Ice Spikes

I've never shot snowflakes before, and decided to give it a whack today, during our 8th snow in just over a month. I had decided to shoot them this morning around 8:30am when the flakes falling were still flakes.

By the time I got out later in the morning, the air had warmed up and the flakes were clumps of ice spikes instead. I snagged a few shots of the clumpy spiky stuff. I'll try to get something more snowflakey another time.

As an aside, pretty much everything I know about shooting snowflakes and other crystals (as well as the methods I use to shoot many other subjects in macro/micro), I learned by reading about Ken Liebbrecht's work at Caltech. So, thanks Ken, if you ever read this!

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Painterly, Intricate Lacework

I've had my first downtime in what seems like months, and had the opportunity to shoot at our friends' country house which previously yielded microphotos of Peacock Feathers and BeeBalm [Monarda] flowers. Luckily for me, the old farmhouse windows iced up dramatically in the recent bitterly cold wind and snow, and these intricate, beautiful patterns emerged overnight.

The size of the photos presented here don't do these pictures justice—they really should be turned into huge prints and hung as modern art (hint, hint). Maybe as an early Valentine's gift for your honey?

But to really show how much detail was contained in these iced windows, in an area about the size of a quarter, below is a cropped portion of the photo from above, followed by several more photos of the icy panes.

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Ice Fishies

Just a quick post today. This is one of my favorite ice bubble photos that I've taken. I was lucky to have the opportunity to see it printed huge for an installation I did at the offices of New York design boutique, String Theory. It looks great huge (60" x 90") as well as on screen!

To me, this looks like a photo of fish swimming up a stream.

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Yeast, Aluminum Packaging, Kitchen Table

The objects above are not teeth. They are dry baking yeast nubs, the kind that come in a little foil package. I didn't know what to expect when I shot them, and this is what I got! Weird world.

Below is a shot of the edge of the foil packet the yeast came in. Further below is a slightly wider shot of the same section of the yeast package.

Here we have a piece of our kitchen table, it's formica or something. If you look very close, there appear to be tiny threads within the white textured resin of this tabletop. I suppose this might be made in a process similar to fiberglass, whereby a fiber and resin mixture is molded and dried.

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Charcoal Filter Charcoal

Our drip coffee maker has a little water filter inside which needs to be changed occasionally. We changed it for the first time in about 6 years this past weekend. I had bought the wrong filter though (the Keurig one looked like it would fit our Cuisinart!!!!) and the new filter needed to be, uh, drained of some of its charcoal in order to fit.

So, here's how these things work: Water goes through meshy fabric, water goes through charcoal, water comes out pure and not full of chlorine and minerals.

I snipped open the old filter too, so we could see what used filter charcoal looks like. These photos are of charcoal grains about the size of sand grains, maybe a little bigger. In these examples, the new charcoal (photos 1 and 2 where the grains are dry) looks exactly the same as the old charcoal (photo 3 where the charcoal is wet) which had been in service for 6 years. I had thought maybe there would be some discernible difference in the look of the charcoals, but I can't see any.

At the bottom of this post is a closeup of the fabric of the container that makes up this charcoal filter. Looks like a synthetic fiber to me, but I don't know for sure. You can see some crud has become trapped in the fibers. So, REMINDER, change your cruddy old water filters. They're gross!

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Sweet & Low, Equal, Splenda, and Sugar

Sweet & Low crystals.

I've been complaining about the shortage of sugar at the office, which I use in my coffee and oatmeal in the morning. And I've been forced by this situation to use sugar substitutes.

In my taste tests, I've found the Sweet & Low to be the most awful-tasting of the sugar substitutes. So bad that it gives the other sugar substitutes a bad rap. Above is a photo of the Sweet & Low product, which appears to be composed of irregular gnarly crystals.

Equal nubs.

I found Equal to be the second worst in my taste tests. Actually, the difference in sweetness and aftertaste between Equal and Sweet & Low is quite dramatic, with Equal being the far better of the two. Its sweetness, however, is still lacking in comparison to real sugar, and it does still leave a slightly bitter aftertaste.

Splenda nubby crystals.

Splenda, one of the newer kids in the artificial sweetener world, is the best of the three fakers I tasted. It leaves the least bitter aftertaste and has the sweetest flavor of the three in this taste test. I believe it would still be very easy, however, to discern the difference between Splenda and real sugar in a blind taste test (which I did not conduct).

Raw cane sugar crystals.

Above is some good old raw cane sugar. Yum. The best in my taste test. Sweet and warm and a touch of caramel flavor.

Since I believe a naturally-occurring food product to be better for my health than a manufactured one, I'll be sticking with the classic sugar, thankyouverymuch.

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Hoboken Studio Tour/Tiny Lab: Watch Closely

The watch hands above were on the watch of a visitor to my Tiny Lab exhibit in the Hoboken Studio Tour. I like the dreamy quality of the light and the way the scratches and dust create haloed sparkles throughout the image.

The two photos below are other parts of the watch which have obviously been much loved. The texture of scuffs is great, and I love the little flecks of gold peeking through the layer of silver.

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Squishy Foam!

This is foam, close-up; the soft stuff used to protect fragile things. I use this as padding for one of my lenses in a small hard case. It looks grey when viewed with your eyes. At this level of magnification, we see the beautiful little prismatic bubbles that make up the structure of the foam. Cool!

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Streaming tap water, captured in high-speed

Another type of photography that fascinates me (there are so many!) is high-speed photography. In this case, I've shot a macro semi-high-speed photo of water streaming out of the tap.

What I found with this shot was how the stream of water was completely filled with bubbles. And it seems like such a strange idea that water moving so fast from the tap could be so filled with bubbles. And they look so big too! So diamond-like and sparkly.

If I didn't know what this was, I would never have guessed that it's simply tap water.

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Dried Berries

As we're packing up the Christmas decorations, I noticed how dry the branches of berries had become. Some of them dried back to a reddish-brown. Others, like these, dried a bright red.

I like the intricate wrinkling of the berry skin that developed as the moisture receded from the berry's innards.

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