Easter Bunny

Canvas Easter Bunny in a Canvas Basket in front of grass grown for Easter.

You can get my "Pic-of-The-day" in your twitter feed by following @rumimumesf on <a href="https://twitter.com/rumimumesf" rel="nofollow">twitter</a>mons

****This image has a creative commons attribution noncommercial share alike license.  You can download it share it, & use it in your own works, as long as you stick to the license rules.

Death of the missing Link

With  the new discovery of Homo naledi a while back, I started to think a bit about human origins.

There used to be an idea of the missing link between humans and ... pre-humans.
Now its' more a case of  'what came when and how did our multiple groups of ancestors  come together to create 'us'. As opposed to the old idea of  one fossil that shows evolution caught in the middle of it's work.  What would that even look like?

There are still new ancestors out there to be found (see above). Some that we aren't even looking for & some that we have genetic evidence for , but do not have confirmed physical remains for.
Like inferring a planet by the dimming &/ wobbling of a star, we can infer a branch on the family tree by having knowledge of predecessors and and antecedents?

If we are still finding preserved remains that we never expected,  how many may still be out there that we simply haven't found yet? 

Families, like the individuals they are made up of, can be messy affairs. They are rarely simple and straight forward, they are rarely one dimensional cliche's and they certainly don't do what you want, when you want.

If our modern day families are messy,& complicated and sometimes unpredictable, why would we expect our ancestors (and our ancestry) to be any different.

Sometimes when looking into your family history,  learning the unexpected can be the best part of genealogy. 'Cool, my great grandmother was native or my great great grandfather was a horse thief'.

The genealogy of our species is likely the same way.  We are made up of this group and have a branch like that, COOL!'

Old School

I should have made this post a while ago, but better late than never.

A while back I got out my old 50mm F1.8 FD (manual focus) lens & spent my afternoon off playing with this vintage lens.

The manual focus & manual aperture took a while to get used to. I couldn't get (what I considered) a reasonably good image wide open, around f8 I was happier with the sharpness of the image.  A lot of this could be do to my inexperience with type of lens. I do focus manually a fair bit with modern lenses, but this was not quiet the same thing.

Outside in full sun it was f11 or slower, not to get a sharper image, but to control the light a bit better.  It seemed to let in more light than I would expect at a given F stop and faster f stops increased the glow & bloom that seems an inherent part of shooting with this lens.

The slightly soft focus & glow/bloom are part of what makes shooting with a vintage lens unique interesting.  At the same time I tried to gain some control over how much of these characteristics where in my shots.

Aside from trying different things in camera I also tried different approaches in post processing. Some images I tried to lessen the vintage feel and make them look more like what would be expected from a modern lens. Some images I didn't compensate for the effect of the lens & a few  I even pushed the "vintage-ness" even farther.

I only spent one afternoon shooting with this lens & initially wasn't too crazy about it, but then started to enjoy playing around with it.  Shooting with a fully manual vintage lens seems a lot more alchemical than shooting with modern auto everything lenses, its' more try this, try that, a little more, a little less, be more aware of light positions, reflections etc.

It's not my new 'go to' lens, but I will be playing with it some more, when I have time to play.

FD Lens

Too Early for Summerfolk?

I'm planning to post old sumemrfolk photos (1997 -2010) online before the 3rd weekend in August. After collecting Summerfolk photos from old folders on old hard drives & copying them all to one location it was time to start sorting.

Sorting out 97-99 into individual years is going to be somewhere between difficult & impossible. I may end up dividing them in  some other way other than chronologically. 

It's fun to see some of the old pics and how things (& people) have changed, but it's amazing how little some things have stayed the same.

So far I've gotten through about 500 & there's still more to get through & then the daunting task of sorting out those early years.

Once there all sorted & ready to go I'll make another post & then the photos will be posted to Flickr in small (ish) batches each day leading up to this years summerfolk.

The Season has Ended

or                   

A dreamy reminder of the past vs a starker version of the present.

In actual fact it's not nearly as dramatic as it sounds. Now that I've sufficiently buried the lead, 
Pumpkin Ale is no longer available at Taps (until the Fall).

To the chagrin (I wish i could that word more often) of many regulars, their most popular seasonal brew has expired. Maybe expired is a bit dramatic, but the current supply of pumpkin has come to an end. Many consider pumpkin their 'go to' beer at taps.  I am part of a different group. We enjoy pumpkin (almost) as must as the pumpkin monobrewists (the beer version of mono theists) , but we don't drink it exclusively. We drink it occasionally or (as I prefer) in an alchemical mixture with other beers. (see: Sinister Pumpkin  )

The current incarnation of pumpkin has ended, but hopefully it clears the way for a new summer brew. No one knows what taps, phil & the beer gods have in store for the summer, but I suspect we will enjoy it.

P.S. a new batch of pumpkin traditionally appears in September or very early October, so for those dedicated to pumpkin, it's really not that long til it's return.

Sidenote: If you have noticed that the photos in today's blog look ' a bit off' it could be that I've been playing around with a new/old lens.  the photos where taken with a canon FD (read old film) lens adapted to my EOS550D. Please, don't be too harshly. It's early days with this arrangement.  The 1st image is sort of 'as is' & the second has a bit more colour & contrast added, which is more common with modern lenses.  not sure which I'd go with in the future, but it's still early days with this combo. 

Survive the Zombie Appocolypes by Eating Brains.

But your ancestors had to start generations ago.

Here's the quick run down.

The Fore People of Papua New Guinea ate there dead for generations.  This custom assisted the spread of "kuru" a degenerative brain disease caused by Prions.  Eating the brains of people with communicable disease was killing about 2% of the population each year, until the practice was outlawed.

Now it has been found that some Fore people have a unique resistance to prion diseases. They  have an amino acid called Valine where everyone else has Glycine. This prevents the prions from producing disease causing forms of the protein.

In tests with mice the mice with the Valine where show to be resistant to 18 forms of prion disease, and there is hope that further research could provide eventually lead to treatments of other degenerative brain disorders like Alzheimer & Parkinson.

 for a more detailed article go to  www.washingtonpost.com

To hear how this will affect the zombie apocalypsesgo to zombieresearchsociety.com.
(It's not bad and has lots of links to more serious articles.)