I went for a walk in the bosque this afternoon. Since I’ve working weekends and prepping the houses to be torn down I haven’t walked in the bosque since it was re-opened after being closed over 4th of July. The photo of the Sandias with the thunderheads turned out to be a lot of work. It is made of up four images — two of the Sandias and two of the clouds (each set side by side horizontal). I first stitched the horizontal images of together, which was no problem, but stitching the merged images of the Sandias with the merged images of the clouds, vertically, turned out to be quite challenging. I ended up using more of a manual process incorporating three separate programs to prepare and finally merge the clouds over the mountains, because the panorama program I normally use couldn’t handle the vertical merge and crashed, even after adjusting the images to reduce the load on the program. I think the final photo turned out pretty well.

While I was walking around the garden a dragonfly I had not seen before presented itself, and allowed me to get close for photographs. As I get junk cleaned up around the our old house and take off everything that can be recycled before demolition, it’s starting to look more and more like the photos of it when my parents bought it in 1958.

The last photo is scarabs on a sunflower. Scarabs are part of Egyptian history and lore, and the black and white scarabs, which I believe are adolescents, looked quite mummified in comparison to the adults’ iridescent green.