More 2010 Wildflowers

As promised, here are some more wildflower pictures taken Sunday at Wind Wolves Preserve. Remember you can click on any picture to enlarge it and see the detail better.

I like this picture because it has several different colors in it. Obviously you can see the bright yellow splashes in the middle and above that the orange-red of the fiddlenecks. If you look closely you'll see purplish-red fading into the blue that surrounds the yellow. Then way in the back you can see a portion of the valley and in the far smog shrouded distance a mountain with some snow on it.

This is one of my favorites just because.

I thought this tree with mistletoe was interesting.

I noticed I took this picture in almost the exact same spot as one from last year. Click here and go to the seventh picture down. I'm not even sure why I took this?

When we first saw this view we thought it was something being cultivated in a farmers field, but then we realized it was all wildflowers.

The bright yellow splashes on the hillsides really intrigued me so I had to get closer to see exactly what they were.

And finally a couple of pictures taken on our return home. We passed an orchard where this fruit tree still had quite a few blossoms left (most of them had already lost most of their blooms).

This is about 10 miles east of Arvin. I love how the lupine lines the roadside. The white flowers almost look like snow patches.

Even though there are no people in these pictures let me assure you there were people everywhere stopping to take pictures. The parking lot at Wind Wolves was totally full--I've never seen more than four cars there before. For the second picture above there were people walking all over that field. When I took that picture I waited a few moments for one small group of people to walk out of the frame before I clicked the picture and before another group of people walked into the shot. Even on our roundabout trip home through Arvin there were cars stopped in all the turn outs. My husband and I were joking about what an inadequate photographer I am because I was about the only one who didn't have a tripod with me!

Well, I think my photos still turned out quite nicely, if I say so myself! I hope you enjoy them too!

Wind Wolves, March 29, 2009, Part 2

Today continues yesterday's day of photos from the Wind Wolves Preserve.

Starting off there were a lot of these brown beetles everywhere doing their best to help with the pollination.

If you look carefully at this picture you'll see my least favorite bug of all, an arachnid. This one has a fairly large body with very long, very thin legs. Ech!!!!

Here's a not very good picture of a ground squirrel.

And speaking of not very good pictures here is a King Bird, probably Western or Cassin's.

And speaking of birds, this is a really good shot of a Western Meadow Lark. This bird was cooperating with me by not moving a lot, which is why the picture turned out better than the other bird.

And finally here are a few pictures of the area in general, some showing better color from the wildflowers than others. You can almost get an idea of how it might look if you were to be there at the peak wildflower time.

Right now everything is still fairly green. It won't be long before it all turns brown though. I'll have to try and remember to get out there earlier next year.

Wind Wolves, March 29, 2009, Part 1

My husband was eager to get out of the house yesterday, and I will do anything to get out of doing housework (in particular the laundry), so we packed up my camera and took a drive. It's a little late in the season for the wildflowers but we decided to take a chance and we headed out for the Wind Wolves Preserve.

Well, word must be getting out about one of our favorite "secret" retreats. Normally we'll be the only car there, or there will be no more than two others. Yesterday there were at least 15 other cars parked in the lot. In one way that's a little disappointing, but in another I guess it's a good thing for the Conservancy. I still can't help not liking it though. Yes, I'm a little selfish like that.

Anyway it was obvious that we missed the main wildflower display but we were fortunate enough that there were still quite a few around. Enough so that I took about 40 pictures! I tried picking out the better shots and I'm going to post some today and the rest tomorrow.

I put the name of the flowers where I knew them (or think I know them). As always, if anyone knows one that I don't please let me know so I can put the name to the flower.

One of my favorites, this is the Sky Lupine (lupinus nanus).

This, I believe, is Blue-Eyed Grass (sysyrinchium bellum).

Of course the Fiddleneck (amsinckia intermedia) was in abundance as usual.

Looking into a flower of the Fiddleneck.

This is one I haven't found the name for. It's some kind of what's commonly referred to as a "belly flower" because they are so tiny you really need to get down close to see them.

Here it is blown up. The flower is maybe about half the size of my pinkie fingernail.

Even the lichen patches on the rocks were colorful.

Here's another of my favorites, the poppy.

This is Purple Owl's Clover (castilleja exserta).
Here's another pretty lavender-blue flower that I can't identify.

And finally today's last rather faded flower. Try not to snicker too loudly. This is called a Blue Dick (dichelostemma capitatum). (Who comes up with some of these names!)

More tomorrow!

PS-I found a great website that lists the names of common western wildflowers. Go to www.westernwildflower.com . The plant index is on the left sidebar at the bottom. You can click on the name of the plant and it will show a picture. There are a bazillion listed plants and I didn't feel like going through each one right now to find the names of the flowers I didn't know. Feel free to do so yourself and then you can tell me what they are! ☺

Vote!

This was a picture from early last year. I've entered it in the Capital One Photo Contest and now it's time to vote. Oh, I know everybody thinks their kids/grandkids are the cutest. But mine really is!

Go here to vote. Remember you can vote five times a day!! ☺

Two Fun Photo Freebies

Last summer I was fooling around with my computer and I wanted to find something where I could make a mosaic using photos. In other words put a bunch of pictures together to make one photo. I didn't find what I was looking for at the time, but I did find a collage maker, which was fine by me too.

This is from Flickr and the cool thing is you don't have to a member (I'm not) in order to use this program. It's from the Flickr Big Huge Labs site. They have a lot of fun things to do with your photos.

The first thing I did was make a collage with the many baby pictures I have. The only bad part of this program is I had to upload each photo individually and after I was finished it turns out I used a couple of the photos more than once, and --my bad-- have a picture of Carli when she was a baby. Oh well, you can kind of turn it into a "Where's Waldo?" game.

One of the fun things you can do is make a stamp (not to be used in real life, of course).

I had fun with the "Warholizer" where you can create a photo a la Andy Warhol and change the colors.

Then there is the "Hockneyizer" where you can create photos in the style of David Hockney.

In the Hockneyizer you can make it with "polaroids", and even decide how many "prints" you want to use.

There are lots of other fun things you can do on this site, even some practical things like making CD cover art or calendars and so on. So go to the Big Huge Labs site and have fun with it!

This weekend I was looking for the site again to do something with my Christmas dog photos. Since I hadn't saved the site to my favorites I had to look for it again. Before I found it I found what I had been originally looking for last summer, the mosaic picture maker. What a difference six months makes! I don't know why I couldn't find anything back then but now all of a sudden a bunch of what I was looking for showed up.

Well, not exactly what I was looking for. What I wanted was another freebie, like the Big Huge Labs site. Most of what I found for the mosaic picture making were sites that you have to pay for. But I did finally find one that is right up my alley and it works great too. The best thing is it's a free download to your computer so you don't have to be on-line while you are playing with your photos (like the Flickr site). The only catch? When you post a photo or print it you must give credit to the creator, something I have no problem with.

It is the Andrea Mosaic program. It's really easy to use. You don't have to upload each photo one at a time (unless you really want to!). You can put the photos you want to use for a particular project into a single file and then upload that file in one fell swoop. For my two mosaic photos below I just used my whole "My Pictures" so the program had just over 2000 pictures to choose from. What I would like to do eventually is take just the dog photos to create a dog portrait, or just the baby/family pictures to create a baby portrait, etc, but I just haven't taken the time to separate them into their own files yet.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of Clyde (again) in the mosaic form.

And here's one of the baby.
See how fun that is?

And finally now the one of the dogs I wanted to do: three separate photos as one (this is using the Flickr site).

Have fun with your photos!

Foggy Fotos

Here's a couple of pictures I took in the fog.

Here's Clyde in the backyard. The light caught his eyes just right so he looks like a zombie dog.

Now check out the blown up version. It looks like his eyes are glowing outward.

And last night there was a big ring around the moon. It would probably have shown up better with a wide-angle lens and a photographer who knew what they were doing, but you can kind of see it here. In person it was a lot more impressive. I don't know if it's an old wives tale but I've always heard that a ring around the moon means a change in the weather. We'll see. The weather people are saying the temperature is supposed to drop and there are rumors of a big storm. I wouldn't mind that if we could have a fire on that day. The way things are going the next time we can have a fire won't be until Christmas, and that will be just to appease the people.

One last comment about the San Joaquin Valley APCD. It seems that we, at the end of the valley, are the ones getting punished for the bad air that floats down from the upper end and gets stuck in our pocket. Okay, 'nuff said.

Wow, how did this go from foggy fotos to ranting about the no-burn days!? I'm getting old and crotchety! And speaking of getting old...

We have several birthdays this month, with one just passed and two this weekend alone. Have fun everyone!

"Fixing" The Dog(s)

It's simply amazing what you can find when you play around with your computer.

Not long ago I was fooling around with my computer and found a program called Photoimpression 5. Apparently it came already loaded on the computer when I bought it and I just never payed it much mind. Probably because I already had the Nikon Picture Project that came with my Nikon camera.

Of course when I discovered the Photoimpression I had to play around with it to see what it could do. Much of it was the same as the Picture Project. But as I kept clicking on this and that button I found the Photoimpression had some features that the Picture Project didn't have.

Right now the thing I'm most excited about is the "cloning" button. Let me tell you why it makes me happy.

Remember this picture I took of Clyde for my little photography class?

It may not be very obvious here, but when the picture is blown up it shows a disturbing viewpoint of something... well, disturbing. Oh, I know it is all natural and all that but that doesn't mean I care to have it looking me straight in the eye, if you get my drift.

You see, I change the desktop picture on my computer quite often. When I get an interesting picture like this I like to post it for a few days. But this photo lasted less than a day on my desktop. I just couldn't handle it.

But when I found the "clone" feature of the Photoimpression program I played around with it and VOILA! I was able to "fix" the problem! Take a look at this picture and see what you think.

Now take another look at the first picture of this post. It's a portrait of the dogs out in the ponds from the "fox (hole) hunt". Of the three dogs, TWO of them had something unacceptable showing. But with my newly discovered cloning feature I was able to fix the problem. I bet if I hadn't told you it wouldn't have been noticed.

Hey, who needs Photoshop anyway!