…In November???

Well, actually, it’s wild strawberry leaves,  turned autumn red ruby and here festooned with the remnants of the morning’s frost:

I liked the way each of the leave’s tiny, hair-like spines had captured its own accumulation of atmospheric rime.

This was taken at about ten AM in the deep shade of a stand of firs, and the crystal structures were becoming indistinct as the day warmed.  I bet it was really good a couple of hours earlier!

Thanks to Mary over at Work of the Poet for hosting this rubilicious meme.  Go visit her for more rubiliciousness!

…Throw ‘em another sunset:

This one’s “good from far, but far from good” – this shot benefits greatly from its reduced size.  But hey, the real thing was cool, and this is what I was able to snag of it, hand-held at two seconds against my car window.

Enjoy!

Got a surprise today, a gift from the project engineer, who had availed himself of a few free minutes before work to snag a fine rainbow trout.  He not only landed it, he gutted and chilled it as well.

I like a man who takes care of business.

Anyway, I’m not really this guy’s tight buddy, so the fact that he offered me his morning catch suggested that everybody else had already said “no.”

I said yes.  Hey, WTF, fresh trout??  I think I can live with it!!

And besides. I’d been eating in a much too pedestrian mode in recent days, and needed to class up my culinary act.  A little trout in the mix seemed unlikely to cheapen my neighborhood.

So I assembled a saute: trout, tomato, red onion and cilantro

…done up in olive oil and lime juice, with virtually no other spices, as I can’t find the pepper grinder here and haven’t the heart to take my own from home:

It came out really guuud!

Anyway, it’s been a while since I shared my dinner, which my Christian up-bringing taught me was right, so I’m atoning right here and now.

Bon appetite!

The Earth turns, the sun recedes and the blanket of night descends

like the closing of a coffin lid.

Light and dark, night and day, black and white, right and wrong, alive, dead, pretending.

It’s all relative, isn’t it?

In this case, mid-morning frost on a carpet of moss in a field where I’m currently working.  The shade of a stand of fir trees kept the frost in place until coffee break, when I gathered my kit and dashed out into the scrub to snag a couple of photos.

I’m glad I did, even though they were quite rushed.

Moss, supporting a sprawl of wild strawberries:

…and a closer shot of strawberry plants gone red as the freeze comes on:

The full-sized versions of these two photos display the temporal layering of successive ice deposits as what looks here to be chunks of Morton salt.  But trust me, it’s good ol’ H2O.

These come our way courtesy of Ziggy, my 50mm Sigma prime lens.

Enjoy.

My most recent lens purchase was a Canon L-series 24mm TS-E II, a lens which replicates the actions of medium and large format cameras in that it allows for the “tilting” of both the camera back/film plane and the objective lens, the one which gets punched first in a street brawl.

I bought this Rube Goldberg monstrosity while in pursuit of the ultimate landscape photograph.  You know the one – the cactus flower nearly brushing the lens and the castellated horizon, both in sharp focus.  It’s a look which is, practically speaking, unattainable with an SLR or modern digital camera, seeing as it depends on being able to “bend” the lens relative to the camera body, which hasn’t been an option until just about… now.

I bought Elliot (my TS-E lens, if you catch my reference ) looking for that infinite depth of field (tilt) and control of parallax (shift,) and have been struggling with the learning curve ever since.  The focus is manual, and the results of my efforts aren’t really obvious in my tiny viewing screen, until I get home and blow my images up.

Then, last week, my Siamese Cousin Bob sent me a link wherein people did exactly the opposite with their tilt-Shift lenses, opting for what approximates a spot-focus amidst a sea of  impressionistic blurs.  It was cool enough for me to be inspired to try it, so I did.

Here’s Bossie, asking the perennial question, “Whatchoo lookin’ at???”

Obviously, I’m lookin’ at a cow with an attitude.

This isn’t what I bought Elliot for, but I anticipate having some fun with it.

Let me know what you think.

I’m generally loathe to do this, but somehow this self-inflicted wound is slightly less painful than most, so I thought, “What the hell, it’s Tuesday, and that retainer on your dollar store glasses does look kinda Ruby…”

With appologies to Mary over at Work of the Poet for so disabusing her otherwise comely meme.

As recommended by my Siamese cousin Bob, on accounta he likes my sky shots. 

This is yet another Windsor sunset, fleeting and ephemeral, a moment in the slide show of a typical evening.  As I drive along, wistful and wanting, the sky is gray and boring; the skyline is vague and uninspiring.  My camera sits on the passenger seat, dejected and wondering why it came on this winding, bumpy ride.

Then it happens, as it occasionally does: the clouds fall into place like pieces of an art puzzle, and the light comes up, and suddenly I’m driving into a ditch and propping my camera against the driver’s side window for an impromptu two-second hand held shot of something which wouldn’t be there by the time I’d set up a tripod:

Yeah, at ISO 3200 it’s  grainier than Plochman’s mustard, but I wasn’t really set up for it, so I got what I got.

Still, I like the clouds a lot.

Because I’ve been swimming upstream for the past month, with diminishing returns for my efforts, and haven’t the emotional energy to actually blog about anything important.

Contrails in the Conway sky:

…and an orange apparition over the high plains of Windsor, MA:

A bit feeble, I know, but it’s what I have tonight.

Peace, Out.

This is an Accidental Ruby Tuesday, which came my way most unexpectedly this past weekend.

I’d overslept and missed the best part of sunrise, but I nonetheless left the house early enough to see some long shadows and a bit of color.

But the skies were boring compared to the sunrise I’d invisioned, and I drove without a destination, disconsolate yet propelled by my inate wanderlust.

Then, on the edges of Ashfield (it might have been Goshen by then) I passed a rustic building gleaming with chrome detritus of a most unanticipated sort – the Good Time Stove Company:

…yes, a real store, festooned with an interesting array of shiny stuff displayed to the delight of early morning travelers like me.  I’d passed it hundreds of times without stopping, but on this particular morning the light was right, and I backed up to snap this shot.

There are several bits of Ruby scattered about this photograph, though I doubt you can see the most impressive one to me: the glowing red heart affixed to the chest of the twenty foot Tin Cowboy at the left of the photo.

Trust me, it’s a trip.

So at this resolution you might just be able to see the Glowing Red Whatever at the foot of the fifteen-foot Bicycle Wheel Arch which frames the entrance to the stove shop.  I call Ruby-Dab!

…but then, off to the right, was a sign:  “Three Sisters Sanctuary:”

Yeah, I know, “That’s pretty scant Ruby.”  Let’s call it “sorta red.”

But I, being curious, wandered out back, the idea of “three sisters” appealing to me in some way or another.

And there I spied Ruby:

‘Twas a Morning Dragon, fifty feet at least, basking in the break of day, with two-foot chunks of sea glass guarding its sinuous spine, and a belly where fire  lived, and a hideously beautiful mouth where the smoke came out, gnashing its earthbound fangs at the waning half-moon:

This was a truly cool find, and the low light of morning lit it to my liking.

I hope you like it too.

Thanks to Mary over at Work of the Poet for hosting this cool meme.  Go there to see what else is rubilicious!