Keep Spring Forever in Your Mind

With the ninety degree April 6’th heat, we may say that spring has arrived – at least in spirit. I think we all needed spring to come early this year, to offset the really bad winter that was forgettable and regrettable for ‘oh so much more than just the gray days and drab landscapes of forgone winters.

I’d been noticing the buds on the trees during my AM walks, and managed to take a few pics of them. I think the buds I’ve photographed are of the Crepe Myrtle tree variety, but never was a horticulturalist. I just thought they were pretty, and a nice introduction to spring in 2021. Hooray I say, spring is here, I say.

Over the winter the body did its usual disintegration routine, so with the arrival of spring my walks will be more frequent, and maybe I’ll get back to a normal walking rhythm by June or July. I’ll just double up on my hummus. It’s the food of spring, sort of. It has some of the ingredients for a body’s spring renewal (now, I’m not a trained doctor any more than a horticulturist, so this is uneducated opinion).

Apparently, hummus is one of the only foods that you can eat (outside of snail innards IIRC) – that contains all three of the precursor organics needed by your DNA to renew those cells of your new spring body. Well, people have said so much as that in the past, and the FDA made them stop. The proponents of the hyperbole called hummus’s most important ingredient: (tahini) – by the name of vitamin T, and gave to it great powers. Apparently the FDA disagreed that it should be called a vitamin. Great powers or not, I’m counting on that hummus and some more spring fresh air to start the 2021 out-of-doors season that I hope will truly be a renewal.

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Creeping Perfectionism

Figure 1: A shot from the Pentax: far from perfect.

There is this thing I call the creep of perfectionism.  It stems from the fact that nothing is ever perfect, even though we may think it is, for a time.  I remember my first camera (a Kodak brownie borrowed from my mum).  It was pretty darned good, I thought.  Later, when I bought an Olympus OM film camera, it seemed vastly superior to the old brownie.  I thought the pictures were just perfect.  Well, later the digital cameras became available, and I purchased a digital Pentax.  I realized the Olympus film camera was less than perfect, but it took the retrospective of the Pentax to make me realize this fact.  So, it’s with hindsight that we continually must update our ideas about perfection, and we update continually because we never reach it.

So, I upgraded my kit to have a camera without the anti-alias filter (a Pentax K5 /iis), and a Sigma lens.   Yet, the results so far leave me still wanting for that sharpness factor.  I’m using the Sigma 18-250 mm lens in the shot shown in figure 1.  Click the picture to see it in full size.  Doesn’t the detail of the pic just lack something in terms of the sharpness factor?  Do I need a full frame camera to get what I want?  Is it the lens, the camera, or the picture taker that’s at fault?  I suspect it’s the latter.

I guess people are just as imperfect as cameras.

Buggy for Bees

Figure 1 : Bee shot taken with K5, Pentax 50mm /f1.4 vintage lens

Recently I started to take macro tube shots of bees in my area.  This is quite an addicting facet of photography, I must say.  So far I’ve managed to shoot a few semi-interesting shots.  The picture in figure 1 is one of my favorites thus far (clicking on the photo will show it enlarged on smugmug).

Recent Lake Photo

Figure 1: Recent Local Lake Photo (Taken Christmas Day).