David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of food from around the world
I was in California to visit my team one final time before the South San Francisco SIRNA site shut down. We went out to lunch at Ambers, an Indian Restaurant. I took a picture of my team in front of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, just outside of the restaurant. I wished everyone luck in their future endeavors.
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This tree fungus was not staying still long enough to keep in focus. I used a feature in Capture One Pro where I selected a color, and then reduced the saturation for the inverse colors (thus B&W + one color). We will see if the Blob is blocking my driveway tomorrow morning.
Life and Death in Nature. It was a great day to photograph nature at the Sourland Mountain Preserve. Many Butterflies, Clearwing Hummingbird Moths, Dragonflies,Summertime Nature in New Jersey: Sourland Mountain Preserve. Robberflies, and a few Praying Mantis carnivores. I went in with two cameras, a D3s camera with a 300 mm f/2.8 VR with an TC-E III 20 teleconverter and a D3x camera with a 105 mm f/2.8 VR macro. Humidity was high, and I had to spend the first 15 minutes equilibrating the lenses so they were not fogged. The first place I went to was the location I observed a Praying Mantis eating a Clearwing Hummingbird Moth yesterday. The first image is a Black Swollowtail Butterfly on a Thistle bloom. Soon thereafter a Clearwing Hummingbird Moth started checking out the Thistle blooms. DANGER! DANGER! It didn’t see the Praying Mantis. Minutes later the moth was breakfast for the Praying Mantis. Later, another Black Swollowtail Butterfly was breakfast to a brown Praying Mantis.
I was on the way to the grocery store and took the following images from my car. It appears that the young buck is either trying to be camouflaged or is just transporting weed seeds.
For the last several years I have not been keeping a kitchen garden for a combination of reasons — mainly too many deer and too much work or photography related travel during the summer. This year I already used much of my vacation for my photography trips to Patagonia and then Central America so I am home this summer. I didn’t get the garden ready during the spring so didn’t expect to be doing any gardening again this summer. However, a few weeks ago one of my neighbors told me that he had excess tomato plants that he didn’t have room for. I decided to try to grow them on my deck (away from the deer) in some small high density self watering containers and self watering container soil (obtained, but not used several years ago from Gardener Supply Company). Yesterday I took images of some of the first tomato flowers, and some green tomatoes. As long as the critters stay away, I should have some fresh tomatoes soon. Although the containers are supposed to be “self watering” with the excess heat we have been going through, I have been watering each container with about 2 gallons of water each day.
