Phototropix
phototropism: the directional bending or growth of a plant or animal in response to light
The blog of photographer Jeremy Allen. I photograph and write about how we respond to each other and our environment, and I reblog interesting images from other photographers
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Baby blackbirds chirp near me, out of sight. Their mother lands in a tree one hundred yards away—a black period at the end of a sentence on the small island in the lake before me. She fidgets, faces me. With my yellow broom I sweep spiders and webs from my blue chairs on our boat dock. Spiders fall through cracks between boards landing on the surface of the lake. They are gone.
I put the broom down and mother blackbird returns. She hops into the roof structure of the dock. She squeezes into the plastic box housing the motor that operates the boat lift. There she feeds her chirping babies. The nest she built them rests against the wheel extending from the motor. I decide not to use the boat lift until summer.
Country music wails from a radio on my neighbor’s dock. His boat motor moans as the propeller slices the water. He and his wife speed away to watch the sun set across the lake. Waves crash, and they are gone. My wife reads in the chair next to me. Her ankle flexes to the rhythm of the music, and her flip-flop beats against the bottom of her heel.
Scratch, tap scratch… I know this sound. A Mallard duck shuffles up behind me on the dock, dragging his webbed feet and toe nails like a lazy sixth grade boy. I do not have bread. He waddles back. Three other ducks take flight from my yard, but his injured wing prevents him from flying away. My wife flings him a scrap of bread.
We are connected. Spiders to my chairs. Blackbirds to this nest. This nest to the motor’s wheel. Me to my wife. Us to our neighbors. All of us to this lake. We make a house of exchange, a delicate ecology of balance and destruction. Our houses rest on electric motor wheels. Someone’s finger is on the switch.
—Jeremy Allen
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the way i look to my wife
Shooting the ducks… camera-style ;) @phototropix (Taken with instagram)
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I know I said earlier that cream soda should be our national drink. But if we can have two national drinks, the iced coffee should be number two. (Taken with instagram)
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Mars Rover self-portrait composite image
Mars Rover Snaps Stunning Self-Portrait
NASA put together this artsy image of Mars rover Opportunity getting a glimpse of its own shadow on the rim of Endeavour Crater. The robotic geologist used its panoramic camera to take about a dozen shots using an assortment of filters between about 4:30 and 5 p.m. Mars time on March 9.
The images were transmitted back to Earth where a team of scientists assembled them into this mosaic, which was released Wednesday.
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Photographs from National Geographic’s new Documentary “Extraordinary Animals in the Womb”
(via discoverynews)
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got a Canon 5D Mark II today, and I can’t put it down
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woah. amazing. she floats.
(Source: vimeo.com)
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Cream soda should be our national drink (Taken with instagram)
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The importance of learning to code isn’t so that everyone will write code, and bury the world under billions of lines of badly conceived Python, Java, and Ruby. The importance of code is that it’s a part of the world we live in. I’ve had enough of legislators who think the Internet is about tubes, who haven’t the slightest idea about legitimate uses for file transfer utilities, and no concept at all about what privacy (and the invasion of privacy) might mean in an online space. I’ve had enough of patent inspectors who approve patents for which prior art has existed for decades. And I’ve had enough of judges making rulings after listening to lawyers arguing about technologies they don’t understand. Learning to code won’t solve these problems, but coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance. Coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally. Alsup is a modern hero.
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Hungry baby mocking birds (Taken with instagram)
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