Mostly about color

Driving along Balcones Woods Dr. on May 30th I pulled over, as I’d done several times in recent years, by a house with wildflowers growing along the street and in the front yard. What particularly drew my attention was several flowering Ipomopsis rubra plants, known as standing cypress or Texas plume. Along with photographs taken at small apertures to keep as many things sharp as possible, I experimented with broad apertures for shallow depth of field. In this view I aimed down and managed to line up a standing cypress flower with a firewheel (Gaillardia pulchella) on the ground below it. I ended up with a portrait as saturated in color as it was soft in details, with just a few key details in focus.

 

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“California Court Rules That Bees Are Fish”

You’ll be forgiven for assuming that headline comes from a satirical publication like The Babylon Bee or The Onion. It doesn’t. It’s a headline from Reason, where you can read the full story. Heck, in a semantic world where people with male genitalia command us to unqualifiedly consider them women and where equity means the unequal treatment of people, then of course bees are fish. Just like I’m an airplane.

  

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman