Art – Page 12 – Ellis Hollow

April bloom day scans

So my old scanner is unusable because our last Windows XP laptop bit the dust and you can’t get drives for this circa Y2K scanner for Windows 7. But I scored a cast-off scanner at work that will run with 7, but spent all morning trying to clean the platen glass (every household spray, mineral spirits, acetone, plutonium) and the glass is still streaky. Oh well. Don’t have $2,500 for the scanner I want. Too cheap to spend $60 for something that would work OK. Guess I’ll have to start doing more camera work.

Despite all that, this one didn’t turn out too bad: A selection of spring ephemerals that I’d have gotten really muddy trying to shoot in situ:

And some fuzzy hellebores, which are much more attractive in person.

Lawn and garden tips …

…from ExxonMobil and Monsanto, via Comics section at DailyKos.

Larger version available via this page.

February bloom day scans: Cyclamen and pelargonium

Yes. I know it’s March already. (Though you wouldn’t know it by looking outside.) I had these scans ready to go a couple days after bloom day, but never found time to get them online until now. Maybe a change in the weather will bring on some ephemerals for March bloom day. But I’m not holding my breath.

‘Planet’ fiddling

Had a few minutes on Friday to take a quick visit to the gallery at Mann Library to check out the Planet Cornell exhibit. The exhibit features works by photo wizards Kent Loeffler (the photographer upstairs for the Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, see his work here and here) and Claire Smith, where they manipulate panoramic images into free floating spherical worlds. (View some of Kent’s planets here.)

The process is relatively easy. (Here are the directions.) But obviously, I need some practice:

The 360 panorama of Minns Garden:

‘Planet’ with sky to center.

‘Planet’ with sky to the edges.

Think I need to stitch in more sky to make it work, which I’m not sure I can do in PhotoShop. I also fiddled with an old panorama (though not 360) of Fred running through the snow:

See also the post below with a pelargonium planet.

Pelargonium

I did finally find time to do some scans this weekend, but haven’t had time to process them. In the meantime, here are some manipulations from an older scan. (They’re blooming like crazy in the cold bedroom now):

Four square:

Kaleidoscope:

‘Planet’

The original scan from November 2011.