Sage in the ground is a perennial around us, but it only lives 3 or so years. It usually flowers in year two. If I had to guess why it's not more common as an ornamental plant it's because of its lifespan and no flowers the first year. People gravitate toward annuals and perennials, not biannuals.
I'm also in the Great lakes region and have never seen a spider like that before. Any tips for searching?
The level of precision that goes into every day items is truly amazing.
I'm sorry to hear that friend! I'm happy that you're still finding outlets to engage with.
Macro photography might be worth a quick glance at depending how mobile you are. Life in miniature can look otherworldly.
Odds are very strong that you have a phone in your pocket with a camera in it. The best camera in the world is the one you have with you, so you're off to a good start.
What you're describing is another good application for stacking/compositing. You can totally take multiple photos, put them into layers, and selectively remove content from each photo. There might even be automated tools that can do this vs doing it by hand. The more steady you can keep the thing taking the pictures the better off you'll be.
The only real hurdle would be things like parked cars, or very high traffic areas where you never get a clear shot of a specific portion of the frame, but if you choose the right spot this could lead to some very surreal looking photos.
I have no idea what this bush is called, but for three or so weeks out of the year it smells fantastic. Very sweet smelling.
A few days back, I wondered if I could achieve focus stacking doing the macro rock-your-camera-to-focus trick. For the uninitiated, the idea is that slight movement of your camera toward and/or away from your subject is an easier focusing method than using the focus ring on your lens.
I thought my logic was straightforward:
Put the three together and here we are. The daisy in the post is 39 images fed into helicon focus 9. I've now spent a total of 10 minutes with this software and it's super easy. Here's one of the photos in the stack to give you a feel for how thin the depth of field was:
For kicks, here are two more stacks. They're not super compelling photos, but they do show that the concept is viable.
Everything in this post was shot at f/4 on a Sigma 35mm f/2 with 26mm of extension tubes in the great outdoors with no additional lighting.
Completely agree. A decent amount of the clutter is aspirational. The kids will totally want to play my old consoles and not spend all their time on our PS5! That hasn't really panned out and I'm coming to terms with reality.
On the good news side, we're going to have to get everything out of our basement to replace the floor. We're going to be very choosey regarding what goes back down.
We're just barely over 40 and are taking stock over the massive quantity of things we've built up. We have a ton of stuff from previous times in our lives that still work, but we haven't used in 5, or even 10, years. Some examples are easier, like college text books. Others are a bit more fraught like my original PlayStation, Dreamcast, and Xbox that all still work, but just aren't getting used.
This is an actual thing. It even has a fancy name. Geophagia is nearly universal around the world in tribal and traditional rural societies.
TIL that IBM designs and/or fabricates ICs.
In the past five years, the air district has issued 369 notices of violation to the company, mostly at its Fremont facility. Though all of the violations are still pending, meaning the agency has not resolved the issues, data from the past five years does not show any financial penalties associated with the alleged violations.
Sigh
Sounds like an interesting after work test! You've got me very curious. If I'm doing this hand held there will likely be some wind, so things are going to move a tiny bit naturally. That and most of my lenses exhibiting focus breathing, so even if the camera were stationary the perspective would change slightly.
I'll hopefully follow up soon.
Hopefully this will be the first of many I take this season. Hopefully^2^ I'll even take the time to break out my "real camera" at some point and go 🐝 hunting
Well, almost. I didn't give myself enough tolerance in the cutout for the speaker and it doesn't fit well. On to v1.01!
It will be a 240x280x70ish speaker stand. The first go ground with it flat and support free resulted in warping despite a 60°C chamber, so I stood it on its end, cut print speed by a third, and added the breaks to reduce stress.
This will take a while...
Note that the bottom has a chmafer, so although there's a shadow it's not warping.
I turned the grow lights on early this year to grow some potatoes, which I'm sure is a totally a great use of energy. I'm really hoping to grow another round of starts after not having a very good year this year due to keeping our potatos in smaller pots and us not getting a ton of rain. Next year I'll put them in a much larger planter.
I'm also trying to get some cherry pits to seed. I collected the cherries, which were delicious, from a tree in our neighborhood. I'm betting the mother tree isn't a graft given its location and age. If any of you have any tips, I'm all ears. The pits are now a year old and spent the time in dry dirt on this table.
Title basically.
One of my windows computers, which happens to be the one I happen to do the most CAD work on, can't upgrade to windows 11 due to having an Ivy Bridge era Xenon (it's an E5-1680 v2 for the curious, older used workstations are fantastic bang for the buck computers).
Switching to Linux on this computer has been in the cards for a while, but I hadn't been in a hurry to do it. Looks like my hand might be getting forced...
The coaster is shivering timbers at Michigan's adventure.
At least the Canadian wildfires are good for softer light. It's very surreal having a cloud free sunny day without the sun actually being that intense.
In my experience, sage will flower year 2+ if it survives that long.