Philippe: I'm actually wondering what kind of balcony view you'd get living there. Makes you wonder what the developers were thinking.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Trying to get warm
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Fire
DSC_8820
Originally uploaded by amkb
Anna: This is one of a series of photos I got of a fire a block up from our place. The rest can be seen at a set I made on my flickr account. These photos are the jpgs straight from my camera. They're a fraction of the file size of the RAW images, but they're untouched and full size. I didn't even stop to get rid of the crud that blew onto my lens.
As I write this, the building is still burning, but under control. I counted at least 6, possibly 7, fire trucks, including 2 cranes. There were also various support vehicles I didn't even try to count.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Mystery Spheres solution
Time for an answer to the last mystery photo posted. I'm not sure, but I think CLarochelle got it - or at least something very much like it. Her answer was water beads from an aromatic diffuser.
What I had weren't sold as part of an aromatic diffuser, but it does give me ideas! Here's another look...
The actual substance is sodium polyacrylate, and they were sold at Micheals as Water Jewels. They're the same as the irregularly shaped crystals sold as a soil-free growth medium. On the packet they came in, suggested useages were for flower arrangements and house plants, as candle holders, or just for decoration.
The above photo was meant to be a fully hydrated pellet next to some dry ones, but in the time it took to get the photo, the little ones were already starting to absorb moisture from the hydrated on.
Of course, we just had to see what they looked like on the inside. *L*
They came as colourless pellets, but I added a few drops of green food colouring to them after they had fully hydrated, and I saw that I'd put in too much water for the amount of pellets. One package of pellets is supposed to be able to absorb 1 gallon of water. We only used 1/2 - 3/4 teaspoon and it's sitting in a little rose bowl I've got. We're waiting to see how long it takes to dry out. We've also discovered it's almost impossible to walk past the bowl and resist running our fingers through the stuff. *L*
What I had weren't sold as part of an aromatic diffuser, but it does give me ideas! Here's another look...
The actual substance is sodium polyacrylate, and they were sold at Micheals as Water Jewels. They're the same as the irregularly shaped crystals sold as a soil-free growth medium. On the packet they came in, suggested useages were for flower arrangements and house plants, as candle holders, or just for decoration.
The above photo was meant to be a fully hydrated pellet next to some dry ones, but in the time it took to get the photo, the little ones were already starting to absorb moisture from the hydrated on.
Of course, we just had to see what they looked like on the inside. *L*
They came as colourless pellets, but I added a few drops of green food colouring to them after they had fully hydrated, and I saw that I'd put in too much water for the amount of pellets. One package of pellets is supposed to be able to absorb 1 gallon of water. We only used 1/2 - 3/4 teaspoon and it's sitting in a little rose bowl I've got. We're waiting to see how long it takes to dry out. We've also discovered it's almost impossible to walk past the bowl and resist running our fingers through the stuff. *L*
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Picking up the camera
Anna: The following photos were taken by Philippe. He hasn't been taking photos very often lately, so he was looking for a reason to pick up the camera. :-D
This photo was an accident, really. He forgot to turn on the off shoe flash, so it ended up being a long exposure. With no tripod and shakey hands.
The end result turned out to be far more interesting than the clear photos taken afterwards. This photo is completely unadjusted, except for resizing.
Here we have a fuzzy looking baby snail. I cropped it rather tightly, mostly because it happened to be crawling over a piece of ... er... pleco poo. Taken using the macro lens and the off shoe flash. The snail is less than 1/4 of an inch long.
I have no idea what the orange bits are. We can't actually see them normally. Amazing what can be seen when using a macro lens.
At most, we've counted 18 baby snails, though there's no guarentee that there still is that many. They finally started hatching from one of the egg clusters on the underside of the lid, after I happened to move the light to a different position. I guess the extra warmth did it. The egg cluster than was being laid in this photo, however, fell into the water some time yesterday evening. I have no idea how long it was in the water before I spotted it, and decided against trying to fish it out of our really deep tank. It's still bobbing around on the bottom. At the moment, there are still 3 egg clusters in place. The very first one laid is as unchanged as ever. The second one, I can barely see way in the back, under where the filter is hung. It may have actually had some eggs hatched, but I can't see it well enough to say for sure. There's one left on the underside of the lid, and a few of those have hatched, though not all survived. I can still see some that hatched but never dropped into the water, dangling from the bottom of the cluster.
The babies are in a wide range of sizes, and one's grown amazingly quickly. They seem to hide in the gravel a lot, but they also like to go into the fake rock cavern and inside the skull we've got, so I doubt we ever see all of them at once. We'll see how many survive to get big enough to give away.
Our tank sure is clean, though.
This photo was an accident, really. He forgot to turn on the off shoe flash, so it ended up being a long exposure. With no tripod and shakey hands.
The end result turned out to be far more interesting than the clear photos taken afterwards. This photo is completely unadjusted, except for resizing.
Here we have a fuzzy looking baby snail. I cropped it rather tightly, mostly because it happened to be crawling over a piece of ... er... pleco poo. Taken using the macro lens and the off shoe flash. The snail is less than 1/4 of an inch long.
I have no idea what the orange bits are. We can't actually see them normally. Amazing what can be seen when using a macro lens.
At most, we've counted 18 baby snails, though there's no guarentee that there still is that many. They finally started hatching from one of the egg clusters on the underside of the lid, after I happened to move the light to a different position. I guess the extra warmth did it. The egg cluster than was being laid in this photo, however, fell into the water some time yesterday evening. I have no idea how long it was in the water before I spotted it, and decided against trying to fish it out of our really deep tank. It's still bobbing around on the bottom. At the moment, there are still 3 egg clusters in place. The very first one laid is as unchanged as ever. The second one, I can barely see way in the back, under where the filter is hung. It may have actually had some eggs hatched, but I can't see it well enough to say for sure. There's one left on the underside of the lid, and a few of those have hatched, though not all survived. I can still see some that hatched but never dropped into the water, dangling from the bottom of the cluster.
The babies are in a wide range of sizes, and one's grown amazingly quickly. They seem to hide in the gravel a lot, but they also like to go into the fake rock cavern and inside the skull we've got, so I doubt we ever see all of them at once. We'll see how many survive to get big enough to give away.
Our tank sure is clean, though.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Mystery spheres
DSC_4829-50%
Originally uploaded by amkb
Anna: Can you guess what these are? This was taken with the macro lens and they are about a centimeter across.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Ah, the wonders of nature...
DSC_8504crop
Originally uploaded by amkb
Anna: ... and the joys of mollusk reproduction.
This morning I noticed one of our 2 aquarium snails out of the water again. Typically, this means eggs. For the first time, though, it was right under where the lid opens, and we could see what actually happens! Out came the tripod, and I took photos using both the 90mm macro lens and my usual 18-55mm lens. I even set up the video camera for a while, but I have to figure out how to modify it into something shorter that I can upload.
In this photo, you can see a new egg that has just emerged from under the shell. Undulating muscle then guide the egg up the snail's body, just under the ... skin? ... before laying it into the cluster.
This is the 6th batch of eggs the snails have laid since we got them (one of the clusters fell off from the underside of the lid, though). From what I've read, they take 2-4 weeks to hatch. At the time of this writing, 2 clusters have reached the 4 weeks mark. So far, we've had a successful hatching rate of 0%.
Which may well be a good thing!
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