Monthly Archives: November 2018

Phone vs old camera

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I always have my iPhone with me, so when I walk the dogs, that’s what I use to take photographs. However, its lens is a wide angle. That means sometimes I can’t get the picture I want. I rummaged around and found my old Canon SD790 IS, which was introduced in March 2008. That makes it more than 10 years old, an antique in the digital camera world. But, it is small, and it has image stabilization, so I thought I would give it a try. On Saturday, I took some comparison photos with it and my iPhone. I enhanced the Canon images a little, but not the iPhone’s.

This is a nice maple with red leaves. First the Canon, then the iPhone.

The iPhone image has more vibrant colors right out of the phone, and it looks more like what I see when I look at the scene. Notice the yellows. I’m not positive that the actual scene looked quite like the iPhone image, but I prefer it to the Canon.

Next was a yellow maple, Canon first, then phone.

The iPhone, again, has more vibrant colors. The Canon image seems especially muddy up in the top, right-hand corner.

Next, Canon first, then phone.

Again, the iPhone image has “nicer” colors.

Saturday was a cloudy day, and the colors were muted. It’s possible the Canon images are a more accurate representation of the scenes as they actually were; I’m not positive. I can say, though, that I prefer the iPhone images over the Canon images.

There is a setting within the Canon’s menu system that allows setting a “vivid color” mode. I plan to select that and try some more comparisons. I would really like to start using the little Canon again because the lens allows a little more flexibility in framing images. I’ll try that when I can.

And town disappeared

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A few days ago Leah got up earlier than me — thanks, Mollie — and saw that most of the rest of the world had disappeared beneath a blanket of fog. She shot a bunch of pictures, and this is one.

The long ridge on the right is Mount Alto.

We often see spots of fog in the morning, here and there, mainly collecting in the lower parts of the up-and-down terrain below the mountain. This is called valley fog. It’s caused by radiative cooling of the air near the surface which then flows downhill into the valleys, where it collects. If it’s cold enough, water vapor condenses to form fog. So, it’s really a type of radiation fog.

This morning, however, the fog was everywhere, not just in the valleys.

This view is directly towards downtown Rome. The tower is a telephone company antenna.

I can’t see the top the City Clock, which stands on what used to be Neely Hill and is now called Clock Tower Hill, but it was just peeking through the fog. The stacks and cooling towers of Georgia Power’s coal-fired generating plant is barely visible on the horizon.

This fog is radiation fog. We had a cool, clear night with conditions just right for fog formation. We also sometimes see a sort of reverse advection fog. Advection fog is usually considered to be the type of fog that forms when warm, moist air moves over a cool surface, causing water vapor to condense and form fog. In our cases, however, it is cool air moving over the warm rivers, causing moisture evaporating from the river to condense as fog in the cool night air. This is usually called steam fog.

We often talk about fog “lifting” as the sun rises. As the sun rises, it tends to warm the ground, which causes the air just above to get warmer and the fog to evaporate. As the air gets warmer, the bottom layer of the fog retreats upwards until all the fog dissipates. If the fog is thick enough, it can keep the surface from warming because not enough sunlight can penetrate. People on the West Coast are probably more familiar with that kind of thick fog that we are here in the Southeast.

This was a welcome change for us. For a couple of weeks we, up here on the mountain, were the ones in the fog. For the people down below, we were up in the clouds.

Some sun, lots of rain

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We’ve had a fairly long period of wet weather, interrupted occasionally by a sunny day. I don’t really mind a rainy day. There’s something nice about being warm and dry while it’s cold and wet outside.

One day this week it was foggy — cloudy to those down at the bottom of the mountain — and it had been raining, so I took the dogs on a short walk up to the top of the mountain where power lines cross the ridge. The towers looked like half-hidden alien structures. And there was a crackle in the air. Turn your volume up for this video.

The buzzing sound is caused by what is essentially leaking electrical power. It’s audible only during wet conditions, at least if the power company is doing its job on the transmission lines. It’s called a corona discharge.

I had walked the dogs up a few days earlier when the view was more open. There were still a few clouds scudding about down in the valley.

What might look like a particularly bright cloud near the center of the image is actually a lake.

The maples have turned. It was hard to get a nice, bright image, but here’s one where I tried.

With all the rain, the wet-weather streams are running all over the mountain. I can hear the rushing water everywhere on our walk, even when I can’t see the streams.

This is where one stream crosses Fouche Gap Road near the bottom of the mountain in Texas Valley.

Sam always wants to drink from the ditches beside the road when we start back up the mountain. I usually let him. He didn’t notice this little fellow,

I suspect this is a red salamander, rather than a mud salamander. According to Caudata Culture (“The information resource for newt and salamander enthusiasts”), the two are hard to differentiate. The red salamander is “often associated with the environs of clear, rocky, streams” while the mud salamander frequents muddy areas. Unfortunately, I see their squashed little bodies in the road fairly often.

The rain ended Thursday, although the clouds stuck around for a while. Thursday night is supposed to be the coldest since last spring. Leah feels sorry for Dusty and Chloe, who stay on our front porch, which is soaked with the blowing rain. They do have cat houses with heating pads, and a foam insulation surround. Leah drapes a bed spread over the beds to try to keep the wind from blowing directly on them.

Miércoles

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I have mentioned before that Leah and I go to Los Portales Mexican restaurant almost every Wednesday for a lunch of huevos rancheros, and then on to the grocery store. I have also mentioned that we have done it so often that almost every waiter/waitress brings us a sweet tea for Leah, an unsweetened tea for me, chips, regular salsa, burrito sauce and ranchera sauce, without our having to ask. Then they ask, “The regular?” And then they bring us huevos rancheros, which mean ranch eggs, which means fried eggs. We get them with the yolk runny and the edges crisp.

Here’s Leah enjoying lunch.

The sauces are, from left to right, burrito sauce, regular sauce, empty ranchera sauce bowl, and full ranchera sauce bowl. One taste of the ranchera sauce and we knew we would need a second bowl.

Here’s a closer look at the ranchera sauce.

Seeds! Chilis!

The burrito sauce has onions.

And here I am, also enjoying.

I managed to eat my entire meal without getting any stains on my shirt.

Way, way back, we started with just regular sauce and ranchera sauce, but the ranchera sauce was so often so hot that one waiter suggested burrito sauce. That turned out to be a good suggestion. The three sauces are have distinct and quite different tastes. The regular sauce is close to what you might buy in the grocery store. Burrito sauce is a deeper and more flavorful sauce. Ranchera sauce can be very hot, but it almost always seems to have a nice, sharp flavor, not just heat.

We usually ask the waitress if the ranchera sauce is hot. Today the waitress said she hadn’t tried it because she gets heartburn. So we dipped one little edge of a chip into it and tasted. Oh, boy, was it good. It had a little heat, the kind that shows up pretty quickly on the tongue, as opposed to the kind that seems to burn the back of the mouth as well and get more intense as it lingers. The taste was more piquant than picante. Sometimes we just dribble a little ranchera sauce over the eggs, but on Wednesday we spooned it over them.

Then I added burrito sauce over the eggs. And the burrito sauce was also good. This time it had a roasted, smokey flavor.

We take pleasure in simple things.

Visit to the garden center

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Tuesday I had to get a few things from our local Lowes. I went through the garden center. These caught my eye, and whose eye would they not catch?

They’re mums, right? These are very commonly planted around businesses that maintain landscaping. At the office building where I used to work, summer flowers were dug out in late summer or early fall and replaced with cold-weather plants, usually including a lot of mums. Although some mums (apparently) can survive as perennials, around here they are treated as annuals. They’re pretty, but I have problems with planting something that I know won’t live beyond a few months.