Of course, I don’t mean that literally. The sun did  come up this morning. The resulting light show was very subdued, but it had a power of its own, so it seemed worth capturing. Ordinarily, this gloomy display would urge me into a similar mood. I seem strangely unaffected by it today, though I know that Eunie will complain, “It reminds me of winter.”

After yesterday’s Marathon of babel, my word machine is in recovery mode. Today will be Madang – Ples Bilong Mi  Lite. I ran through a few images from the last week and came up with these. 

As I was driving past the location of the Arcade fire some time ago I snapped this shot:

The remains of the building are gradually disappearing. If left long enough there will be no expense for removing it. Gradually, bit by bit, every scrap of it will be carried off.

If you look just to the right of the remains of the Arcade in the image above, you will see a vacant lot. That is the former location of the Chemcare pharmacy. After the fire, over a period of months, the lot was picked clean. Here is a shot of our old friend Greg O’Keefe looking a bit glum as his workplace goes up in smoke:

We’ll see how long it takes to have two vacant lots in a row.

On Sunday morning I went over to the beautiful grounds of The Madang Lodge and Restaurant to shoot some family portraits for our friends Jimm and Heidi. They have been absent from Madang for a while, so I’m including this shot so that their friends can see that the family is well and enjoying a visit to Madang:

While at The Lodge, I got this nice shot of the Finisterre Mountains  across Astrolabe Bay  with the swimming pool in the foreground:

The Lodge is one of my favourite spots to get images of friends. The garden is immaculate and a riot of colours.

Dont’ try to figure out the title of the post yet. It’s so stupid that you will simply waste your time. I’ll get to it.

Busy, busy, busy. When I went out this morning I was wondering how I was going to cram in all the things that I “had to do” before clocking out. One of them was to take this picture of a sunrise, a very peculiar one:

Frustrated with the violet hue (which, by the way, I saw with my own eyes, but can’t explain), I spent far too much time trying to get rid of it and then decided to leave it, because that’s the way it was. It is not a very good idea to fool with Mother Nature, even when she seems to be fooling with you.

But, getting back to “things I have to get done today”, I really need an attitude adjustment. There are categories:

• That which must be done to maintain life (eat, get a little exercise, don’t offend any mobsters, etc.)
• That which one must do to keep one’s job or jobs (should be obvious to you unless you are about to be sacked)
• That which you would like to do just to show that you’re pulling your load (help with the housework, wash the car, mow the lawn, etc.)
• That which you need to do in order to maintain some level of personal satisfaction (this too, you probably already have figured out)

The problem is putting them all into some kind of balance. I still haven’t gotten a handle on that. I probably never will.

So, since this is something which I do to maintain some level of personal satisfaction, I’m going to blow off some of the more essential tasks and show you the source of the ridiculous title of this post. It is a nudibranch, specifically a Phyllidia varicosa,  of which you have seen many specimens before:

The title is a stupid pun combining the species name, varicosa,  and vain, which we all understand (“You’re so vain – da da da da da da da.”) with varicose veins and don’t ask me why that popped into my mind. So having established what kind of a day it’s going to be, let’s get on with the rest of it.

By the way, I am calling that P. varicosa  image a perfect specimen shot. If anybody wants to argue that, then put up your dukes and show that you did better. I’m laying the matter to rest until I get (or I am challenged with) a better one. That’s another brag down for the day. How many do I have left? I’ve lost count already.

Here’s a nice, symmetrical shot of  a Fan Coral and a Feather star:

No, I’m not going to say a lot about it. It’ speaks for itself. Let it talk for a few seconds. Pop it up and have a look. Hear anything?

Me neither.

A little gaggle of Shadowfin Soldierfish (Myripristis adusta)  were swimming through the notch leading to the catamaran. Having plenty of air and not much else to do, I took a picture of them:

Think of that shot as part of my continuing efforts to demonstrate that not everything under the sea is as exciting and beautiful as you see it on TV.

This is a bit better. These little devils are usually almost impossible to shoot well. The Blackspotted Puffer (Arothron nigropunctatus)  is a shy, shy fish:

This is probably the best shot which I have ever gotten of the fat little puppy-like swimmers.

Then, a few metres away, I found another one ducking in and out of a hole:

Another good puffer shot. When you’re hot, you’re hot!

Looking back up at that list, I think that I have to get to work now.

This morning’s sunrise was unmanageable with the tiny sensor and the somewhat limited dynamic range of my modest Canon G11. I have nothing but praise for this camera, considering that I am a relatively poor person. We just bought our first new car in nearly twelve years. I’d like to purchase a camera which would cost, with lenses, nearly a third of the price of our new Nissan Navara. That would be patently insane. Therefore, I squeeze the lemon. I do not, in any way, resent being relatively impoverished. I certainly live as a rich man here in Paradise, so why should I complain? I can’t afford an expensive car. Where would I drive it? I don’t own a Rolex. I don’t own any  watch. Why would I need one? In Paradise, things happen when they happen. I am rich beyond my wildest dreams of three or four decades past. It’s a richness that money can’t buy.

Anyway, the contrast ratio between the sun and the clouds was greater than any camera can handle. Only the human eye can deal with these conditions. I began to wonder if I might use that to my advantage. What if I could turn day into night?

Well, it’s not totally convincing, but the general effect is pleasing.

When I turned around and saw the morning sun lighting up our house and the garden all I could think was, “Wow. Gotta have that shot!”:

Too bad about that ugly TV satellite dish spoiling the shot. It’s tacky. I should Photoshop it out. What’s amusing about this shot is that you can see my shadow. I’m like the ghost appearing in the hall of the mansion. I held my trusty G11 up as high as I could to get just the right angle. The other shadow is one of our coconut trees.

Down at the water’s edge I could not resist yet another shot of one of my favourite plants commonly called the Sensitive Plant or the Tickle-Me Plant (Mimosa pudica):

Its flowers remind me a cheer-leader’s pom-poms and the leaves fold up magically if you touch them.

Half a lifetime ago, I never dreamed that I would live the rest of my life in a place where I would have orchids growing in my yard:

Life can be full of surprises. Let it flow, baby, let it flow.

Even the now familiar orange lilies were decked out in their sparkly caps of morning dew:

I will never tire of shooting water drops. There’s a purity of imagery there which is difficult to top. Less is more.

Today is about images. I suppose that you’ve guessed that already. I enjoy letting the images speak, because images can speak more eloquently than words, at least my words. I was hunting for my wonderful green spiders who frequent the yellow flowers forever blooming in our garden. They have been curiously absent recently. Today I found one laying in wait for a meal:

Does the fly sense danger? I think not. The spider is designed to be covert. Its posture mimics the shape of the flower.

Even as the spider slowly moved its legs to conform more closely to the contours of the flower, the fly approached:

And then the fly flew. Was the spider disappointed? I doubt that a spider thinks much about disappointment. It’s a waiting game. Patience is the key. The occasional meal will suffice. Would that we had such patience.

Yes, the spider waits and my attention is focused upon it. My concern is the perfect image. The spider is takes no note of me. Even as I hold the stem of the flower to adjust the angle, the spider is unconcerned:

My concentration prevented me from noticing, until I had this shot on the screen, the other  spider, which had completely escaped my attention.

How much we miss when we concentrate on one thing!

Sometimes befuddlement settles deep into my cranium and all I can manage is a little walk around the yard and a scrounge through old images to find a scattering of thoughts and images to exercise my chosen writer’s discipline and fill some space. Each day I leave something here and take something away. The beauty of it is what I need please only me. The down-side is that if I find my own efforts unpleasing, I have nothing to show for my efforts but dissatisfaction. So, I muddle through.

But first, a sunrise:

My creative writing professor at uni was a hard taskmistress. We had to write 1,000 words every day in a jornal. It didn’t matter what it was about and it wasn’t graded. However we had to turn it in for checking each week and then we got it back to continue on. Most weeks I would review what I had written and a familiar phrase would pop into my mind, “What a dog’s breakfast!”

An unappealing mixture of many things… a hodgepodge… a disorganised mess… but probably still usable (or consumable in the case of food.) From the idea that a dog will eat anything and feeding it a mixture of whatever is on hand. (Unappealing because only the dog finds its breakfast appealing… if you see or smell the dog food in the morning, as you’re feeding the dog, it may well turn your stomach.)

“Those contractors didn’t do very good work and they made a real dog’s breakfast of that job.”

Not that I insinuate that my readers are canine. No. I simply mean that there are good days and bad.

So, off we go into visual pandemonium.

Let’s add a canoe to the sunrise:

This was a very mediocre shot right out of the camera. I had to jazz it up a bit. I decided to make it nearly monochrome and take advantage of the brilliant red-orange tugboats across the harbour to complement the colours of the sunrise.

It looks as if warm colours are going to be the theme today. Here is a nice red hibiscus right outside our front door:

The brown mass to the left is the trunk of one of our Fishtail Palm trees.

Speaking of which, they are fruiting continuously now. In this shot I am standing directly underneath the oldest inflorescence, pointing my G11 straight up. You are looking into the bottom of it from about six metres away:

I am amazed how long it takes for the fruit to ripen. This inflorescence developed in October of 2008. You can find an image of it here.

Over the last three months, fruit has been dropping from this inflorescence. They are bright red to maroon in colour and average about five or six centimetres in diameter:Our haus meri, Juli, tells me that they are “not for humans” but some birds eat them. Of course, I had to try one. They are intensely sweet and fig-like. I tried only a small amount. After a few seconds you get a chili-like burning sensation on the tongue wherever the fruit was in contact. The strong sweetness lingers, but I take the burning as a warning. I decided that I had experimented enough. The seeds are one or two shiny black kernels which are so hard that you have to crack them with a hammer. Inside the thick shell is a nut-like core which is also very sweet.

In the garden this morning I found a spider who was willing to pose for a while. I got one very nice shot of it:

If you click the image to enlarge it you will see a water drop attached to its abdomen.

I felt like saying, “Shake it off, dude.”

Despite torrential rain this morning rousing me from sleep by thundering down on our metal roof, by the time I got up and stepped outside about 06:15 things were looking better. It was still a bit gloomy, but the air was nice and clear. Why talk about it? I’ll just show you:

I went back inside to start the day’s work. It didn’ t look as if the sky was going to improve.

Then Eunie called into the bedroom that I’d better check the sky again. She was right. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this one:

But, hey, gorgeous sunrises are a dime a dozen here. I have to come up with something better if I am to succeed at getting you to waste some of your valuable time wading through today’s screen filler.

Have you ever considered that hermit crabs might find homes in places other than seashells whose former occupants have deceased? As it tuns out, this is not an uncommon thing. Witness this rather large specimen living in a broken beer bottle:

Trevor Hattersley gave me these shots. He didn’ t mention who took them or where they were taken. I suspect that the shots come from Blueblood. Trev is on holiday somewhere, so I can’t check with him. He seems to be perpetually on holiday. I wonder how he works that.

Here’s a nice close-up shot of the crab in its beery home:

Hermit crabs will use anything which fits them and is not too heavy for a home until they can find something more suitable. In front of my house I saw one dragging around a short length of discarded white plastic plumbing pipe.

I decided to have a poke around on Google Images to see what other shots I could find. This one is cheating. The crab is actually living in a shell and just using the bottle as his veranda:

Birds will often pick up hermit crabs in their shells and fly off with them. Presumably they pull them out and eat them when they find a spot to land. This guy is taking no chances.

This one is The Real Deal, no faking here:

The shot came from Treehugger.com. However, it appears that the photographer was an eleven-year-old Finnish boy.

Monday morning – Ugh! Gotta get to work.

When I roused from my nightly coma this morning, I was strangely refreshed and ready to get on with it. “No more whining!” I sternly admonished myself. “Whinging is for the losers!” Yeah, that’s what I was saying to me. And then, I went into the bathroom to brush my still gorgeous teeth – tobacco stained to a rich, mellow yellow. And, to my sudden disgust, my brand-new tooth brush, for the second day in a row, deposited a dislodged bristle way back between the exact two molars where it had shed a similarly wayward shred on the previous day. Did I mention that it happened two days in a row?

So, out come the tweezers to poke around and try to grab the end of the offending nylon torture device and extract it with much contorting of face and popping of elbow joints. Finally dislodged and held glistening with drool in from of my stern glare, the blue strand mocked me.

Well, when something like that happens what can one do but scream into the mirror? It does absolutely no good, but it makes one feel much better.

And then, my mind went blank. Not the Fiji blank – the other kind. The kind of blank that comes to a writer who is mentally unprepared to write. I’m sick of fish for a day or so. I don’t have a single idea in my head, at least nothing that I can release upon unsuspecting readers as If I had crowbarred open Pandora’s Big Box and strewn the contents all over your screen.

So, I got my trusty G11 and went outside into the near dark to wait to see if the Muse would show up.

She did, after a while:

She gave me a somewhat anemic sunrise with some strangely fringed crepuscular rays.

I looked up toward the heavens, imploring for more. What do you know? (That’s a rhetorical question. You don’t have to answer it.) I was given a tiny, fingernail moon to play with:

“Well, that’s better.”, said I.

And then, along came a canoe. I could write a song about this image. It screams for a voice such as Don Ho’s backed by Hawaiian guitars and the soft swish of hula skirts:Okay, I’m on a roll now. Work with me here.

I feel a crescendo coming on.

Not to be teased by a fickle moment, I bravely captured a quasi-glorious Panorama of Sunrise With Canoe:

You may have to click to enlarge the canoe. It’s over on the left. I yelled at the guy to come closer, but when he saw it was just the crazy old white man who lives over on the poor side of the harbour, he just laughed at me. The fact that I was in my underwear probably didn’t help much.

But, then . . . BUT, THEN . . . (come on, feel  it!)  The early Air Niugini flight brought meaning and spirit to the morning shoot. With landing lights glaring as brightly as Satan’s eyes, she banked in over Dallman Passage  and courageously plunged toward the general vicinity of the runway:

I was breathless to see if the bird, which you can see over on the left side of the image, if you click to enlarge, would be ingested into an engine. Not that I wanted  it to happen, of course. Of course not.

I am but an observer. It’s my job. Let others achieve. I have never wanted to achieve anything except to stay married to the same woman for as long as she can tolerate me. I shall observe and comment. That’s what little people do. An old friend of mine cracked me up yesterday when he said he was going to write his autobiography. He said the title was going to be, Life at the Top of the Bell Curve.  I laughed hysterically. Maybe a little too  hysterically. Then I got him him back.

I said that my autobiography was going to be titled, Modest Expectations.

We had a middling decent sunrise this morning, complete with crepuscular rays from the sun shining between towering clouds over the horizon. Not a bad start for a day which I fervently hope will be less of a hassle than yesterday. However, it’s only 13:50, so anything could still happen. Half of the fun and half of the terror of living in PNG is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or rather, the next  shoe.

Anyway, as I said, I got a passable sunrise this morning and, though three pedestrians attempted suicide on the bonnet of my car on the way to work, it has so far been a singularly uneventful day:

Just as well, too. My Valium stash is getting low. I’m going to have to see my connection pretty soon.

As you may recall, if you’ve ever been here before, I’ve been fooling around with what I call “Deep Focus”. Though this may sound like a meditation technique, it is really nothing more than setting your camera so that the hole where the light comes in is as teensy-weensy as you can make it. In fancy terms, it’s called the ƒ-stop. Real photographers insist on using the curly ƒ instead of the regular f because we are so pedantic. The explanation of all the ƒ stop explanations would simply explain you into a nap, so I’ll leave it up to you to Wikipedia it, if you like.

Explained so that even I can understand it, think of a pinhole camera. If you would look with one eye through a pinhole in a playing card held very close to your eye and wiggle your fingers around in front of it while viewing a distant scene, you would note that your fingers are clear and focused as well as the scene. Pull the pinhole card aside and you fingers will go all blurry unless you focus your eyes on them, in which case the distant scene will get blurry. There’s no free lunch. However, there is  a cheap  lunch. If you are willing to make other adjustments to your camera such as slowing the shutter speed to let the lens gather light for a longer time (unfortunately, also making moving objects blur) or setting your “film speed” (called ISO on digital cameras) to a faster setting (and getting “grainy” images as a result) then you can get stuff like this:

Note that everything from a few centimetres away to the distant diver is in focus, more or less. This is Deep Focus, and I didn’t invent it. I’m just fooling around with it. A fancy term for it is High Depth of Field Photography, but you can forget that now that you have heard it once.

Here’s another shot using the setting of ƒ/8 on my Canon G11 which is the smallest opening of the iris that I can get:

Again, we get a nice, almost 3D effect.

I’ve learned a few things in the last weeks I’ve been playing with this. First you must have water as clear as possible. That is sometimes a problem. Next you need a very bright, sunny day with as few clouds in the sky as possible – your best friend is intense sunlight. The other thing that I have found is that noon is not the best time. It is much better when the sun is coming in at an angle. Nine to ten in the morning or two to three in the afternoon seems best:

The shot above shows the deep blue that you want as a background.

Another thing that you want is what every photographer knows – keep the sun at your back or coming over your shoulder from the back. You want the light to be coming from behind you.

It does take considerable messing about with Photoshop to get the optimal results. I’m taking an average of about 15-20 minutes on each shot, sometimes more if there is a lot of particulate matter in the water which I have to remove bit by bit.

I have concentrated so much on macro shots for the last few years that I am now enjoying the process of learning something new.

I feel like an old dog who has only now learned to roll over on my back to get my belly scratched. Ah . . . what a relief!