One of a number of shots of the crimson bottlebrush flowers that are in bloom all over the bay area at the moment. This one was outside my apartment.
The crimson bottlebrush, sometimes also called lemon bottlebrush because of its citrus aroma, is Callistemon citrinus. A native of Australia, but very common in the San Francisco bay area too it seems.
This seems to be what I get from almost all attempts to search Technorati at the moment. Perhaps they’ve become too popular, too fast?
An unusual subject! I walked over to Encinal high school to take a photo of their sign. On the way back, I noticed this combination padlock attached to a chain link fence. Depending on the angle, the background was either a reddish wall (seen here) or green (in the other photo in my Flickr stream).
Schedule changed due to customer service? What does that mean?
Seems that there are rules for where you queue for each of the ferries that depart from Gate E in San Francisco. Passengers for the Harbor Bay ferry service, to the Bay Farm island end of Alameda, must queue neatly around the edge of the water. Alameda/Oakland ferry service passengers queue down the access road towards Embarcadero.
Again, apologies for the photo – it is a cell phone capture, through a glass panel with the afternoon sun reflecting off of it.
The fine strands of a spider’s web, carefully strung under the overhang of a garden shed roof. This one proved too challenging for the camera’s AF system (I guess the fine strands of web were not significant enough for it to consider them the subject of the photo). With a simple flick of a switch though, control is regained and the web came back into focus (or close to it anyway).
An unusual side-by-side on the same tree appearance for two of my favourite citrus fruits: lemon and lime.
OK, not really. The green one is just a lemon that is not quite ripe yet, but can you tell them apart just by looking? Had I captured just the green fruit, would you have known it was not a lime?
Uploading some new photos to Flickr this morning I noticed that while the colours seemed vibrant in Photoshop and iPhoto, by the time they got to Flickr they had lost that vibrancy.
Thinking the problem was the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto, or iPhoto itself (I resize the images for upload too, so there is a conversion in there), I tried re-uploading the image scaled in Photoshop. Same thing.
So, I think, perhaps it is the browser… Sure enough, firing up Safari showed the red rose with the vibrancy of the original Photoshop. I had an old version of Firefox though, so I upgraded to the latest, and also installed the latest stable Camino as well. Still the same thing in Firefox, and Camino was also rendering the same dull version.
The photo on the right is a mix of two screen captures of the same image (from the Flickr page). The top is Safari, the bottom is Firefox.
Next, search to see if anybody else is reporting this issue. I found a post on Antipixel’s blog from over two years ago commenting on the same effect. I checked his post in Firefox and Safari, and sure enough the photo he included is still dull in Firefox by comparison.
Not only does it single out employees of one company, but it seems to suggest that the employees themselves will be towed 🙂
Are they that large that need to be towed out of the parking lot? The ones I’ve seen around the San Bruno don’t seem to be anywhere close, but maybe there are some large enough to require towing like the “other non-authorized vehicles” being warned by the sign.
Went out for a short walk last night when I got home since it was a pleasantly warm evening, and while trying to get some shots of a family of older ducklings across the other side of the lagoon area, these very young ones were herded in front of me by their mother. I assume she was hoping for food, but I only had the camera. Got a few shots, though the light was fading so they’re mostly flash assisted and not great.