What is this?

I’m guessing you’ll have no idea what this is. If you’re up for a challenge, pause for a bit to contemplate the photograph and try to figure out what you’re seeing, then continue reading below for an explanation. Of course you’re welcome to tell us what you imagined this abstract picture shows.

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On April 25th I found that some rain-lilies (Zephyranthes drummondii) in my neighborhood had gotten well past the flowering stage and had produced seed capsules, so I set about photographing a few of them. Rain-lily leaves are typically only a third of an inch wide yet can grow to 12 inches long. Given those dimensions, the leaves usually end up lying on the ground, but I noticed that one rain-lily leaf had draped itself over a prickly pear cactus pad, with the result that the leaf’s distal portion was suspended in the air. I conceived the idea of taking pictures tip-on, so to speak, even as a bit of breeze complicated my task by causing the leaf to move somewhat. This minimalist portrait with almost nothing in focus is one result of my experiments. Prickly pear cactus buds on an adjacent pad became the orange orbs you see at the lower right.

© 2021 Steven Schwartzman

Making the most of a least daisy

The previous post showed you a densely mixed colony of four-nerve daisies and much smaller least daisies (Chaetopappa bellidifolia), whose flower heads are maybe only a fourth of an inch (6mm) across. While I was on the east side of Yaupon Dr. on April 23rd I found a least daisy rising a little above a horizontal spiderweb that lay close to the ground and sparkled with light reflected from morning dew. Those reflections played through the elements in my lens and in so doing created the unusual nonagon-strewn portrait you see here.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Etwas anderes

This post’s title, which is something different because it’s in German, means “something different.” That applies to the post’s photograph, which is also something different in these pages because it doesn’t show nature (at least not unless you consider geometry a part of nature). Oh well, I hope you won’t mind if once in a while I jump out of my box. The subject, which I photographed with an iPhone at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan on May 29th, is the Oculus, designed by Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Bug nymph on four-nerve daisy

In contrast to the willful four-nerve daisy flower head (Tetraneuris linearifolia) you saw last time, the flatness of this one that I found on the same April 1st outing had me aiming straight down at it.

You’ll remember that each “petal” of a daisy is actually an independent flower known as a ray flower. The rays (14 in this case) ray-diate out from the flower head’s center, which is made up of many smaller individual flowers of a different type, known as disk flowers. It’s common in daisies for the disk flowers to form overlapping spirals, some of which go out from the center in a clockwise sense, and others in a counter-clockwise sense. If you count the number of disk-flower spirals in each direction, you typically get consecutive Fibonacci numbers. There’s a confirmation of that in the following enlargements of this four-nerve daisy’s disk. Go ahead, count the number of spirals going each way and you’ll see:

In the unlikely event that anyone ever asks you if daisies know how to count, you can confidently and Fibonaccily say yes.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

A different metamorphosis

This morning I received a message from Judy Baumann saying she’d finished a quilt based on a monarch butterfly photograph that appeared here last fall and that you see repeated above. My reaction to Judy’s quilt was: Geometry meets lepidoptery. To see that happy geometric metamorphosis, click here and then on the picture of the quilt to enlarge it. Nice going, Judy.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Hooker’s mountain daisy

At the Orokonui Ecosanctuary northeast of Dunedin on February 27th we saw some Hooker’s mountain daisies (Celmisia hookeri), a species classified as being at risk. Notice the white-margined leaves.

As with many other plants in the sunflower family, this one’s flower heads give way to puffball-type seed heads.

After the seeds fall away, the remains are rather sculptural:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Spider and polygons in the morning

Another thing I saw on the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, on June 20 was this tiny spider, the main part of which my 100mm macro lens resolved quite nicely. The morning sun in front of me lit up some strands of silk in the web while also causing the lens to create polygonal artifacts of light. Those nonagons have better definition than the red ones I showed you in 2013.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Milkweed flower globe

The last thing I’ll show in this series from my visit to the Doeskin Ranch in Burnet County on April 8 is a flower globe of antelope-horns milkweed, Asclepias asperula, the most common milkweed species in central Texas.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman