a slight variation on this here - that works nicely even is there are dirty patches on the background.

I continue to use more or less the same technique now when conditions are right. I call up Levels dialogue, and start dragging the white point (upwards arrow on the right of the diagram), while holding Alt key (for PC) visually controlling the results. Sometimes it works just like that, sometimes I need to play with a few layers, but it works very nicely. Hope it helps if someone is still struggling with isolation.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

sparkly stuff

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Now, she had a dream about the king of Sweden,
He gave her things that she was needin',
He gave her a home built of gold and steel,
A diamond car with a platinum wheel.
(Cab Calloway, Minnie the Moocher)
I need a King of Sweden to give me things that I am needin'. And I don't even need a diamond car. Cheaper things of sparkly variety will do just as nicely.

I spent a few minutes yesterday in Scotsdales garden center looking though their Christmas decoration things. I like it, I just do. I don't need any of that, But I bought two branches with crystals hanging off them. I wanted to buy one, I really did. I couldn't choose. I asked for help from another shopper. He graciously agreed to choose for me. I took the branch that he choose, wandered off... Returned and took the second one as well.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

hoar frost

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It was frosty today in the morning, second time in a row. I had to spend some happy time with ice scraper before we could start for school.

While checking for the correct name of this type frost (yes, I am a checking person), I found the name for another type of frosty formations that I saw only ones before. I didn't see any today, but basically it looks like thin flat same-width rims of ice. Pics that I took on one occasion I saw it - here and here

According to wikipedia it's called advection frost or wind frost and it forms _against_ the wind direction. A puzzler that.

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winter images on shutterstock