bodhi tree swaying

This is a wall on the other side of Main Street from my new office. I guess it was a mill building or factory at one time, but only the base of the wall remains. The faded paint on the sign is covered over with branches and creepers.

Ladybird, ladybug. Take your pick.

This wasn’t the greatest photo since the ladyinsect was moving almost continuously and the light levels were low.

One of the joys of the fall: backlit maple leaves.

Who doesn’t love rainbows? This is one I snapped a couple of weeks ago when my friend Dassini was over for a visit.

The rainbow can be used to investigate how we impose our divisive concepts on the unbroken world of flow and change. The spectrum of colors in the rainbow is a continuum, and yet we find that the mind skips over the intermediate colors in order to see only red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

 But Xenophanes only described three colors, and saw the rainbow as "a cloud that is purple and red and yellow." Aristotle too saw the rainbow as three-colored, but in his case the colors were red, green, and purple, although he admitted that orange could sometimes be seen between red and green [Meteorologica III, 2. 371-372]. The tri-colored rainbow persisted for a long time in Europe, probably because of the

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Another of the pictures I took yesterday of a dead dragonfly’s wing.

I like this one too. I cropped it so you can see more of the detail.

I couldn’t resist playing with the macro function on my camera this evening after finding a dead dragonfly on the back porch. The picture came out rather well, I thought.

Taken May 27, by my wife.

Inspired by an article called How to Take Better Baby Photos, featuring an interview with Carrie Sandoval, who explains how she takes such stunning photos of young kids, I thought I’d share a couple more of my very, very bad pictures of my son. I’d seen (as I’m sure you have) those lovely close-up shots of baby hands and feet, and thought I’d have a go myself.

As you can see the pictures are in focus and the composition and lighting are fine, but I somehow manage to bring to the process of photography an indefinable something that makes my child’s hands look like those of a mutant, and his feet look like those of a teenager. He is in fact a small and delicate-featured child. It takes really inverse talent to make him look so weird. I think the secret is to use the

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I love American “slow children” signs. They look like they were last redesigned about 1939.

Some people are good at taking cute close-ups of babies, but somehow when I try to take pictures of Malkias’s dainty little hands they end up looking like mutant appendages. I’ll spare you the pictures of his feet, which look (in my pictures) as if the belong to a teenager rather than an 11 month-old.

Photographed in the grounds of an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on the day I discovered that my camera has a reasonably good macro setting.

It came to my attention today that I’ve only posted one picture of Malkias here since I got back. Until we’d finalized the adoption we weren’t allowed to make photographs public, and I guess the poor thing has been affected by "second child syndrome’ (child number one has every smile and gurgle recorded — by the time number two comes along it’s all old hat). Anyway, here are some recent pictures.

He’s a very happy wee boy. Smiles all the time.

This is him a month ago. June 7.

He adores his sister, Maia. Especially since she stopped biting him (sibling rivalry).

Here they both are with their cousins from Connecticut, Hannah, Hailey, and Ryan. (Ryan dropped Malkias a moment after this picture was taken).

Well, it’s an Ethiopian coin, so it’s really my 0.45c worth. Just me playing with the macro function I hadn’t realized my camera had.