“What really knocked me out was her pink sunglasses…” or maybe it’s “…her cheap sunglasses!” — either way, I think ZZ Top would appreciate this fashionably coordinated young lady, surfing around downtown on her skateboard.

As I passed under our neighbor’s mimosa that hangs over the path to the front door, I looked up at this clump of blooms, and for an instant they offered the most interesting shapes and colors against the bright background before my eyes adjusted to the back lit sky. I had to overexpose the photo by almost three stops to get close to what flashed before my eyes when I initially walked under the clump of blooms.

After I posted my blog last night, Laurie and I laid out on our lawn chairs and looked at the stars. The big dipper was very clear.  I got up a 3:00 am to turn in the irrigation water, and discovered the Conservancy had buried our gate in the process of dumping dirt and grading it to build up the ditch bank. I put down the main gate, went back up to the house, grabbed a pair of gloves and a shovel, went back out to the ditch and spent the next 30 minutes in the dark, digging out our gate while standing on a 60 degree bank of loose dirt with the water rising quickly. I simply wanted to turn in the water and go back to bed like I normally do, but I feel like I got the “Spanish Inquisition” instead.

We went on the Corrales garden tour today. I’m still working my way through the photos, but some of the critters, a more exotic stripey plant and old adobe building were the most interesting photos that I’ve worked on so far.

There are many ways to make sangria, which is basically fruit soaked in wine. One recipe from Fine Cooking included dry riesling, pineapple, oranges and guava juice. For good measure a fluffy black cat blessed the ingredients, adding a touch of brujaria to the sangria.

The air was much warmer tonight, and it’s just now starting to cool off after 11:00 pm. The moon hasn’t come up, so it’s very dark outside the canopy. I  can see a few stars twinkling in the eastern sky, and the blinking lights of jets as they pass by on their way to the airport. It’s surprisingly quite for a Saturday night, which has made sitting outside really nice.

I got a photo of a golden dragonfly this morning, and added it to the series of dragonfly photos. This one let me get fairly close to it. The other photos include a backlit weed, a window in B&W, and a B&W panorama of the big tree on Coronado Road between Corrales Road and La Entrada.

“I be a bee assassin bug. A true bug. I kill bees and suck their vital life fluids. I be a bee assassin bug. A true bug. I kill and suck the vital life fluids out of anything I can catch. I be a bee assassin bug. A true bug. A beneficial bug. A bee assassin bug I be.”

I had seen bee assassin bugs around, but I didn’t know what they were or pay much attention to them until this afternoon when I found this one sucking the vital life fluids out of a honey bee. When I looked it up on the Internet, I discovered the obvious. Its full name is Reduviidae Bee Assassin Bug.

Damselflies are nice subjects because they don’t seem to mind the camera. Actually, I think they might be able to see their reflections in the lens because they posture and flutter their wings when I put the lens in their faces.  Most of the dragonflies are a different story — the black and blue winged dragonfly in the last photo kept buzzing me, but it would not land anywhere near me. The photo was taken with a 100 mm macro lens from 15 to 20 feet away, so I had to really crop the image to make the dragonfly fill the frame.

 

If you were expecting chiles, the frost on May 28th zapped them. The corn and grapes sustained damage, which makes interesting tones and textures in B&W, and they are recovering. We were feeling frosty last night as the air that settled in felt really cold. While we were sitting out on the deck, I had a sweatshirt on, and Laurie had a light jacket plus a cat magnet blanket wrapped around her. The temperature felt like 40 degrees, but when I checked the thermometers they all read 60 degrees. A few weeks ago 60 degrees was comfortable when the highs were not much over 70, but now that the highs are up around 90 degrees, 60 feels cold.

 

 

 

Common insects in B&W.

 

 

 

The eleven photos tonight cover the Transit of Venus from when I got my camera setup on our front porch at 5:23 PM to 7:45 PM when the sun fell behind trees and the fence on the west side of the property. I had to move a couple of times, and as the sun got lower in the sky and filtered through trees and clouds it became more yellow/orange. You can see how Venus was slowly moving down the right side of the sun, and it got about half-way down before I lost the sun behind the trees and the fence. As the sun gets lower and more yellow/orange other spots become visible.  At first I thought the other spots might be dust on the lens or sensor, but since they seem consistently placed on the sun, but I placed almost every shot in a different location in the frame of the un-cropped photos to cover the reflection between the lens and filter, I believe they may actually be sun spots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Trojan Horse was parked on Silver behind the office this morning. Bruce thought it would have been an even better photo op if it had been parked in front of Ms. Zachary’s Castle just a half a block away on the corner of 2nd and Lead (you can take a photo tour of “The Castle on Skid Row” at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909904576051950137854170.html#slide/1).

I walked out of the office at 1:30 this afternoon to discover a beautiful, stormy sky that eventually delivered a little rain. I took the final photo at 3:00 am Sunday morning when I went out to turn in water to irrigate.

The transit of Venus will occur tomorrow afternoon when Venus will crawl across the face of the sun between 5:00 to 7:00 pm. I plan on photographing it if the sky is clear.

When I first saw this spider waiting in its den, it was much farther out in the opening, in full view, but when I shook the bush trying to get my camera into position, it retreated into it’s tunnel, out of sight of my lens. I stood patiently in the same spot, and after some time it slowly crept forward, showing one leg, then another leg until in finally peaked around the corner of its web, settled in, and just looked at me.  After snapping a few shots of our stand-off of sorts, I snuck around to the other side of the bush where I could see the spider’s profile from the low sun lighting up the inside of its web from behind the spider.