I got a little tired of the Utah photos after a few weeks of them, so we’re going to shake things up a bit this week. I’m trying to use this weekly deadline as a way to create a photo assignment for myself to make sure I don’t let my camera languish in between trips to the mountains or the beach. Even if only one of the shots every week is new and I get to review my archives for the other ones, that’s still better than nothing.

This week’s theme—flora—came to me during a little spurt of cleaning the house over the past weekend, and I spent the rest of the week mentally walking through other photos I’d taken in the past that fit the bill.

I’ve got Monday’s post already written and scheduled, and I hope y’all all like it as much as I do. It was one of those pieces that almost wrote itself and I was just running around after it with my keyboard trying to make sure I got it all down. It took me to some places I didn’t realize we were going, and it was a little tough to write at points, but I think it’s one of my best pieces of writing.

I’m going to let these photos and links roll you into the weekend. Have a good one, have a safe one, and I’ll see you on the other side!

Photos

Photo 1

I took this photo over the weekend. My husband had gotten me flowers a couple weeks before. But I am so terrible about throwing flowers out because I feel sad throwing them in the trash. So I usually just toss them in the backyard. My thought process is that there are still nutrients or something that are good for the soil. It’s like composting.

When the flowers landed, I liked how they had laid out and how the light was hitting them. I grabbed my camera and took a quick shot. I knew that I’d have a lot of cropping and some color work to do, but I was confident there was a photo there.

I didn’t quite realize how much cropping I’d be doing. I had a vertical version of this image that I thought I’d be using, but it ended up being too busy. I started playing around with crop angles and just kept focusing on smaller regions of the photo. I had originally thought the focus was going to be on that flower on the left hand side, but the rose was the one that ended up being a better composition to me. I wanted to make sure and include the shadows on the leaves and was able to do that with this focus here.

I wanted the photo to feel warm because that helped set the tone for the dead, dry flowers and leaves. Because the sun was out and strong that day, I didn’t have to do a whole lot to bring that warmth out. I did try and bring the highlights down as much as possible so that the rose wasn’t totally blown out. I like that we’ve got dark shadows and extremely bright highlights all in this one little spot of the photo.

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Photo 2

This photo came during the early days of the pandemic. When you’re not allowed to leave the house, you start hunting around the backyard for things to shoot, and I was lucky that the previous owners of this house put some irises in the corner of the yard and they were blooming right then.

I had just gotten the Canon RF 35mm f/1.8 macro lens refurbished for my EOS R. I’ve always been a really big fan of the 35mm focal length on a full frame camera, but this lens is just magical. That depth of field combined with the macro feature allows for beautiful close-ups like this one.

There wasn’t really too much to this edit. I didn’t change the crop because the bokeh was so beautiful that I didn’t want to lose any of it. I’m more partial to these bluer greens than the yellow greens of the original, and I wanted to accentuate the contrast of all of the different shades of purple as well.

This is one of those straight up, middle school, “here’s a photo of a flower” shots. I will admit that. I think the iris is a very visually interesting flower, and the ephemerality of these particular flowers make them a real treat to catch looking so beautiful. But personally, I think I’m more in love with the technical elements of the photo than the actual subject itself.

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Photo 3

Last summer was impossible. It was hot. It was 109º in September kind of hot. I had just gotten a new camera right around then and I was in search of just about anything to shoot. I’ve written in the past about how much I hate the heat, but I tried to—if not embrace, at least work with—the heat. I gave myself an assignment to go out and document the extreme heat at the lake.

I got a few shots that I really loved that day. Orange and teal are visually attractive colors to most people and we had that in droves with the dead grass in the fields around the lake contrasted with the cloudless blue sky. I really liked getting this particular shot of these hardy little plants that survived a summer from hell. They weren’t winning any conventional beauty contests, but their refusal to give up in the face of adversity was beautiful in its own way.

There wasn’t too much editing that needed to be done here. A small crop from the top, and some small enhancements of color and contrast that already existed, but the landscape provided everything I needed to work with to tell their stories.

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Which photo do you like the most? What would you have done differently? Let me know with a comment!

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Links

1. Mississippi Native: Julie Liddell Whitehead by

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path? When you live in Mississippi, you live with a chip on your shoulder. You constantly have to justify why you stay in Mississippi and sometimes justify your very existence as a Mississippian. I can talk about the largely unspoiled landscape, the friendly people that exist almost everywhere, the way you learn to tell the best stories from the best storytellers that no one else has ever heard of. Doesn’t make a dent. We’re marked.

Boy did I feel this one. I’m not a native Mississippian, but I went to school there and I love that state like I love nowhere else. It’s a state with boundless beauty, love, and talent. I almost wrote “potential” there, but that ignores all of the wonderful people already doing incredible things in the state.

I often find myself trying to pitch Mississippi to people. People don’t often want to talk about Mississippi. People don’t want to visit. They don’t want to hear the good things about Mississippi. It’s a place that’s easy to pick on or revile or ignore, or all three, depending on the situation.

Julie’s sentence at the end there: “We’re marked.” It’s such a succinct way to express the uphill battle that any of us who have taken up the mantle of trying to not just justify Mississippi as a place and a people worthy of recognition but as a place of interest—a place to explore—fight in every conversation we have.

2. Want to Win a Bike Race? Hack Your Rival’s Wireless Shifters by Andy Greenberg at WIRED

At the Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies earlier this week, researchers from UC San Diego and Northeastern University revealed a technique that would allow anyone with a few hundred dollars of hardware to hack Shimano wireless gear-shifting systems of the kind used by many of the top cycling teams in the world, including in recent events like the Olympics and the Tour de France. Their relatively simple radio attack would allow cheaters or vandals to spoof signals from as far as 30 feet away that trigger a target bike to unexpectedly shift gears or to jam its shifters and lock the bike into the wrong gear.

I love electronics, and in the past few years I’ve gotten into radio frequency signals. You might not know it, but there’s data floating around your head all the time in the form of RF signals. Airplane location information, wireless weather station and tire pressure monitor transmissions, and garage door codes are all around us. It’s super neat.

This bike shifter hack is just another RF signal that gets sent to achieve a modern convenience. Usually, the bike’s main electronics unit would send this signal to the derailleurs to get them to shift the bike’s chain to a different gear. But that signal is essentially the control unit yelling “HEY SHIFT INTO THE NEXT GEAR” at the derailleur. There’s no attempt to disguise the message so that anyone within earshot (or RF range) wouldn’t know what was being said if they heard it. So anyone with the right cheap tools would be able to listen to the signal and replay it. Which means anyone can just shift your bike if they really want to.

There have been a lot of cool stories like this in the past couple of weeks because the biggest hacking convention in the country, DEFCON, was going on. Most of the time, any new exploits that are announced there are resolved now or are in the process of getting resolved by the manufacturer. This Shimano shifter exploit does have a patch coming out soon, but I definitely want to find a friend with these shifters and try it out for myself.

3. Getting Down to Business by

I found myself wanting to get to business immediately, as I think the landscape of video calls and everyone always being in a hurry has trained me to do. However, he was the opposite. He took his time. It was nearly fifteen or twenty minutes before we began to turn the conversation toward what we were supposed to discuss. It turns out, most of the time was spent talking about things, on paper, that we weren’t supposed to discuss. He told me stories, and I told him stories. It was my first time meeting with him, and the time allotted allowed us to get to know each other on a deeper level, which was refreshing.

Most of the time, we complain that meetings could have been emails. I think that’s gotten worse since we’ve moved into a video call-primacy environment, even though I’ve been a beneficiary of the remote work shift. We start a call, we ask, “can you see my screen?” and then we get down to business.

One of the things that everyone talks about when we all get together in person is how much nicer it is to just be able to connect on a human level. Talk about things that aren’t related to the task at hand for a moment. Be people instead of coworkers.

I really enjoyed reading this piece because I don’t get the opportunity to do a lot of in-person meetings. I think part of why I do advocate so strongly for them now is because they’re so rare for me. Reading this piece was a bit like being able to go to a pleasant meeting in person.