Lichen are visually fascinating: their bodies have gorgeous textures, lines, and colors. But capturing all of that can be challenging. Take, for instance:
Even, diffuse lighting allows for the entire body to be viewed, but textures and height have been minimized. My best guess is that this is in _Physcia_, but I'm not sure. This lichen was found in Vasquez Rocks County Park in Los Angeles County.
That lichen has gazillions of lines and textures on its body, but the diffuse shade lighting isn’t helping show them 1.
I typically seek out lichen that are in the shade, but in an area that has full sun available only a few inches away. This means I can hand-hold a small reflector 2 to bounce sunlight back onto the lichen, trying different angles as I work the camera. Here’s the exact same lichen with reflected light added to the shot:
Reflected light added from the left of the image. The scale bar is 5mm.
In that image I’m reflecting light in from the left of the image, and holding the reflector a good distance away from the rock (nearer to the camera) to shorten and soften the shadows. The textures of the lichen are brought out beautifully.
If you want to add more lighting contrast, just hold the reflector closer to the rock so the light comes in at a shallow angle and the shadows get less fill:
Reflected light added from the right of the images. The scale bar is 5mm.
In that shot the reflector’s now to the right of the lichen, and lower to the rock. The lichen looks, on first glance, completely different. In fact, it looks so different that I included two pictures of the same lichen in my introduction to lichen post; did you notice they were the same?
And, for your comparative pleasure, here are all three images stacked up:
Last week I visited Vasquez Rocks, and wrote about the trip in this post. While the geological features were neat, what really interested me were the critters growing on the rocks. After all, what organismal biologist can go to a park with the word “rocks” in the name and not look for lichen?
For those who don’t remember Bio 101, lichen are a symbiotic organism: they’re a fungus and either a green alga or cyanobacterium living as a single unit. Fungi are masters of living in dry, dessicated environments with low nutrients (many plants have fungal symbionts that help the plant’s roots get nutrients out of the soil). However, fungi can’t obtain energy from sunlight. Luckily for lichen, algae and cyanobacteria are photosynthesis experts. Pair the two up and you’ve got an amazing organism: one that can survive in a desert, exposed to the full summer sun all day while living on nothing but bare rock. No soil to get nutrients out of. No possibility to send roots down to the water table. They’re awesome.
But from far away, lichen don’t look like much1 . After all, many species of lichen require years to grow a centimeter or two (growth rates of lichen are typically reported as mm/year). But look up close, and the beauty of these organisms reveals itself as a complexly structured body consisting of beautiful lines, textures, and colors.
A brown-fringed gray foliose lichen on a rock. My best guess is that this is in _Physcia_, but I'm not sure. The scale bar is 5mm (contact me if you want a version of the image without the scale bar).
Quick quiz: how many species of lichen are visible in that picture?
The gray one that fills the frame is the dominant individual, but there’s at least four species visible2. And the gray one is overgrowing all the other three. This is competition, lichen style. Lichen have only a limited amount of area where they can grow (the surface of some substrate), and inevitably they start to run into each other. Since they get their energy from light, whoever can overgrow the other is likely to win. You’re witnessing a fight to the death.
The number of lichen visible in that picture also demonstrates another characteristic of lichen that I love: they’re diverse. Walk into any given habitat that’s amenable to lichen, and within a few feet you’ll likely find a dozen or more different species. They’ll be different colors, textures, shapes, and sizes. See, for instance:
A crustose yellow ascomycete lichen growing on a rock. Multiple apothecia are visible. I believe this may be _Acarospora_ (_Acarospora socialis_?) or _Pleopsidium_, but I'm not sure. The scale bar is 5mm (contact me if you want a version of the image without the scale bar).
Most lichen are ascomycetes, meaning that their fruiting bodies are based around asci, which are often found in cup-shaped structures. Take a look at the picture above, and you’ll see a couple of little cups; these are their apothecia, and they’re filled with spores that will be released into the air to grow into new lichen.
Adding to the diversity of lichen is the range of sizes they come in. Compared to the two above, the ones below are growing as tiny individual units:
Vasquez Rocks from the parking lot, which is the same view that is often used in films.
Vasquez Rocks were featured prominently in the Star Trek episode “Arena” 1. The formation seen above is on the left-hand side of the classic shot of Kirk facing off with the alien Gorn; scroll down on this page to see the classic Star Trek shot2.
The rocks are indeed visually interesting, and I wish we’d had more time to explore them. I got distracted by all the beautiful lichen present (which will the feature of a separate post), and so didn’t even make it halfway around the rock formations before we had to leave.
Many people were having fun climbing the rocks, leading to great opportunities to add some scale to the pictures:
A woman climbs the primary peak of Vasquez Rocks.
As we drove home after Greg’s talk we watched a beautiful sunset over I-14, and decided to stop at the park to see what we could find. We got there just as dusk was ending, and the park was sadly closed. But we set up outside and had fun playing with star photography.
A star trail taken just after dusk from outside the Vasquez Rocks park. Click on the image to view it on a dark background.
Sadly, when I captured the first picture of the night (to test exposure time and composition) and looked at the preview, I thought the lines next to the stars meant that the tripod had vibrated during the shot. Oops. Who knew the stars moved so fast?
Greg then informed me that to freeze the motion of the stars the longest shutter speed you can use is 600 divided by the focal length of the lens. We didn’t know if that was the cropped focal length or the actual focal length of the lens, but I used it as an estimation to get frozen stars:
Taken just after dusk from outside the Vasquez Rocks park proper, this exposure was short enough to freeze the stars' motion. Click on the image to view it on a dark background.
A few days ago our friendly neighborhood UPS driver delivered my new Canon efs 60mm macro lens. Excitement ensued!
My primary lens to date has been a Canon efs 15-85mm. It’s an excellent all-around lens, and it even holdsitsown as a macro lens. But I’m already in love with the 60mm. It’s a true 1:1 macro lens that’s small and light, meaning I can carry it around easily (335g compared to the 625g Canon 100mm L). One complaint some people have is that the working distance at 1:1 magnification is only a few inches from the front of the lens, but since I do primarily plant and lichen work I don’t mind. The Digital Picture has a good review of the lens here.
Of course I just had to try out the new lens as soon as I got it. Looking around the house for items to photograph revealed one very cute and furry critter sitting next to the window.
Sniff: A closeup of Lucca's cute "old rose" colored nose.
The light was fairly diffuse room lighting, but the lens was capably able to handle it opened up nice and wide.
Yes, closeup pictures of cat eyes are a cliche, but how could I resist taking a picture of Lucca's green eyes with my new macro lens?
And, of course, it was fun to play with selective focus.
I love what happens at f2.8. This picture gives me a feeling of fear: it's like a giant cat is suddenly so close that your eyes haven't had time to focus on the iris yet.
After my fifteen minute, hand-held shoot with only sunny-window-enhanced room lighting, I’m very impressed. The lens is light, quick to focus, and sharp. I can’t wait to use it more.
Gourmet food trucks are all the rage right now in Southern California. Luckily for me, there’s a gathering of them every Thursday from 11-2pm at the Orange County Fairgrounds, which is just a short walk from my office at OCC. And there are other meetups nearby as well: SoCo Collection has food trucks Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday at lunch and Fridays for dinner.
A colorful menu for colorful food that's different from your typical food truck sliders and quesadillas. I got there too late to enjoy their breakfast fare (that whole waking up early thing is hard).
Many trucks focus on meat, meat, and more meat, possibly with fries on the side. While this is delicious and all, there’s a decided lack of non-potato vegetables and non-meaty entrees. Don’t get me wrong; Louks has their delicious felafel gyro, Chomp Chomp has a great tofu burger, Flying Pig has their crunchy tofu bun, Crepes Bonaparte has a variety of non-meat fillings, Spud Runners has excellent grilled cheese sandwiches, and Chunk ‘n Chip’s ice cream sandwiches are to die for, but my favorite truck has to be Seabirds.
At Seabirds, their specialty is fresh and flavorful vegan burritos, tacos, burgers, soups and more. But don’t let the vegan designation scare you away: their food is delicious.
You know you want to try some of Seabirds's Jerk Jackfruit Tacos 🙂 They take jackfruit, process it so that it's somewhat meat-like in texture, and then coat it in Jamaican Jerk spices; it's delicious topped with salsa in a fresh corn tortilla.
They do wonderful things with jackfruit; the taco above is probably my favorite menu item. Another fan favorite is their beer-battered avocado tacos:
I’ve already posted about Michelle’s and my entries into the Orange County fair, which I visited about a week and a half ago. But after checking out our entries to see how we did, I had a whole afternoon free to spend at the fair. So, of course, I took pictures.
The ferris wheel was just gorgeous in the late afternoon light:
The Orange County Fairgrounds RCS ferris wheel, seen at the 2011 Orange County Fair. The cars are numbered, and labeled with "La Grande Wheel."
And an ox with a wooden yoke was being walked around, and didn’t mind a closeup:
A black and white ox at the 2011 Orange County Fair, with a wood yoke to pull a cart.
And this ride looked terrifying to me, but most of the people on it seemed to be having great fun:
Cats are carnivores: their skull, jaws, and teeth all cry out “I’m a hunter. I eat things like you (but smaller) for breakfast.” Yet cats in both the wild and captivity consume grass voluntarily.
A good friend bought our cats some wheat grass as a welcome-home-from-the-shelter present when we adopted them, and both enjoyed nibbling on it. Unfortunately, though, we recently learned that one of our cats has a wheat allergy, and the vet wasn’t sure if the allergens being tested for were in the grain or the leaves. So, we stopped buying wheat grass for them.
But wheat isn’t the only grass out there. In fact, Wikipedia reports that oats are often called “cat grass”. So, we ordered some tack oats from Johnny’s Selected Seeds and planted it last week. Both Lucca and Kira have been eying it through the window as it grew, and today we brought the pot in for them to eat (it took about a week to go from seed to cat-ready size).
Within a few minutes both kitties were investigating:
Lucca sniffs a pot filled with newly germinated (and nibbled on) oat grass (tack oats; Avena sativa).
