The flower (Echinacea purpurea) looks a bit bedraggled, but the butterfly (Chlosyne nycteis) is in fine shape.
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Silvery Checkerspot on Purple Coneflower
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Fuligo septica
This colorful slime mold, Fuligo septica, is known to gardeners as the Dog Vomit Fungus, but it is not a fungus. Slime molds are fascinating beings more closely related to amoebas than to mushrooms, and you should really read up on them. For example, this species has a worldwide distribution, and Wikipedia helpfully informs us that “in Estonian mythology it was thought to be leftovers from kratt.” That, of course, tempts us to find out what a kratt is; it turns out to be “a creature formed from hay or of old household implements by its master, who then had to give the devil three drops of blood for the devil to bring life to the Kratt.” That in turn tempts Father Pitt to find out a lot more about Estonian mythology.
Father Pitt has tried to adjust the color to make the bright yellow as close as possible to what he actually saw, but some colors in nature are simply too vivid to reproduce accurately on your screen.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 (hacked).
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Red Spider
Having constructed her web, a beautiful red spider sits and waits and thinks, “If only I had a book to read…”
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Moon in the First Quarter
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In the Two-Color Forest
Another experiment with limited color. Old Pa Pitt enjoys all kinds of photographic experiments, but in this case he has a particular reason for presenting this picture this way: it was a photograph that could not be easily rescued in full color.
You may see the original color photo below if you really want to see it. Father Pitt will draw back the curtain for a moment and reveal the insignificant man with the levers and switches.
In spite of much manipulation, including a gradient filter applied in the GIMP, the highlights are still bleached out completely, making it look like a picture from a cheap cell phone rather than Pa Pitt’s treasured Olympus E-20n.
Full-color image. The upper part was darkened with a gradient filter, but the highlights are still blasted into pure white. Reducing the saturation made it look more artificial without making it look more attractive.
Reducing the saturation just made the picture look a bit unhealthy. But somehow imitation two-strip Technicolor made an attractive image. In the words of Michelangelo, go figure.
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Dragonfly
A dragonfly rests briefly before heading out on another hunting expedition.
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Mushrooms from Here and There
Mushrooms come in all colors, shapes, and sizes, and old Pa Pitt’s visitors seem to enjoy looking at them. For his part, Father Pitt enjoys finding them, so here are a few more pictures.
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Frog
This frog in the pond at the Homewood Cemetery is looking at us, and knows we are looking at it.Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Shelf Fungus
For no very good reason, Father Pitt decided to see what this picture of a log covered with little bracket fungi would look like if it had been printed with one of the limited-color processes sometimes used for books of popular science in the 1930s. There is actually a plugin for the GIMP that imitates two-color Technicolor, which suited his purposes well enough. What do you think? Would this not have made an admirable illustration in The Child’s Book of Wonders of the Fungus World?
Camera: Olympus E-20n.
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Tiny Mushrooms
There are mushrooms that decompose whole tree stumps, and there are humbler mushrooms whose job is to decompose twigs. Somebody has to do it.
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
