Summer Reruns

Yesterday's bike ride along the Mon River rail trail was in many ways the same-old, same-old.  I'd taken an oft-repeated track, and I photographed some of the same old blooms, repeats from this year as well as past years.  Although I've made little progress in my biking stamina, I feel that I've improved somewhat in my photography.  Witness these results:

The Forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpioides) has been the most challenging for me to get a decent shot.  This one (above) is the closest I've ever come to perfection.  I particularly like the fractal-like curvature of the unopened buds. 

For once, I've managed to get some additional depth-of-field and a decent focus.  One of these days I'm going to master the intricacies of auto-focus, but the vast majority of my shots have been manually focused.

Last year, I had labeled the bloom above a Thimbleberry.  That may still be acceptable, but I've decided upon Purple-flowered raspberry (Rubus odoratus) as the more correct name.  Again, I'm much happier with the crisp detail. No doubt part of the success is due to the stillness of the air yesterday, which later became beastly hot.

Last of all is the Virginia spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana) that I saw a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't want to disturb (any more than I'd already disturbed) a large garter snake.  I have several years worth of spiderwort pictures, but something about this flower always draws me back.

This One is Pink

Dianthus armeria (Deptford Pink) is an alien species that is naturalized in most of North America.  It is now found in the wild in all but three states:  Arizona (thanks to that state's strict immigration laws), Alaska, or North Dakota.  These are starting to appear in grassy areas along the Mon River bike trail.

Wikipedia says the flowers are 8–15 mm diameter, with five petals, bright reddish-pink; they are produced in small clusters at the top of the stems from early to late summer

Praying Mantis

When I was younger, much younger, this is what I imagined a Praying Mantis should be.

                 

Et tu, Jack?

One of the plants I saw on my ride down the rail trail from Masontown to Morgantown last Saturday had me puzzled.  While it looked vaguely like a Jack-in-the-Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllu), I was certain that this was something different.

Compare it, for example, to this picture that I took a month earlier.

I sent this picture to the Herbarium Curator at WVU, and she informed me that this is also a Jack-in-the-Pulpit:

Arisaema triphyllum is highly variable, leading to the recognition of several subspecies (sometimes treated as species). The differences you see (size, color, shape, etc.) may be due to site/climate, plant age/sex, and ploidy level (chromosome number), as well as genetic factors.

Sneaky little buggers.

A Little Out of Bounds

On Saturday, May 19, I was biking down the rail trail from Masontown.  Much to my surprise, I saw a small patch of irises growing on the edge of some swampy ground beside the trail.  I couldn't get too close, but this is what I got:

According to my old Field Guide to Wildflowers (1968 edition), it's a Blue Flag Iris (Iris versicolor).  The cool thing about this iris is that it's a native species, unlike the Yellow Iris (Iris pseudacorus).  Even cooler is that it's just a little bit -- but not too much -- out of its range.  If you look at the range map at this US Forest Service page, it shows up all around us, in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.  This one apparently does not strictly adhere to political boundaries.

Simplicity is Complicated

The other day, a co-worker asked if I'd be able to modify the A&W root beer logo with some custom text in place of the "Since 1919 Root Beer" text along the top and bottom.

I used Adobe Illustrator and simply added a layer over the original graphic, where I masked out the text and replaced it with what he wanted.  End of story.

Except... afterwards, I began to wonder how one might do the logo entirely in Illustrator.  Those two arcs behind the A&W -- in orange and brown -- turned out to be really tricky.

My idea was to use various oval shapes and create the arcs by overlaying two ovals and then using the Pathfinder "Minus Front" to leave just the crescents.  That worked okay, but when it came time to match up and overlay the orange and brown crescents, I saw the conundrum:

While I had achieved a nice 3-D ring effect, I really needed to be able to overlay only the top half of the brown crescent.  In the actual logo, the bottom portion of the orange crescent overlays the brown portion.  Try as I might, I couldn't achieve a simple, elegant solution.  One inelegant solution is to create a duplicate section of just the bottom portion of the orange crescent.  I could then place that layer over the brown crescent.  Because of issue with stroke and fill, however, inelegant also became technically awkward.

What I finally ended up doing was create a custom-shaped crescent arc and then mirror that in its corresponding color.  This allowed me to maintain the white strokes, which work so well to accent the opposing arcs.

I layered those arcs over a slightly larger white oval, and I got that tricky part looking pretty darn close to the original design.

The golden brown "plaque" behind the rest of the logo  is basically an oval united with a rounded square.  I had to coax and fudge the paths of the square to give it a slightly rounded appearance.

The lettering for the "A&W" was a lost cause.  I simply did not have a matching font set that came close.  I ended up using a Palatino Linotype bold italic to get something that I liked instead.  One layer of brown text over a layer of golden brown, offset slightly.   I couldn't even come close to matching the glyph for the ampersand.  That ended up coming from the Brush Script Std Medium font set.  It was placed as the top-most layer.

It's a hack job, but that will do, pig.

Aliens Among Us

I'm saddened to read that the Oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) is a non-native.  According to Wikipedia, it is a widespread flowering plant native to Europe and the temperate regions of Asia.  I shot this one right next to the Hildebrant lock & dam, but these things are pretty much everywhere out in the open.  They're so common that I've been reluctant to bother photographing them.  Don't know why, because they're still quite pretty.

Something I didn't know until I read the Wiki entry is that the unopened flower buds can be marinated and used in a similar way to capers.

Another non-native flower that I like is the Goatsbeard (Tragopogon pratensis).  Unlike the common daisy, I've shot the Goatsbeard before.  Actually, I just wounded it and gave up on tracking it down.   It's also known by the nicer name of Meadow Salsify.  According to Wikipedia, its roots and buds are also edible.

Googling "salsify" is very productive.  If you really want to go nuts trying to eat it, check out Vintage Recipes for salsify dishes.