Garden 28-29 July 2014

 Cosmos, Sara's plot

 Sunflower to be

Lizzy girl action

tidied and pruned front orchard

The garden hired a local tree pruner to begin cleaning up our trees, he did a really nice job, and left us with some beautiful firewood, too.

almond tree looking spiffy

Random Food Pic

Banana Splits

Ellison Owl

baby great horned owl

Road Food

yet another one of those stupid lists (sandwiches from each of the 50 states), but some of the sandwiches on it look good. wyoming = buffalo reuben. alabama, alaska, arizona all look good, and some of the midwest looks interesting nebraska, oklahoma, south dakota.

Nice Timelapse

Western Timescapes by John Shellington Full size. The Arches and Bryce ones are pretty epic. The one of Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado took my breath away. music is meh, turn the volume down...

Nikon PB-4 Bellows

Got it on ebay. I really want the 85mm PC, but this is a starting point to make sure I like the movements. Basically these allow you to tilt the lens up/down or swing it left/right, or shift it up/down/left/right. What these movements do is change the focus plane, so you can either get alot more or alot less in focus. It works cause the lens itself is larger than a normal 35mm lens and you only access part of the glass. Anyway, some images:

 the standard thing to do is shoot it normal, then tilted down and up to show differences, so here's the standard comparison...

 Tilted right, neutral, then tilted left. One thing about the PB-4 is it doesn't have a scale on it so you can't tell how far you're tilting/swinging. In this case it seems like I swung it more than in the first set cause the band of focus is really narrow in the 3rd image.

 some nice one off shots

 Tilted up, tilted down, neutral

nice one off again

D600 with PB-4 tilted down with Bellows 105mm. The bellows are largely compressed and the focusing rail is behind the camera/lens

Thai Cabbage Salad

 really really damn good. recipe here (she has an interesting, NW, mostly gardening blog). we used leftover BBQ chicken instead of beef, whatevs...