I Remember California

Despite the fact that my macro lens has been returned, I'm still working through the last batch of images that I made before it broke.Of those, this is the last of image of a Californian poppy that I'm going to post, and appropriately enough, its of a seed head, the end of the life-cycle.

Previous post title: California Stars is a song recorded by Wilco for the first Mermaid Avenue album. This was one of a pair of albums that they made with Billy Bragg - of all people - which took lyrics from an archive of unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs and set them to music written by the recording artists.

This post borrows its title from another politically engaged American band's oeuvre.

Sigma in Successful Lens Return Shocker

My Sigma 50mm lens has been returned, repaired. I have to say that Sigma's customer service has been rather good. 

I set the lens via Royal Mail and it was delivered to their facility at 10am the following morning, according to the parcel tracking information. By 2pm, I had an email from Sigma acknowledging receipt. A couple of hours later, I had a repair estimate and I sent the authority to proceed that evening, which they acknowledged the following morning.

Then things took at bit of dip. Ten days went by before I emailed for a progress update. Fair enough, they responded the next day and I now have the lens back in my possession. And I've been charged what was estimated. 

So all in all, its a thumbs up from me for Sigma: good comms, acceptable turn-round time, charges as estimated. 

California Stars

In a first for this blog, I've chosen to post two versions of the same image on the basis that I can't decide between them. Above is the mono treatment, below the colour. I think they both have their charms - feel free to comment on which you prefer.

In other news, this blog has reached a milestone of one thousand page views. Its taken over a year, so its nothing to crow about, more a case of perseverance in the face of indifference than anything else. I have noticed that posting anything with a vaguely American theme causes a surge in the number of hits, so these poppies have helped move things on a bit.

The previous post was titled after a song by Luna, once described in Rolling Stone magazine as "the best band that you've never heard of", which is a ringing endorsement, if ever I've heard one.

This post has another popular music themed title, with a roundabout link to one of the previous titles in this series.

California (All The Way)

This is an image of one of the Californian Poppies that we had growing on the riverbank at the back of the house earlier in the summer. Photographing them open is the devil's own job, because they close up as soon as the sun goes in. The specimen pictured is actually closing up, so I was having to work quickly.

Yet again, I couldn't come up with a suitable mono treatment, so I'm presenting it here in glorious colour.

Anyway, the post title is another music reference, this time with an indie rock theme.

The previous post - Windfall - was a reference to the Son Volt song of that name, from their first album "Trace", which is a truly great driving record. Yet again, Mr Dart sussed it out.

Windfall

So, here we have the first image that I've posted which has been processed through my new workflow. The main difference is that I've done away with UFRaw, and introduced RAWTherapee. In practice, I still have to process my raw files to tiff and then import them into GiMP, but the RAWTherapee interface is so much nicer than UFRaw, which hasn't been improved over the years that I've been using it. Presumably the developers have been too busy hating Microsoft to bother with reworking their UI.

Anyway, back to the image itself. This is of a poppy that we found growing in one of the troughs at the front of the house earlier this year. We left it to see what would develop, and were glad that we did. The thing was enormous - about three feet tall when I made this image. We've harvested the seeds, so we should have a few more next year.

The title of this post is a reference to the fact that this is a windblown plant, but it's also a suitably obscure music reference (clue: think alt country). Anyone who spots it will get an honourable mention on this blog.

The title of the previous post is a reference to an album track from Sonic Youth's "Murray Street" album. Props to Mr Ian Dart for spotting it.