Music Video: "Chiron Beta Prime" (Jonathan Coulton, w/ ASL interpretation from Stephen Torrence)

Is today the solstice? I know it's around now, at least.

So hi. How are y'all doing? I'm okay. Sorry if I worried anybody. I really wasn't having a nervous breakdown, whatever rumors you've heard. There are much longer, whinier, more personal, and somewhat abstract (in places) explanations for the abrupt hiatus, but it really does basically condense down to, I was burned out on blogging and wanted to have time to play Sims, which I never had time to do previously. I am now seeing signs that I'm burned out on Sims, or at least approaching burn-out, so regular blogging will probably be resuming at some point in the next couple weeks. It may take me a while to work back up to daily posting, though. Like, don't expect posts in the next couple days, is what I'm saying. Among other things.

This is a video I had previously scheduled for this week, because it's holidayey without being one of the standard Christmas songs. I pretty much hate all the usual Christmas music, since 2005 or so, because of having been forced to listen to it during a retail job (and then again in 2006, in a similar but different retail job), and basically never want to hear any of those songs again in my entire life and I'm not even exaggerating. But nobody writes light jazz versions of "Chiron Beta Prime" for supermarkets, or uses it to sell toilet paper -- at least not yet -- so I approve of it.

Also I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the one semi-exception to the Christmas music hatred, this mashup of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" with The Police's "Roxanne." (And even it's not something I'd want to listen to very often.) I'm not sure the video actually improves the experience of hearing the mashup, but embedding a video is the easiest way I have of sharing music, so:



The next post will happen when it happens.

Extension

I need a little more time, I think, before I come back. Don't know how long it'll be, and I hesitate to give myself any new deadlines for fear I won't be able to keep them. I'll explain eventually.

Random plant event: Aglaonema; Hiatus

Hi.

So, um, everything/everyone is okay, but I'm feeling very close to burn-out and need to take a few days off. (Sorry if this ruins anyone's life. It's unintentional.) I had a big thing written here with the four reasons why, but luckily, I realized that y'all probably don't care about the reasons so long as everything's okay, which it is, plus they weren't even especially interesting reasons, so even if you would ordinarily be inclined to care, you still wouldn't care.

Planning to be back Sunday.

As for today's plant-related content, the Aglaonema fruits I reported on in July are showing signs of ripening now.


A lot of the Aglaonemas bloomed this summer, at more or less the same time, and I tried making random crosses with everything that happened to be flowering at any given moment, but this is the only set of fruits I managed to get. This page suggests that I might have had better luck if I'd wrapped the flowers with wet paper towels and plastic after making the crosses -- apparently 100% humidity is important. Next year, perhaps.

I don't know exactly when these are fully ripe and ready to plant, but I've been having reasonably good luck with Anthurium lately (65 seedlings growing in vermiculite, plus I started about 100 more seeds a few days ago), and I figure Aglaonema is probably at least kind of similar. The mother is 'Maria;' the father I don't know, because I was basically trying to cross anything and everything, but there's a pretty good chance that it's also 'Maria.' In which case the seedlings will be boring and the whole project pointless, but I won't know if it was a waste of time or not for another 12-24 months. (The link above says you can't really know if you've produced a cross that's worth propagating until the plant's been growing for about a year, but I'm guessing that indoors, it'll be slower, so maybe 2 years.) I'll let you know how it goes.

Pretty picture: Cymbidium Starbright 'Sirius'

Lots of Cymbidiums for sale lately in the stores here, but they're all super-expensive. (The cheapest I saw was $50.) This means I will probably never find out whether I can grow a Cymbidium, but that's probably okay: based on my experiences with other orchids, I suspect the answer is yes, but not well.

I really like the way they look, though.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

When it got hot this summer, I stopped walking Sheba. I couldn't handle it, and she's black, and in a fur coat, so she's not crazy about going out in the heat either. We'd still go out in the mornings, and I'd throw a tennis ball for her to fetch, but that was it. It saved me a lot of time, she still seemed to be getting adequate exercise, and I didn't have to get heat exhaustion first thing every morning, so it worked out great.

However. This meant, also, that Sheba's nails weren't getting worn down by walking on concrete and gravel. We can't cut her nails for her -- she will permit us to touch her feet now, which she wouldn't when we first got her, but she still won't let us hold her feet, and she gets pretty freaked by any objects near her feet.¹ So, during the morning tennis-ball throwing, she was catching her nails in the lawn and breaking them a lot. (Possibly "a lot" is inaccurate, but after the scary first one a while back, which I wrote about, she's broken one at least two more times. I don't know if it's the same nail or not, though I think I've read that once a nail's broken once, it's more prone to breaking again ever after.) Which means that I've resumed the walks, though I'm not terribly happy about it. I'm not sure if this is a particularly good way to deal with the nail-splitting problem, but it at least doesn't appear to be making things any worse.


On the other hand, when we go out, she spends basically the whole walk with her hackles raised, as in the above photo. This is new: she didn't do this in the spring.

Googling was inconclusive: ordinarily it's a sign of fear or aggression, but I read that hackle-raising also sometimes happens when the dog is surprised or nervous. She certainly isn't acting particularly aggressive when it happens -- usually there's not even a person or dog around to be aggressive towards -- and it seems to happen particularly often when she's smelling something really intently. Perhaps she's just surprised. A lot.

-

¹ It's not like her nails never get trimmed; we've just never been the ones to do it. Once at the vet's, once at a pet store (which sounded like it was a terrible experience for all involved; I wasn't there), maybe another time at another pet store, I can't remember.

How to Take Transmitted Light Photographs

This one is for Derek Powazek, who left a comment in the most recent transmitted-light post asking for a "'behind the scenes' type post on how you shoot these photos."

Initially I resisted the idea, because I didn't think it was really complicated enough to write a post about. I mean, really, you just get a light source, a camera, and a leaf, and you put the leaf between the light source and camera and take pictures. Nothing that complicated about it. But as I thought have I learned anything else about the process that would be useful to share?, I managed to make it complicated anyway. Yay me.

So the first thing is, you need a camera, light source, and leaf.

I have no advice about the camera part. I don't know about cameras; I've only ever had relatively cheap point-and-shoot ones. I do know you're going to need something with a very short focal length, so make sure there's a macro mode.

I have some advice about leaves. Characteristics that tend to make leaves suitable for transmitted light photos:

1. Thin (non-succulent).
2. Broad.
3. Variegated.
4. Flat(-tish).

Thick, succulent leaves can sometimes produce serviceable photos, but to see the venation, you need a leaf that's thin enough for light to shine through. Broad leaves are useful mostly because the leaf has to be big enough to block the light source from shining on the lens. If it's not, you get lens flare.

Lens flare, ruining an otherwise mediocre picture of Begonia x erythrophylla.
Variegated leaves tend to be more interesting, or at least more colorful and dramatic, though that's a matter of personal taste. Finally, extremely curly, quilted, or twisted leaves tend to make poor subjects because only part of them can be in focus. Sometimes that works out well anyway, but I prefer flatter leaves.

The "leaves" don't always have to be leaves, either -- I've taken serviceable pictures of spathes (Spathiphyllum, Anthurium), phyllocladodes (Schlumbergera), petals/sepals (Abutilon, Tulipa, Hemerocallis), and cataphylls (Zamioculcas) before. Dead leaves also have their charms, sometimes, in the right situations.

Zamioculcas zamiifolia cataphyll. I'm not saying it's gorgeous or anything, but it's in-focus, and there's light.
Almost any leaf can be made to work, but I particularly recommend Dieffenbachia, Caladium, Alpinia/Zingiber, Calathea, Alocasia, Zantedeschia, Strelitzia (especially S. reginae), Solenostemon, Musa, Anthurium, Codiaeum, Begonia, and Phlebodium.

The light source that works best for me is sunlight. That said, it's totally possible to get a decent image out of an artificial light; the main problem is that the color balance can come out really strange, and sometimes it can be hard to fix after the fact, like in this picture:

Aglaonema 'Golden Bay,' using an overly-reddish fluorescent light as a light source. The result is too yellow and too saturated: I should have fiddled with the image longer, probably.
This happens less often with sun.

One wants to minimize reflected light as much as possible when doing this. The appeal of transmitted light photos is that the colors are highly saturated and at high contrast; if there's light coming from behind the camera, this will reflect back into the lens and wash out the color. This can also be a problem if you're taking pictures outside in a bright area, or even if you're taking pictures while wearing light-colored clothing. Wear dark clothes, and as much as possible, shoot from a dark location towards a light one.

Strobilanthes dyerianus showing reflected light (especially visible on the left side of the image and down the midvein). Reflected light tends to be blue, so sometimes you can just reduce the level of blue a little bit and come up with something workable anyway.
Very light-colored leaves (e.g. some of the Dieffenbachias with white centers, Spathiphyllum spathes, pretty much any of the chartreuse cultivars of anything) tend to be difficult to get. This might be specific to my camera. It's often possible to manipulate the image afterward to increase the contrast and get something interesting out of it anyway, but not always.

Dieffenbachia 'Triumph' or something similar. This would have been improved by making the image lighter and increasing the contrast, though sometimes that also changes the color.

Like here (Spathiphyllum 'Golden Glow' or whatever, spathe), for example. The actual spathe is basically pure white, but in the process of cranking up the contrast so there was something to look at, all this yellowish stuff showed up. This was fixable too (reduce the saturation); I don't know why I didn't.
I usually get the best results when the light source is hitting the leaf exactly perpendicular to the leaf surface. If the light comes in at an angle to the leaf, you'll wind up with shadows everywhere. If the leaf is basically flat, this can sometimes be a good effect; if it's at all cupped, quilted, or otherwise uneven, though, I don't like it as well. With some extremely-textured leaves (like Pilea mollis 'Moon Valley,'), you're going to get shadows no matter what you do.

Pilea mollis 'Moon Valley.' There's a really obvious shadow in the top left, but there are also shadows on the left side of each of the bumps on the leaf.
If the camera is pointed at an angle to a flat leaf, you'll have one area that's in focus, and then out-of-focus everywhere else. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Usually, the closer you can get to aiming the camera perpendicular to the leaf surface, the better.

Codiaeum variegatum NOID. This image was very obviously taken from an angle -- the left and right sides are very blurry.
I'm usually trying to get these pictures while holding the leaf in one hand and the camera in the other. This means that for most shots, both my hands are moving, and the image comes out blurred. The solutions I've come up with for this:

1. Keep your hands touching one another, so that if one moves, the other has to move with it. This doesn't eliminate motion blur, but it keeps both hands moving in the same direction, so you get rid of some of it.
2. Tape the leaf to something. I've had decent luck taping leaves to the shade of the fluorescent light on Nina's terrarium; I've also been able to tape leaves to windows at certain times of day. If you use a tiny piece of tape, and only on the very edges of the leaf (which won't show in the picture anyway), this can be very helpful. This doesn't work when there's a screen on the window, though:

Dieffenbachia 'Camouflage,' photographed against a screened window. It's an interesting effect, but not really the kind of thing I'm usually going for.
3. Find a tripod. I often stack up soup cans and rest the camera on the cans when taking pictures. This doesn't reduce camera motion entirely, but it helps, and it's easy to set up, take down, and adjust. Plus then you can have soup when you're finished taking pictures.
4. Take lots of pictures. Sometimes you just have to take 25 pictures and hope that one of them turns out.

Manipulating the images afterward is also part of the gig; I use Irfanview. I rotate the image so that the base and petiole of the leaf are on the left and the tip of the leaf is on the right, straighten it as much as possible so the midrib (if present) is strictly horizontal, crop the image, and then adjust the color until it looks right. All these steps are pretty easy to do in Irfanview, though cropping is sometimes kind of a pain, because of a quirk that happens when the image size is reduced down to about 20-25% of normal. A typical process goes something like this (using a bract from an unidentified Euphorbia pulcherrima variety as my example):

This is the raw image, as uploaded from my camera. (Part of the reason this is so dark is because it was late in the day and I didn't have much direct light to work with; this was taken in the ex-job's greenhouse, about an hour before sunset.)

After rotating it slightly to get the midvein horizontal.

Cropped to remove the shadow of another bract on the left.

Lightened with the "gamma correction" function. (I don't know what gamma is or why it needs correcting, but this gives better results than adjusting the brightness.)

I increased the contrast until it looked more or less right.

I used the auto-adjust color, which increased the contrast a little more and darkened the image slightly.
There are often other steps involved in the photo processing: if everything's too yellow, I can turn up the blue a little; if it's washed-out, I can increase contrast; if it's a little fuzzy, I can sharpen the image. That sort of thing. Often, something that looks just fine on my computer will look like crap once I upload it to the blog, but them's the breaks.

So I think that's all I've got. Go. Go try it for yourself.

Monstrosithurium

Remember this spring, when we all got to bemoan the existence of dye-injected orchids? (Phalaenopsitrocity! Dendrobomination!)

Well, certain douchemonkeys have decided that those were such a great idea that they're wanting to do the same thing with Anthuriums.


Presently, one "breeder" is offering a white Anthurium that's been infused with blue or yellow dye. The picture at the link doesn't actually look that terrible, but I'm guessing it's also been very carefully manipulated. The dyed Dendrobium and Phalaenopsis probably look very nice too, if there's enough Photoshop involved.

I have no hope of being able to stop dyed Anthuriums from happening (indeed, my guess is that in the future, all plants will be available in every color of the rainbow, and every one of them will rebloom white), but I figured I should at least warn y'all that this is on the way.

New Frontiers in Christmas Decor

This . . .


was at the ex-job yesterday. The flash washed out the purple lights, so this isn't quite how it really looked (I've tried to compensate by turning down the green a little), but perhaps you get the idea anyway. It was very, y'know, striking, so I said so to a former co-worker, who was all like, "oh, yeah, the hooker tree." And then there was a discussion with her and another employee about whether "hooker" was appropriate or not. (The other employee pointed out that we had no reason to think that the tree actually slept around -- all we actually know about it is that it has flamboyant tastes -- and said she preferred "burlesque Christmas tree." I like "burlesque" better too. And I'm pretty sure I now like the other employee, who I'd not previously met.)

You know you're having a nice day when you get to talk about whether or not an artificial Christmas tree is slutty.

For my part, I was initially horrified, but the more I look at it, the more I think it's one of those so-wrong-it's-cool things. Your mileage will vary.

In more houseplant-relevant Christmas merch, we have this:


Poinsettias don't fall apart and die fast enough on their own, so we have to speed it up by sticking them in tiny, no-drain spherical pots full of sopping wet peat. The wooden sticks don't seem to serve any useful purpose; they read "http://www.optimara.info" on one side, but that address goes to a page displaying African violet varieties (which, judging by the page's formatting, was last updated in 2001) and "easyGrowing...easyCare" on the other, none of which is true. Unless the ellipsis stands in for missing words, like:

easyGrowing is not at all what this plant is, even under ideal circumstances, nor are there any imaginable circumstances under which this plant, as it is currently being grown, could be construed to be easyCare

In that case, then the ellipsis, at least, might be true.

This, I think, is just kind of self-evidently horrible and wrong, but everything involving poinsettias tends to strike me as horrible and wrong, so whatever. I'm not sure what could possibly happen to launch these poinsettia-balls into so-revolting-it's-awesome territory (Glitter? Bows? Plastic neon bows covered in glitter? Artificial ivy spilling out of the bottom? Little metal stars bobbing above the plant on springs? Plastic neon glitter-covered bows on springs? Spray-paint? LEDs around the inside rim of the pot? Plastic neon stars encrusted with blinking LEDs, on bobbing springs, with a tiny mechanical Santa walking in circles through the artificial ivy spilling out of the glitter-covered metallic-painted spherical pot?), but I enjoyed thinking about the possibilities.