Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I haven't done much with the relatively few digital photos I shot yesterday, but I did get around to editing the macro shots:

Hmm. Too bad there is't away (AFAIK) to use an image as the cut-tag text, since I want to use this small image as a teaser to get y'all to click through to the larger pics that I thought it'd be rude to not lj-cut, and it'd seem oh so much more clever if the small version and this paragraph didn't appear in the 'full' view of this entry...

Okay, ignore the stuff above, now that you're seeing this. I'll implement the mechanism I wanted to use in a way similar to how first Linux virus was done. ("This is a Linux virus. It works on the honour system. Please delete all the files on your hard drive manually and forward this Virus to everyone on your mailing list. Thank you for your cooperation." The second Linux virus actually worked a lot better, as the instruction was to delete "a few random files" before passing it along, so most (compliant) victims still had enough of a running system left to forward it. Both of these really fall prey to the classic "burned before you pillaged" programming error, of course.)

The originals are larger, and I was tempted to post them fill size to emphasize the OHH! MACRO! effect, but I went ahead and scaled them to a more browser-reasonable size before uploading them to Flickr.

As I was detoured from my intended path by the sound of some rather nice bluegrass, these berries caught my eye. At first I thought they were wild grapes like the ones attempting to eat my house (the ones that are Seussian pastels before they're ripe, and bird poop immediately thereafter), but the leaves were different, the spikes on the underside of the fruit not as long, the clusters of berries larger, and I don't think my wild-grape vine has such vivid stems ... also, though it was hard to tell because it was tangled up with another plant, I think it might have been more of a bush than a vine. Oh, and last but not least, the berries had ripened without being transformed into bird-poop.

I was especially fascinated by the five-lobed attachment point for the berries -- is that formed by the petals of the flower that the berry grew from? It looks so much like what I might see on a plastic toy ...

My poking about with cameras, especially when I took a lens off one of the film cameras and held in front of the digital camera as a macro adaptor (I had a macro lens on one of the film cameras just in case, so I didn't have to do anything special like that for the film shots; I reversed a normal, non-macro lens in front of the digicam for these because it was wider (f/1.4 vs. f/4)), drew other people's attention to the berries. Once they stopped to see what I was looking at, folks seemed to agree that they were pretty enough to warrant pausing for.

Here's a non-macro shot of a cluster of berries to put the previous images in context.

One person said she thought it was Pokeweed, and it does match photos of Pokeweed that Google found for me (though I'm curious about the fruit being intact and plentiful, since Pokeweed, despite being toxic to mammals, is edible for birds -- I guess the bird population up at Spoutwood hasn't found these bushes yet?). She said that despite being tempting because of their colour, the berries don't actually make a very good dye, because the dye made from them never sets permanently enough, so it comes out again after a few washings (but Wikipedia did mention their use in dyes and ink).

I did shoot these on slide film in an SLR with a macro lens as well, but I don't expect the slides to be significantly better (unless I want to blow them up much larger); other than the kludgey macro technique, this is a subject that plays to my digital camera's strengths. (It's a 2.1 megapixel point-and-shoot.) The big advantage the slides should have is the lack of vignetting -- the entire frame should be bright, instead of looking like the camera was pointed through a tunnel. (I think the vignetting comes from the wide angle-of-view on the built-in lens -- when I reverse a 50mm lens in front of a 135mm lens on an SLR, I don't see any vignetting; reversing a 50mm in front of another 50mm shows some vignetting but nowhere near as extreme as on the digicam.)