At the Bowling Alley

Vending machines reflected in the mirrored ceiling decor at the UC Davis bowling alley earlier today.  I liked the stained glass effect created by the mirror panels.   I wish we discovered this bowling alley before we were getting ready to move, but we're making up for lost time. Today was our second time bowling this week.  It's a welcome break from all the pre-move work going on in the garage!   

Sundial

I guess it's just a matter of time of day and time of year, but the shadows lined up just right to make a little arrow pointing at 7 o'clock.  At least that's what it looks like to me.

June 23

So this is very cool.  It's called Titan Arum...this one is named "Ted the Titan", and it only blooms once every two years for 48hrs.  It started blooming today at the UC Davis greenhouse!  When it blooms it gives off a smell like rotting meat.  The smell wasn't as strong as I was expecting but it did sort of waft out a scent like the garbage needed to go out a day or two ago.  It turns out this scent helps it attract flies to pollinate it.  Weird.  Technically it's not a flower but an inflorescence...a huge leaf holding hundreds of tiny flowers.  As for the photo itself, I wish the photo included the top and bottom of the flower.  Also compositionally I wanted a photo with just the bloom, but I realize that makes it harder to tell its size.  You can see a little bit of someone's elbow poking in the right had side of the photo under the leaf, just to give and idea of the size.  Here's a link to the greenhouse website if you're interested in reading more about Ted: http://greenhouse.ucdavis.edu/conservatory/

April 4

So this is my attempt at "panning" to capture bike movement on campus here.  I've got this idea to capture the bike scene between classes, but I found out that I needed my shutter speed to be about 1/20 sec. and in order to do that I had to find a somewhat shady location to not bring in too much light, because all the main thoroughfares were too sunny.  But my idea is to capture a lot of bikes all at once.  If I try this again, it will be on a somewhat cloudy day or much later in the day.  I'd like to keep the slow shutter speed but capture a busier location.