365 / 40 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Editors note: This is Jayme's hairy leg, not Lisa's.

So, remember how I mentioned in yesterday's photo that I'm a huge fan of passion flowers/passion vines/passion fruit? Well, one aspect of growing passiflora is the fact that several species of butterfly lay their eggs on it, and their larvae eat the passion vines as their only food source. Passiflora generate a natural form of cyanide in their foliage as a protection against being eaten, but these caterpillars have evolved to absorb that poison and use it as a defense mechanism to prevent them from being eaten. They've got little black spines all over their orange bodies to drive the point home. Normally, they're harmless. Just brushing or touching one isn't harmful (unlike bushing an asp/puss caterpillar, which is excruciating). However, if you happen to bump into a fritillary caterpillar with any force, and those spines are actually jammed into the skin, well, the effect is not pleasant. This is my leg today, after an encounter with a caterpillar two days ago. You can still make out the puncture marks where the individual spines impaled me. So let me serve as a lesson to you: Don't try this at home!

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 39 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Yesterday, after sorting through the issues surrounding my eldest daughter beating up a misogynistic boy (see previous 365 post by Lisa) I went outside to bring in several passion flower vines. Passion flowers are something of a hobby of mine, and most around the Blaschke house are native or hardy species that live in-ground throughout the year. But I have several that are cold-sensitive. Two are passiflora edulis the tropical species grown commercially that passion fruit juice and fresh passion fruit come from. They'd grown up into a large pomegranate bush on the side of our house, and I had to prune the passis back to get them untangled. As I was doing this, the big, green fruit in the image below dropped to the ground. A nice, fat, passion fruit. I hadn't realized any of the sparse flowers that bloomed this year were pollinated. It's a shame, because given a few more weeks, this one would turn deep purple and be delicious. As it is, the fruit is unripe and actually poisonous. Then, I happened by the pecan tree in our front yard, where another passion vine grows. This one, "Incense," is a hybrid that stays out all year. Despite several attempts to hand-pollinate it over the years, the few fruit it's produced have been uniformly hollow and small. But I found this small yellow fruit lying on the grass, and it felt unusually heavy. I tore it open to find it full of seeds. I figure the Edulis provided the pollen, rather than one of the other species (as they haven't flowered much this fall). I'll pot the seeds to see if any interesting hybrids sprout.

Late-season passion fruit are something of a tease. Next year, though, I expect them to produce fruit all summer long.

Camera: Canon 5D mark III
Lens: Canon EF 24-70mm 2.8 L

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 38 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Another Picture of the Day, another photo of a lens. This is the Tamron 28-75mm 2.8 lens that Lisa purchased when she made the decision to start photographing weddings. It's proven to be a workhorse for us over the years, and is now the lens that spends the most time on my (Jayme) camera since Lisa's traded up to the Canon EF 24-70mm 2.8 L. The Tammy is an extremely sharp and light lens, and one of the best cost-per-performance lenses we've got. As you can see in the photo, it's not anywhere near mint condition. It's been used, and used a lot. There are a lot of miles racked up on this one, and a lot more to go.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 50mm 1.8 mark I

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 37 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

There's a little cactus in a broken pot sitting on our front porch. It was a gift from someone in the family to someone else quite a few years ago. Several other ornamental cactus with it have since died, but this one soldiers on. Today I noticed a tiny flash of color--on closer examination, I discovered it blooming. I felt that kind of perseverance deserved a Picture of the Day spotlight.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 36 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

The holidays are here in full force, with decorations hither and yon. The traffic circle in downtown New Braunfels is a veritable blaze of lights, so last night I thought I'd try for some long-exposure shots of traffic to get some nifty light trails. Naturally, as soon as I set up, the traffic flow slowed to a trickle. I spent an hour there, camped out on the island, taking a whole lot of photos of nothing. Eventually I got a few decent shots and was able to stack this image. Once I broke down my tripod and packed away my camera, however, it was like the Daytona 500 broke out: I had to wait almost five minutes before a break in the traffic allowed me to escape the traffic island, and as I reached my car, a horse-drawn carriage decked out with thousands of blue-and-white twinkle lights showed up to make leisurly loops around the traffic circle. I will not share the words I used at the time to express my feelings on the matter, but I'm sure you can come up with a general approximation on your own.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Opteka 6.5mm 3.5 fisheye II

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 35 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Confession time: My interest in photography began with the stars. I've been a nut for space for as long as I can remember, and shortly after I bought my first telescope at the age of 13 (which I still have) I also ponied up some of my hard-earned lawn mowing money to buy a camera adapter for the family's Canon AE-1 so I could shoot through-the-telescope astro photos (I still have that adapter, by the way).

There was just one problem... I was terrible at astrophotography. This was back in the days of film, mind you, so it was very challenging. Add to that the fact that I had no clue about photography, and it's no surprise I burned through a whole lot of film rolls to get exactly zero good images. Fast forward to today. I've learned (with Lisa's help and patience) a great deal about photography. Digital makes astrophotography infinitely easier. Seriously. Unfortunately, despite all that, I still stink at astrophotography, the one photographic discipline I really, really want to be great at. Part of that stems from equipment problems--I've only got a primitive, 30-plus year old clock motor on my telescope mount for tracking, which limits deep sky and long-exposure images. My high-quality telescope mirror got damaged by a company I'd sent it off to for resurfacing, and the replacement mirror I have is not quite as good. But mostly the fault lies with me. I don't have the instincts for it--every little aspect I have to struggle with, while I've seen other comparable amateur astronomers take jaw-dropping images their first night out. Someday I'll get it, but it may take a while. Until then, here's my Picture of the Day for today, a series of stacked images of the constellation Orion taken between midnight and 1 a.m. this morning. And yes, I am indeed tired today.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 50mm 1.8 mark I

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 34 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

There is a field of mesquite trees I pass to and from work every day, one which I love very much. I've photographed it before. Sometime last week I missed photographing an incredible, fiery sunset with those striking trees in the foreground because I had a pressing engagement to get to. I promised myself that if I saw another potentially spectacular sunset, I would make the time to shoot it. Well, this evening's sunset held potential. Alas, it didn't live up to that potential, at least not for the widefield shot I was hoping for. On a whim, I ran back to my car and grabbed the FD 500mm reflex lens, as I had a hunch that lens would frame this particular mesquite tree perfectly. Turns out my instincts nailed it. And there will be other sunsets for the rest of the trees...

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon FD 500mm 8.0 reflex

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 33 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Today turned out to be dreary and overcast for the most part, a little drizzle here, a little fog there. Nothing dramatic, weather-wise. I hadn't used Lisa's manual fisheye lens to any real extent--she's kept a pretty short leash on it--so I borrowed it and stuck it in my camera bag, planning to experiment with it a bit if the opportunity arose. Opportunity presented itself in the form of a train parked on a railroad bridge spanning the Blanco River. The colors, lines and textures appealed to me, so I squeezed off a few shots before getting out of there before the train decided to start moving.

Thoughts on the lens: It's a decent buy for the price, and this newer version, with the removable lens hood, is preferable to the original with the fixed lens hood. Corners were definitely cut, though, to keep the price down--in addition to having manual focus and aperture, the aperture ring doesn't even have a setting for f/4. Believe it or not, it skips from f/3.5 right to f/5.6. Bizarre. The stated focal length of 6.5mm is bogus as well: I'd say it's closer to 8mm, as the wide field views it gives aren't that much more expansive than my EF-S 10-22 (although the fisheye distortion is obviously more pronounced). Finally, I noticed some significant chromatic aberration in the images, which is not unexpected with an inexpensive lens like this. Fortunately, CA can be corrected to a great extent in Photoshop.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Opteka 6.5mm 3.5 fisheye II

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 32 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

I've always liked pomegranates. The seedy arils make great tart/sweet additions to breakfast cereal, and are a bright, fruity addition to countless recipes. Plus, they're pretty good to snack on straight. But I think what appeals to me most is the fact that when you crack one open, it's like a fruity geode, filled with glittery, juice-filled gems. What's not to like?

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 31 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

I wasn't sure what I'd do for today's Picture of the Day after my somewhat elaborate concept photo from yesterday. But then I noticed this leaf-footed bug resting calmly on the car's front windshield, and I knew I had to try a macro shot. It's not often the opportunity to photograph an insect from underneath presents itself--and even rarer for our cars' windshields to be clean enough to shoot through!

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 30 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

In recent months there's been a meme circulating around Facebook and elsewhere, "How I see me/How others see me." I suppose that's the underlying theme for today's Picture of the Day. I call it "Self-Portrait: Guy With Camera."

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm 2.8

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 29 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Went for a little walk on my lunch break today, scouting out Blanco Shoals Natural Area in San Marcos for possible future photo shoots. As undeveloped park land, it's a little confusing getting around and knowing where the boundaries are. There are some old, overgrown roads that offer a rough guide for the hiker, but beyond that you're on your own. There are only a couple access points to the Blanco River--and most of the time it's not even visible, which is surprising considering that it borders the length of the park. Today's Photo of the Day is from the south end of the park, looking north east. I thought it would make a good false-color infrared scene, and it looks as if I was right.

Camera: Canon XTi/400D 720nm infrared converted
Lens: Canon EF-S 10-22mm

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 28 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

How about a little local flavor for today's 365 photo? Here is the legendary live music venue Gruene Hall, smack dab in the middle of downtown Gruene, Texas. They've decked it out for the holidays with a wreath right there amidst the famed logo.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF-S 10-22mm

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 27 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

I (Jayme) spent today home sick, trying to sleep off sinus congestion and a nasty sore throat. I'm better now, thanks. But hovering in the house all day put a crimp in my 365 photo acquisition. I suspect "pictures of the lenses I use" will become my go-to feature when I don't have anything else better to run, but hey, a least you folks get to see the cool toys Lisa and I play with. This here is a personal favorite of mine: The Canon EF 50mm 1.8 mark I. The (good) optics are the same as the current EF 50mm 1.8 mark II lens available for around $120, but the build quality of the lens is much better. I believe the autofocus in the older model lens is slightly faster and more accurate, but more importantly, it has a easy-to-use manual focus ring, which is something the newer version can't claim. I bought this lens used back when I first started getting serious about infrared photography. Ever since my Rebel XTi was converted to full-time infrared, it's become my absolute favorite go-to lens for portraits. From my vantage point, it's an even better performer in infrared than in visible light. It's a workhorse, and one of the oldest EF lenses Canon ever produced: Judging from the serial number on it, it rolled out of the factory a month or so before the first EOS cameras became available for sale in the U.S. That makes it at least 25 years old, and still earning it's keep.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm 2.8

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 26 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Through a series of unfortunate events which I'll not bore you with, I spent today in Cuero, banging my head into a proverbial wall. On the way home, my Picture Of The Day was the furthest thing from my mind. So much so that when I drove past the woman parked on the side of the road taking pictures of buffalo grazing in the nearby pasture, the only thing that crossed my mind was, "She's got a nice lens. That looks like the Canon EF 70-200 f/4 L." About a mile later, the lightbulb went off in my head, and I turned around to get today's shot.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon FD 500mm f/8 reflex

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 25 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

I love the very idea of Texas black walnuts. Yes, they're good to eat, but they've never been a popular home orchard or commercial crop simply because they're too darn hard to get at! They've got one of the thickest shells of any nut in the natural world, and even squirrels have to put in quite a bit of effort to gnaw through all that hard wood armor. But they're lovely trees, and I will always find them fascinating.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 24 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

So with the Thanksgiving holiday and all, a craving for stuffed acorn squash came over me (Lisa's not such a big fan of the winter squashes, but hey, she wasn't cooking dinner, I was). I made this a few times years ago, until I accidentally burned them one meal, and haven't fixed the dish since. In fact, I lost the recipe. But thanks to the miracle of the interwebz, I poked around and found a couple of appealing vegetarian recipes (since Monkey Girl doesn't do the meat thing), combined the most likely elements of them and produced a new and original stuffed acorn squash recipe, with portabella mushrooms, wild rice, quinoa, spinach, feta cheese and some other stuff. The verdict? Not bad. There are some things I'd do differently next time, and a few things to add to bring out the flavors more, but all in all it's a dish I'll certainly revisit in the future.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm 2.8

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 23 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Whew! Shooting a wedding makes it quite a challenge to get in a 365 photo project shot. You just get all photographed out. "But wait," you might say. "If you were shooing a wedding, can't you just use one of those photos?" Ah, but the whole point of the 365 challenge was to start taking photos that weren't work-related. In the rules Lisa laid down on Day One, neither of us can use images from a paid photo session. Which mean no weddings (although, technically, I could probably use the shots I took since Lisa's pretty chintzy when it comes to paying me--don't tell her I said that, okay?).

In any event, I was feeling pretty uninspired. Some hay bale-by-moonlighet shots I tried didn't come out at all, and a few other options I rushed and wasn't satisfied with. We'll try those again at a later date. Tonight, boring though it may be, my 365 image is the view down my Newtonian telescope's optical tube. I'll try to do better tomorrow. Promise.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm 2.8

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 22 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

Today we went to Columbus to celebrate a belated Thanksgiving with my Mom and brother Chris. Such are the compromises you make when you've got two sets of relatives to juggle and keep happy. Today was also Monkey Girl's 14th birthday, which Lisa so eloquently covered in her preceding post.

Visiting Columbus is always bittersweet for me, because it drives home the fact that my happy childhood memories have been supplanted by family conflict. The old homestead has been neglected as an outgrowth of this, and while Chris does his best to fix and maintain what he can, it's more than one person (or really, several people) can handle. The fact that he lives in Waco and I live in New Braunfels doesn't help matters any. Today, he and I took a walk in the sprawling back yard, figuring out out to protect the fig trees (which I'd planted for Mom last year) from deer, and what to do with some of the old outbuildings that have fallen into serious disrepair. As we walked under the pecan trees our Dad had planted 40-something years before, I stopped occasionally to pick up a pecan. Most were bad, infected with pecan scab disease. I could tell by whether they'd separated from the husk, and also by weight. Rotten pecans are very light. Almost all the hybrid pecans Dad had planted were bad, vulnerable to the disease without regular spraying. The one native in the back yard, though, had produced many, many good nuts. The downside was these nuts were quite small compared to the others. I did find a few good hybrids, but many more natives. I thought back to our days as kids, picking up so many pecans we couldn't carry them all, so many big nuts that even the dogs would happily crunch the shells to eat the sweet meat inside. It made me think about how life is a series of trade-offs, be it fat delicate nuts or small, hardy ones; or happy childhood memories contrasted to melancholy adult reality. The sum of these trade-offs, for good or ill, equals the human condition.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

365 / 21 {Texas 365 photo challenge}

For Thanksgiving, as we do every year, we visited relatives in the piney woods outside of Bastrop. Fortunately, this part of the county was spared from the wildfires that caused so much damage last year, so we're certainly thankful for that on this holiday. Following a magnificent dinner put together by my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and assorted pot-luck contributions from friends-and-relations, my little boy and I took a nature hike through the woods. He found a centipede. And a velvet ant. And some grasshoppers. And I also let him take pictures of many of these things with my camera. I, on the other hand, took this one as a memento of our little adventure together.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF-S 10-22mm

Lisa On Location Photography