Yesterday afternoon, when we left work we went over to the docks to pick up our friend, Jo Noble. She is the Steward on a giant super-yacht which is temporarily stuck in Madang awaiting repairs. We had her over for dinner and a “movie night”. Such is what passes for entertainment in Madang. We like it. Although I miss the big city attractions of restaurants, movie theaters, museums, clubs and the like, the simple pleasures of visiting with friends in our homes keeps us more in tune with each other. Relationships are closer, stronger, less concerning events and venues and more about the real things in life.

Anyway, on the way around coronation drive we all simultaneously noticed that there was a remarkable scene before us. I had to stop the car to record the moment. In nearly thirty years of driving past this spot, I’ve never seen such an odd juxtaposition of hues. Honestly, I did not fiddle with this. Other than balancing the tones so that is shows up on the black background it’s pretty much the way it appeared to us:First, the sun was over my right shoulder low in the sky, taking on the winelight colour of the tropical afternoon. The rest of the sky behind me was intense blue, making the storm clouds over the Finisterre Mountains  reflect that blueness back at us. There was also a large amount of fresh, cloudy water from the Gol Gol River  over Astrolabe Bay.  The sunlight was shining intensely there, but not directly on the storm clouds. This gave the water an aqua tint that contrasted strongly with the clouds and turned upside down the normal bright-sky, dark-water combination which we expect.

All of that fiddle-faddle of explaining it sounds stupid to me now. It dropped our jaws. No need to explain it.

This morning’s sunrise was extravagant:As I was moping around the garden for lens fodder, I was amused by the tiny sheep moving around in a little mob in the sky. I took a picture of them.

A few minutes later I heard the wimpy whine of one of Air Niugini’s Fokker F-100 jet-powered gooney-birds coming in over the  main wharf on final approach:I was a pilot for a long time, but I never got used to that term. It always gave me a vague sensation that I was nudging too close to a prediction.

PILOT: Uhhhh Tower, Gold Three-Four on final approach to One-Two.

TOWER: Confirm that, Gold Three-Four on final approach to One-Two.

PILOT: Uhhhh roger tower, this is my final approach . . . ever.

TOWER: Uhhhh Gold Three-Four, say again last.

PILOT: Tower, you got wax in your ears? I said this is my  final approach. I don’t plan on doing any others after this one.

TOWER: Uhhhh . . . mmmmm . .  Gold Three-Four, is it your intention to land?

PILOT: Uhhhh . . . Tower, Gold Three-Four . . . I haven’t decided yet, I’m just approaching for now. But this is the last time.

Well, you get the drift.

As I panned madly, blurring the trees below to keep the sharp eye of the lens on the aircraft, I was still wondering:As it turned out, it did land. This time. Every time I get on an airplane, I think to myself, “What? Are you meshuga?”

On to simpler, less transcendental things . . . like grasshoppers:This was my morning grasshopper. I sometimes don’t even bother to photograph them; it so often leads to a pointless chase around the garden. This one, however seemed to want, need to be imaged. It may have low self-esteem issues.

This is my poor, poor willow tree which simply won’t grow. I’ve been feeding it, mulching it, trimming back dead whips, talking to it in gentle tones of encouragement and tenderly stroking its leaves for three years now. It’s the only willow tree that I’ve ever seen in Papua New Guinea and I have no idea where Juli, our haus meri  got it:

I love willow trees. I had one in my back yard as a child. It was my place of escape. I escaped a lot. I built a house in it. I would have preferred to live there, if I were allowed. I would also like to have had a bicycle, if it were allowed. Too dangerous!  No wonder I’m now a mad man. Poor me.

Jesus wept. So do willows.

Julie, a Facebook Friend, tells me that she really digs starfish. Because I can use all the friends I can get and Julie never scolds me for attempting a humorous comment on her status changes, I think that her polite hint deserves an appropriate response.

Since I do, despite my geeky aura, appreciate the sentimentality evoked by images of starfish, I’ll set the stage with this mushy shot:

I can hear the murmurings of “Awwwwww . . .” from here. I have no idea who the people were. They simply happened to be standing on the rock while I composed the image. It was a very lucky break.

The truth is, I nearly overstayed my prime time. During an attempt to catch the sailboat out on Astrolabe Bay,  I was nearly inundated by a wave crashing on the rocks:Now that I’ve set the mood in my inimical way, we shall proceed to tickle Julie’s fancy with some yummy starfish.

You know, I’ve seen  this shape before.  There is a logo somewhere, on a product or representing some organization, that is a cartoonish figure of a starfish (two eyes, a mouth, etc.) with the top of the star a little crooked, as if it were wearing a hat which is a bit askew. This Fromia milleporella  reminds me of that:Please keep in mind that this is Annual General Meeting week and I’m sitting here trying to stay interested and not fall asleep. My mind wanders in particularly unusual ways. I keep feeling fluid draining from my sinus cavities. It’s seawater. My wife, Eunie, tells me when to raise my hand to vote on a motion. As you can imagine. I’m a little more distracted than usual.

But wait! Let’s get back to Julie’s starfish. This is one that you’ve seen here many times, the lovely Choriaster granulatus:You may be tiring of seeing this critter, but I’m nowhere near finished taking pictures of it.

Here’s is another which you have seen here many times:I’m sure that everyone out there has seen images of the Mimic Octopus which is able to contort and recolour its body in marvelous ways to appear to be any of several non-octopus critters. However, have you ever seen a Linckia laevigata  mimic a snake? As of now, you have.

It may surprise some that this lump is a starfish:Called a New Guinea Cushion Star (Culcita novaeguineae),  it appears more like a bumpy, spiky football. In fact, it is supremely tempting to pick it up and attempt to kick it back and forth between divers using the floppy fins.

Of course, we never actually do  that.

Bon appétit,  Juli.

Counting the years as they whiz past seems less fun than it did at twenty. And, whizzing past they are.  It’s a pity that life speeds by so quickly as you get close to whatever is at the end. It feels as if I’ve had the pedal to the metal since I was thirteen and now I’m running flat-out in the fog at night with my hair on fire. The thought, “Pretty soon I’ll be dead.” intrudes daily into my otherwise manageable world.

Well, there is no sense in crying over milk that has yet to be spilt. It’s not that death frightens me. I made peace with death a long time ago. Accepting The Big Sleep as something that is as natural as life itself, indeed, defining life,  has removed the heebie-jeebie factor from the death equation for me. There’s some kind of Big Plan. My death is simply a part of that. I’ve been inches or seconds from death so many times that I’ve lost count. I’ve lost interest in counting. Death is the biggest tease of all. How close can  you get?

No, I’m not going to off myself. I’m having way too much fun for that. I’ve been sitting here listening to Pink Floyd for about three hours now. That’s enough to make anybody ponder darkly the meaning of life.

Today I’m feeding you a stew of images that don’t fit anywhere else. Butter up some bread and have a seat:

That was Wongat Island  which just flew past and is left in the wake of Mike Cassell’s boat, Felmara,  on our way up to Blueblood on Christmas Day. It has a very nice beach and is the only place that I know of where you can pick up magnificent specimens of weathered blue coral. I’ll have to do a post on it someday.

This is a much prettier island image. I think that it is Sinub Island;  the outline looks right. I wasn’t really paying much attention to navigation, since I wasn’t driving:The sun lit it up nicely and a polarising filter over the lens darkened up the sky just as it is supposed to do. The big Cumulonimbus cloud is casting a lovely reflection on the sea.

Here is an example of how to blow out your whites. The little sensor in my Canon G9 simply can’t handle the dynamic range of brightness levels in this shot:The rest of the image was recoverable, except for the blocked blacks which I can live with in this image. However the bright area in the centre was blown out to pure white. I couldn’t get any detail out of it. This is where a US$5,000 camera comes in handy, if you have the moolah for it. I had to fake something in there, so Photoshop saved the day with the Selective Colour tool set on Absolute. Choosing Whites as the colour, I tweaked up the Yellow slider and added just a touch of Red. It looks a little fakey, but hey, what do you expect for a tenth of the price?

This shot fits my mood today like a glove. It’s raining and cold outside; Eunie would say that it’s winter today in Madang. The Finnisterre Mountains  are glowering in the distance as rain tumbles down from the gravid clouds:Mind, when we say ‘cold’ were talking maybe 24°C (75°F). I never sweat any more. My body has fallen deeply in love with tropical weather. In Indiana, at this time of year, I’d be dead in a month – I’m sure of it!

I gave you a frame of this series of sunrise over Astrolabe Bay  in another post. I like this one better:The canoe man is more clearly visible here. I also used a different mood for the colours. You can compare them, if you like.

Since I seem to be wallowing in the ephemeral nature of life today, here is a perfect image with which to illustrate the principle:

When I named this image Ephemeral Mushrooms, I thought that I was being very cute and trippy. Then I Googled the phrase and got 731 hits. So much for originality. Among other scholarly titles was, The Predictability of Ephemeral Mushrooms and Implications for Mycophagous Fly Communities.  That will give you the gist of the subject. I didn’t even know that mycophagus flies had  communities. I thought they were like wandering hunter-gatherers.

Okay, okay, I’ll wrap up this orgy of self-pity and random fluctuations with a Guest Shot by our fine friend and enthusiastic fellow photographer, Ron Barrons of Hamilton, Ontario. Ron, like myself, is a waterfalls buff. Here is his latest shot of Princess Falls.
I call the image above Princess Falls Mugged.  That’s because it’s my interpretation of the image that Ron sent to me. As I do, Ron struggles with ‘flat light’. He emailed the image to me with the remark that the lighting that day was very flat. My addition of a blue sky at the top seems to contradict this, but it’s fake. Punching up the contrast and increasing the γ of the image did wonders for it. Lightening only the shadows and changing the water in the pool from sickly green to deep blue put on the finishing touches. Actually, I liked the shot the way Ron sent it to me.

By the way, Ron said that Princess Falls only works when it rains. Otherwise it is dry. A dry waterfall. Hmmm . . . Is  it a waterfall, when it’s dry? Anyway, Ron said that he was going out to try again, but it will have to wait until all the ice is gone. Thank heavens I  don’t have to deal with that!

I simply couldn’t resist “improving” it.

Ron is a forgiving guy.

It’s part of my image of life, going back to childhood when my father taught me photography, that I think of a camera as a toy. Why do kids love the Transformer toys? Well, my theory is that, unlike a toy firetruck or doll, a transformer can be anything that you want it to be. As a child I used to play with Mechano sets. (In the USA they are called Erector Sets) That was a perfect toy. You could make pretty much anything that you could imagine.

A camera forces you to adopt a starting point, much as the instruction manual for a Mechano set, giving illustrations of things that one can build, suggestions, as it were. A camera gives very strong suggestions which are often excellent. In fact, many people are quite happy with the suggestions that their camera makes and fill their albums with snapshots of daily life and special moments (Kodak Moments – what a brilliant ad campaign).

The suggestions that your camera makes depend entirely on the scene in front of the lens and the settings you have chosen for your camera. By learning to use your camera controls you can drastically change the initial image, the suggestion, as it were. In this shot my camera was forced to expose for the brightest spot in the big cumulus cloud. I also held a polarising filter in front of the lens to darken the sky. Simple tricks such as these can dramatically affect the suggestion that your camera makes to you:

However, that is only where the fun starts.

In this image, I wanted to capture the ephemeral aqua colour that appears in the wake of a motorboat in clear tropical seas. It is very pale and showed up in the camera’s suggestion only to my eyes which were looking very hard for it:A few minutes with the Photoshop Replace Colour feature allowed me to pick out only the extremely pale aqua patches of the image and to incease the intensity of the colour until I was satisfied that it illustrated the effect.

And, if a camera is a toy, why not have a little fun with it? Eunie and I were in the cabin of Lyin’ Dog,  Trevor and Karen’s boat, when I noticed Karen sitting on the bow deck. There is a fly-wire screen inside the windscreen of the boat. I wondered about a shot through the fly-wire:

The camera made an excellent suggestion. This shot required no computer processing at all. Good job, Canon G9, my trusty old friend. Whe have an interesting and very colourful shot with just a tiny taste of cheesecake. Perfect for a weekend afternoon.

Up at the Blueblood Hilton, we settled in for a BBQ and a little vino. Sitting back in my chair behind the railing, I asked my camera for a suggestion:

Spot on, once again. I had to adjust the darkest parts to make them a little lighter so that they did not ‘fade to black’. Otherwise my little point and shoot suggested an image that’s fit for the cover of a magazine. Hooray!

Along the way back to Madang, the most distant clouds were showing the typical orange-ish colour caused by sulphur dioxide in the air from the many constantly spewing volcanoes in the inter-tropic zone:

The pollutant is trapped in the relatively calm air of the tropics.

Nearing Madang we are confronted my the horror of the tuna boats:Since RD Tuna came to Madang with its mostly unwanted tuna cannery we have noted a drastic reduction in the number of tuna that we see in Astrolabe Bay.

I did mention that I would get plenty of  Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus)  shots so that I can show one each day before Christmas:

And, there is today’s specimen.

Hang some popcorn strings on it and put your presents under it. You get two trees for the price of one.

I took a drive up Nob Nob Mountain  yesterday with some visiting friends to show them our magnificent Astrolabe Bay  and the surrounding coastline. A prime feature of this beauty is the Finisterre Mountains  across the bay. Because of the rain all morning, when the sun finally came out, it was quite clear, so we got a terrific view of the mountains.

If I were a painter, I think that one thing that I would enjoy is being able to interpret the same scene or object in many different ways, according to my whim. Alas, I have not a smidgen of artistic talent. However, I do have a yummy selection of cheap cameras and I have acquired a bit of cleverness with Photoshop. For the first time in the history of man (bring up The Ride of the Valkyries  in the background now), an ordinary bloke or blokess can, with the minimum of fuss, create wonderful scenes that would make a landscape artist of a hundred years ago weep.

Here are three interpretations of the same scene from the top of Nob Nob Mountain.  You are looking out across Astrolabe Bay  at the Finisterre Mountains:

An astute (very  astute) observer would note that I have exaggerated the vertical aspect by about 20% to make the mountains appear taller.

Here is a different interpretation of the same scene:Changing the aspect ratio and including the dramatic sky changes the mood of the image completely, but keeping the mountains just about a third of the way up enhances the focus on them. The eyes have to move around a lot more in this image, because there are several focal points.

In an attempt to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, I took another series with mid telephoto. I didn’t even have to exaggerate the height of the mountains in this one. The telephoto effect did it for me. Using a telephoto lens will always make background objects appear larger with respect to foreground objects:Of course, while I was up at Nob Nob,  I had to have a little nature walk also, just to see what was buzzing.

Guess what I found buzzing in a crevice of an ancient Frangipani tree – hornets!

My camera appears closer that I actually placed it. I used a little telephoto with my macro setting and didn’t get closer than about a third of a metre (or one foot, if you insist). I honestly don’t know if they are hornets or wasps or whatever. I just know that I’m not going to let them sting me if I can help it. I was once trimming a tree in my yard and did not notice a small hornet’s nest. They came at me about a dozen strong and I took about twenty hits before I got to the edge of my yard and dived into the harbour. Man, that smarts!

There are all sorts of weird and wonderful orchids here. Have a look at this one:What’s that supposed to be?

And this, my gentle readers, is a passionfruit flower:Pointing out the obvious here, note the passionfruit at the lower left. I can’t say that I like them much. They taste too perfumy and sour to me. The flowers are certainly beautiful. We have another fruit similar to this that we call a sugar fruit. It has the same hard shell with the gooey stuff inside around the seeds, but it is much sweeter.

When I got home from the mountain, this copra boat was heading out to sea, probably to Kar Kar Island:When the winelight falls on our beautiful harbour in the afternoon, I don’t want to be anywhere else.

With my camera, of course.

A couple of days ago I had to drive a mob of visitors up Nob Nob Mountain.  It’s not really a bother, except the road is a bit scary. It’s just dirt and tight switchbacks and two-hundred metre drop-offs, so it is really no big deal as far as PNG roads go. Nevertheless, when I’m driving it in a van, it’s not my cup of tea.

The view from Nob Nob is fairly spectacular. You can see the entire coast from way over at Saidor on the other side of Astrolabe Bay  to the southeast up to Sek Island  and further to the north. Here’s a shot from the Pacific Orientation Course camp:

I enjoy having a walkabout with my camera whenever I’m at Nob Nob. I never know what I’m going to discover. I was stopped dead in my tracks by these very trippy pink fungi growing on the side of a rotten log:

One can’t help wondering what a little nibble might do. The possibilities are endless, beginning with a psychedelic journey deep into your navel and probably ending with a quick trip to the morgue. On the other hand, it might be an Alice-like experience. I didn’t look underneath to see if they had little labels attached commanding “Eat me!”

This, as any fool can see, is the underside of a fern leaf. What is interesting here is the size and colour of the sori. In case botany was not your favourite subject, I’ll mention that sori are the clumps of sporangia. Does that help? Okay, okay, they are the naughty bits of the fern by which big ferns make little ferns:

The spores from the red spots are released into the air to find a suitable place at which to start all over again.

Here is another kind of fern called a Staghorn. You are looking at about half of it. The rest is hidden higher in the tree. The part that you are looking at is about two metres long:

If you look at the flappy looking bits at the top you can see that they are completely covered underneath by a solid mass of sporangia.

Enough of ferns. Have some orchids.

Here are some frosty-white ones:

I don’t know the names of any of these. It’s enough strain on my brain to keep up with fish.

The design of this one seems a little overblown to me. I’m not sure what the point is, but I’m suspicious that it has to do with reproduction:

It probably goes something like this:

“Hey you! Bug! Look over here. Yeah, baby, I’m hot! Don’t you want to pollinate me? Come on, big fella; you know you want it.”

Sorry for that.

Anyway, I admit that I’m fascinated by orchids. Look at this clown:

If I were an orchid I’d want to look like that.

Only moreso.

And yes, I would be sticking my purple and white striped tongue out at you.

Today is Papua New Guinea Independence Day. We got some of the holes in our roads fixed, since the Prime Minister is allegedly showing up. Blessed be the PM.

It’s also about a week past the second birthday of Madang – Ples Bilong Mi.  I didn’t miss it, I just didn’t know what to say about it. Here is sunrise at my house this morning:

This is the 568th post. I didn’t start out writing every day. Then it got to be an ego thing, because I got so much reaction to it. When a lot of people started reading, I got all puffed up and decided more was better. At the same time, I decided that, since we’re getting poorer by the year as our religious supporters forget about us, then I’d try to make up a bit by writing. Of course, what you are reading now contributes nothing financially, since I refuse to allow ads on the site. Nevertheless, I rationalise that, if I’m going to call myself a writer, then I have to write daily – and try to do it as well as I might.

I like this shot from this morning of the little point of land near Smuggler’s Inn (ugh!) in the sunrise:

I don’t know what the average length of my posts is; let’s say 500 words. That comes out to roughly 284,000 words. According to Wikipedia, a novel has to be 40,000 words or more.  That means I’ve written the equivalent of about seven short novels in two years. Of course, nobody with a brain would read them as a novel. They are “moods”. That’s my own invention, by the way. My Creative Writing professor at university once asked me what in the world I was writing in my assignments. I told her, “Moods.” She seemed happy with that. I got an A.

Do you like these ladies out admiring the sunrise? I do:

You’ve also seen roughly 2,000 images here. I’m vain enough to say that most of them are not “snapshots”. I work far more hours on my images than I do the writing. That’s because – if you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll have noticed this – to me, the images are  the stories.

I also saw a sailboat heading out into Astrolabe Bay  this morning:

What makes me keep doing this? Well, there are a few reasons. One is obviously ego. I get a terrific feeling when someone that I’ve just met says, “Hey, you’re the guy who does that blog!”, though I don’t think of it as a blog. It’s difficult to calculate accurately, because I’ve used several different tracking methods over the two years, but I estimate that I’ve had about 250,000 unique visitors to Madang – Ples Bilong Mi.  It’s growing too. So far this month, we’ve had 9.560 unique visitors. I’ve been told by someone who is involved in tracking internet sites that this is the largest site in Papua New Guinea in terms of hits. I don’t have any way to confirm that, but it amazes me, nevertheless.

Other reasons? I mentioned already the practice, practice, practice thing. In truth, the main reason I keep doing it is you. As I receive comments on the site and on my Facebook account, I can see that people enjoy the daily experience.

Once you start to give, it hurts too much to stop. That’s one of the nice  things about giving. Because I give this, I’ve got many thousands of friends around the world who would be happy to meet me and buy me a beer. That seems to me to be a very nice reward or the effort.