Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Mission Carmel Bell Tower

This is from the inner courtyard at the Carmel Mission. I believe the tree with the white blossoms is a Flowering Pear Tree. This is thier time of year. There are some around here that are pure white with so many blossoms you can't see their leaves.

Sunday, January 25, 2009
High Speed Fountain

Today was a day of relaxation. Well, after the morning of spring cleaning it was anyway. (Yeah, spring comes early in California and it's not always a good thing.) One of our stops today was at Terra Sol Nursery on Patterson Avenue. We spend a LOT of time there for people who live in a place with a 10' x 25' back yard. But there is always room for one more plant. And there is always room for quite a few more cool plant photos.

We were trying to think of something nice to put in a newly cleaned space hoping it would discourage us from collecting junk... er, I mean, important things that have yet to find a permanent home. Today it was the fountains that caught our eyes. But those are more of an outside thing so we left uncharacteristically empty handed. Well other than for a few really cool shots of the water flowing from the fountains. This one is particularly interesting because just looking at the fountain the stream was a perfect column of water. But at 1/640th of a second you can clearly see individual pulses of the motor driving the pump. Usually the pumps pulse at 60hz (60 times per second) same as the electricity that supplies them.

In the spirit of simplifying things, and since the photo of the day has been a little behind lately, I have created a new category on the site: "unretouched". This image is just as it came out of the camera. Not to say that all the other images are heavily altered. But I am far from a purist when it comes to either recreating the scene as I remember it, or just having fun with a creative image. And recently I have been working with some massive panoramas that take days to get just right. So it will be nice to take some more spontaneous shots.